NYPD chief-turned-inmate Kerik: Prison system is 'broken'
TODAY - In his first interview since his release from prison where he served time for tax evasion and lying to federal authorities, Kerik spoke with TODAY’s Matt Lauer about lessons learned...
TODAY – Bernard Kerik, the fallen former New York police commissioner who rose to national prominence after the September 11 attacks, says the three years he spent behind bars definitively changed his mind about federal mandatory sentencing guidelines.
In his first interview since his release from prison where he served time for tax evasion and lying to federal authorities, Kerik spoke with TODAY’s Matt Lauer about lessons learned. He said the plunge from police chief to prisoner allowed him to see numerous examples of why imposing mandatory minimum sentences doesn’t work. Instead of discouraging criminal behavior, it sets up inmates for failure, he said.
“The system is supposed to help them, not destroy them,” he said.
Kerik hit national headlines after working his way up from cop to a plum spot on the security detail for former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He then got named commissioner of the city’s Department of Correction, turning around Rikers Island, one of the nation’s largest, and most violent, metropolitan jail complexes.
Years later, Kerik went on to lead the New York Police Department and rose to prominence following the September 11 terrorist attacks. In 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Kerik to be Homeland Security secretary. That’s when his race to the top hit a speed bump.
Kerik soon withdrew his name from consideration, citing past employment of an illegal immigrant as a nanny. Stories related to personal and marital strife followed. Kerik admitted to having an relationship with corrections officer Jeanette Pinero while he was first deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Corrections, which he claimed ended in 1997, before he married his third wife in 1998. But Kerik was married during his affair with powerhouse book publisher Judith Regan. That began when she worked with him on his memoir, the 2001 best-seller “The Lost Son,” a New York Daily News investigation unearthed in 2004.
Then there were questions about his connection to a construction company investigators say had mob ties, claims that Kerik called “either untrue, exaggerated, taken out of context, or has an explanation,” in an in-depth interview with New York Magazine in 2010. But in 2006, Kerik admitted to getting $165,000 worth of free renovations to his apartment from that construction company, and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors after failing to report that gift.
Kerik said he served time with non-violent inmates, many of them first-time offenders sentenced disproportionately for their crimes.
Kerik produced a nickel during the interview to demonstrate the amount of cocaine that sends an offender to prison. “I was with men sentenced to ten years in prison for five grams of cocaine. That’s insane. That’s insane,” he said.
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