Felicity Huffman Reports to Prison Camp in Admissions Case

Actress Felicity Huffman reported to a minimum-security federal prison camp in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday to begin serving a 14-day sentence for her role in the college admissions scandal, according to a representative for Huffman.

The Federal Correction Institution in Dublin, California, about 40 miles east of San Francisco, consists of a low-security facility housing 1,052 female inmates and an adjacent minimum-security satellite camp with 175 more female inmates, now including Huffman.

The camp is based in an old prison facility, but like most federal minimum-security camps, it allows the inmates considerable freedom. Security is so low, in fact, that inmates have sometimes walked right out of the camp, though such incidents are rare. The cells are left unlocked, according to a Bureau of Prisons official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly. The camp houses many white-collar criminals but also holds gang members and drug couriers, including some who are serving multiyear sentences, the official said.

A Bureau of Prisons office in Grand Prairie, Texas, generally makes decisions about where federal inmates will be housed. At the request of Huffman’s lawyer, the judge who sentenced Huffman recommended that she be designated for “a facility commensurate with her security level closest to Dublin, California.”

In May, Huffman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud for paying a consultant $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s SAT exam. She was the first parent to be sentenced in the sprawling college admissions scandal. Generally, federal sentences of less than a year are not reduced for good behavior, so Huffman is expected to stay for the full two weeks.

In the prison camp where she is being housed, inmates sleep in bunk beds. Generally, there are two women to a cell, but it was not clear whether Huffman would have a cellmate.

According to the camp’s online handbook, inmates are awakened each day at 5 a.m. Each inmate is responsible for making her bed according to posted regulations, and for sweeping and mopping her cell floor.

All of the inmates are required to work, the prison bureau official said, and people with very short sentences often work in food service. The official said that inmates generally work for at least five or six hours each day.

Inmates wear jumpsuits to work and then generally change into shorts or sweat clothes that they can buy at the facility’s commissary.

Inmates are allowed to have radios, and they have access to computers. They are not allowed to have phones, which are considered contraband and can land someone in a special housing unit, where inmates are sent for punishment.

There are zumba and yoga classes, according to the official. The handbook says sunbathing is prohibited, but the official said that the rule was not always enforced and that some inmates do sunbathe.

Although the camp has had a reputation in the past as a cushy “Club Fed,” the official and a second Bureau of Prisons official said that staffing shortages have made it less safe than it had been.

An investigation by The New York Times last year revealed that federal prisons across the country were dealing with rising violence and contraband problems as staffing at the facilities had dwindled. Some prisons, including the Dublin facility, are so pressed for guards that they have regularly compelled teachers, nurses, secretaries and other support staff to step in and help.

In June 2017, the warden at the Dublin prison complex said in a memo to workers that the prison had only 76% of the staff it needed, so he would be compelled to call upon other workers to fill in.