George Santos Pushes Prison Reform After 84 Days Behind Bars
'It’s a pretty humbling process, meeting with the director of the BOP, deputy director, as in, 14 days ago, I was under their custody as a federal inmate'
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A little over two weeks after President Trump commuted his sentence, George Santos sat across from Bureau of Prisons officials in Washington, hoping his experience could improve conditions in the US prison system.
The former GOP congressman from New York served 84 days in federal prison before President Trump commuted his sentence on Oct. 17, and he’s wasted no time pivoting to prison reform.
“Today is the 14th day of freedom. It’s been a lot of work. It’s been a long, long, long last two weeks,” Santos told 24sight News in an interview on Friday. “It’s a pretty humbling process, meeting with the director of the BOP, deputy director, as in, 14 days ago, I was under their custody as a federal inmate.”
Santos is pushing a comprehensive agenda focusing on mental health, recidivism, healthcare, reintegration to the community, and creating incentives for employers who hire former felons. But he’s drawing a hard line on who qualifies.
“I want to stress this very, very strongly. This is a project geared towards non-violent offenders,” he said.
“There’s a big difference in the quality of prisoners who have the ability to rehabilitate, and those are usually the non-violent offenders and we’re working on that. … I don’t want it to overlap thinking, oh, now we’re just gonna give people in prison a pass,” he added.
Santos also wants reforms to address judges engaging in what he argues equates to “overzealous charging in order to do mathematics to counteract incentives such a second chance and first step out.”
He said the prison system creates an “environment of failure” where people make poor choices to survive and are then “treated inhumanely.”
One issue he stressed he feels is inhumane and experienced by incarcerated individuals across the country: expired food.
“It is very true that expired food is a common denominator across the entire spectrum of the BOP, because he experienced it,” he said, referring to reality TV star Todd Chrisley whom was pardoned in May.
“He experienced it down south. I experienced it up north. So it seems to be an issue, a chronic issue, that needs to be resolved and addressed.” Santos said Chrisley and his wife “are at the top of my list of people to reach out to” and suggested “they should both come on the pod at the same time.”
But Santos isn’t joking about the psychological toll. Despite only 84 days inside, he’s dealing with serious PTSD in part from his time in solitary confinement, sometimes called security housing units (SHU).
“I still have not adjusted, and it’s important because … I was only there 84 days. I am still having severe PTSD,” Santos said. “I wake up completely hallucinated from having vivid dreams that I’m still in the SHU. I’m waking up during count times or paranoid, oh my god, it’s count. I think that the whole isolation in the SHU really, really did something to me psychologically, and I believe it could be long term.”
He noted he made the conditions known to the president when he called him after he was released.
“I explained everything to him about how I was treated as facility and the decay of it, and the team over at the DOJ and the BOP were on the money really quick,” Santos said.
Santos isn’t launching his own organization immediately. He’s meeting with groups focused on the issues to explore partnerships.
“I came out swinging, wanting to start an organization. I probably still will, but I do want to do it in partnership with some sort of brand where they can take up all the heavy lifting and management side of that, and I can just be a voice,” he said. Santos added he’s meeting with folks from dream.org in DC “to talk about this a little more.”
Santos was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison in April after pleading guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
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