Federal convict Bill MacNeill says his security rating was jacked up – not because he tried to escape, got caught with a grappling hook or a map of the prison – but because he did an interview. In August, I met MacNeill at Bath Institution, the medium-security federal prison just west of Kingston where he’s behind bars. He said his coming release is doomed to failure because the conditions under which he’ll be forced to live are too onerous. Bill got in touch again recently, and sent along some pages from some recent paperwork (available after the jump) that shows that Corrections authorities paid close attention to interview comments.
In September, a razor-wire topped gate at Bath Institution will slide open and inmate Bill MacNeill will walk out, a free man. Not willingly. MacNeill is scheduled for automatic, early release after serving two thirds of his prison sentence. He doesn’t want it. “I was sentenced to two years and I want to do the two years,” the 45-year-old life-long criminal told me in an interview at the medium-security prison just west of Kingston. (MacNeill explains his strange request, in a video after the jump).
The National Parole Board seems to be backpedaling in the case of Brenda Martin. She’s the Ontario woman who was spirited back to Canada from Mexico in May 2008, after her teary pleas that her conviction in Mexico in a multimillion dollar Internet fraud was a sham. She spent a week in prison in Canada and was paroled – that’s pretty quick turnaround. Martin was released from prison last month, after her second screwup while on parole. The record of the decision to free her again (available in full after the jump), shows that the board keeps pressing Martin to admit she has a booze problem, but “to this day, you are not convinced that you have an alcohol problem.” The board doesn’t say, flat out, that it doesn’t believe her, but you can determine what they think, for yourself, by reading between the lines.
Jailed swindler Conrad Black once said prison would be “quite endurable,” but after a little more than a year behind bars for fraud and obstruction of justice, he wants out, 
