Why Ghislaine Maxwell’s Transfer to a Minimum-Security Prison Camp Stinks
Last week, Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted coconspirator of deceased billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, was quietly transferred from a federal penitentiary in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp after sitting down for an interview with President Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer, now a deputy attorney general at the Justice Department.
Maxwell’s transfer raised eyebrows not only because it appeared to be part of an obvious quid pro quo between a rather infamous public figure and a president trying to downplay his connections to Epstein, but because it’s practically unheard of for a federal inmate with Maxwell’s record to get transferred to a minimum-security camp after serving only a fraction of their sentence.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has a classification system to determine custody levels, and Maxwell’s status as a sex offender would normally make her ineligible for minimum security.
A jury convicted Maxwell in 2021 of conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor. She was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.
According to the BOP’s publicly available policies, any offender convicted of a sex offense must be housed in at least a low-security facility unless that public safety factor has been waived.
But such a waiver would be extraordinarily unusual, and it would have to be approved by the administrator of the BOP’s Designation and Sentence Computation Center.
It just doesn’t pass the smell test for some retired BOP officials.
Paul Gibson retired from the BOP after 36 years and is currently the chief operating officer for the Prison Education and Reform Alliance, a nonprofit group working to improve conditions in the federal prison system.
“I did a lot of classification in case management. I was a
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