Or more precisely, Lord Conrad Black learned.  After all, there was no reason why he should have known, or cared, until it happened to him.  Now that he’s out on bond, $2,000,000, following the Supreme Court’s redefinition of honest services fraud in Skilling to bribery and kickbacks. Black was back.  Now he need only address the “obstruction of justice” of his non-crime.

There’s nothing like sitting in prison for a couple of years to give a Lord time to think.  His days as a media mogul might have given him reason to think about news and issues, but he was too busy buying and selling companies and figuring out how to get millions in tax-free bonuses.  Can you blame him?  Wouldn’t you like to make millions in tax-free bonuses?  Who wouldn’t?  After all, what’s the point of being fabulously wealthy if you can’t be, well, fabulously wealthy?

To his credit, Lord Conrad Black could have spent the 28 months in prison thinking only about himself, the injustice done him by the American legal system and the lack of decent prison Osetra on toast points.  He’s now written about his experience in prison (what else is a former media mogul to do but write?), and it appears his interests, and lessons are broad.  Our Lord learned that everyone doesn’t get to eat caviar and struggle with how to keep their bonuses tax-free. 

From Canada’s National Post, Lord Conrad Black tells of his prison education:

The Mafiosi, the Colombian drug dealers, (including a senator with whom I had a special greeting as a fellow member of a parliamentary upper house), the American drug dealers, high and low, black, white, and Hispanic; the alleged swindlers, hackers, pornographers, credit card fraudsters, bank robbers, and even an accomplished airplane thief; the rehabilitated and unregenerate, the innocent and the guilty, and in almost all cases the grossly over-sentenced, streamed in steadily for hours, to make their farewells.

It had been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society. I saw at close range the failure of the U.S. War on Drugs, with absurd sentences, (including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42% of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California.) A trillion dollars have been spent, a million easily replaceable small fry are in prison, and the targeted substances are more available and of better quality than ever, while producing countries such as Colombia and Mexico are in a state of civil war.

I had seen at close range the injustice of sentences one hundred times more severe for crack cocaine than for powder cocaine, a straight act of discrimination against African-Americans, that even the first black president and attorney general have only ameliorated with tepid support for a measure, still being debated, to reduce the disparity of sentence from 100 to one to 18 to one.

There’s nothing like being a guest of the government to learn a little something about how life works for your cellmates.  But bear in mind, this is the fellow who owned the Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Telegraph.  And yet it came as an epiphany that the justice system doesn’t work well?  Imagine the use to which his media empire could have been put if only he knew, or cared, about any of this when he was still a mogul. Did he every read the papers he owned?

There’s another part of his prison education that strikes a darker note:

And I had heard the vehement allegations of many fellow residents of the fraudulence of the public defender system, where court-appointed lawyers, it is universally and plausibly alleged, are more often than not stooges of the prosecutors. They are paid for the number of clients they represent rather than for their level of success, and they do usually plead their clients to prison. They provide a thin veneer for the fable of the poor citizen’s day in court to receive impartial justice through due process.

This lesson is easy to understand and hard to swallow.  That federal defenders and CJA lawyers are perceived as “stooges of the prosecutors” is both brutal and wrong.  What they are is underfunded and overworked.  And yes, some are hiding behind appointments as welfare for lawyers who either aren’t good enough, or don’t care enough, to fight for their clients.  The perception is grounded primarily in the push for pleas.  There are certainly plenty of lawyers who believe that no one wins, so guilty pleas are the only way to go.  Does it make them feel good to know that this is what their former clients think of their advice?

Conrad Black wasn’t permitted to return to his native Canada, so he’s been forced to return to his Palm Beach Manse to suffer his fate with a fully stocked wine cellar.  He’s learned quite a bit about the life others lead since his arrest, when he was “once a paid-up member of the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade,”

I wonder what the Lord will remember about injustice after a few months back in the lap of luxury.