After your conviction for violating campaign-finance law, you served an eight-month sentence, spending nights in a confinement center. Irving Kristol once said that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been ‘‘mugged by reality.’’ So what’s a conservative whose reality is being surrounded by muggers? Unlike white-collar prisons, the confinement center has the full gamut of criminals — armed robbers, rapists, murderers. I thought of myself as an anthropologist with a rare opportunity to, you might say, study the natives.

What did you learn about the natives? I couldn’t find one guy who said that he was framed. They all acknowledged their guilt but argued that they were the small fry. They believe that the real criminals are not only part of the system, they are running the system, and, in fact, that they are the system and that, at its highest level, America is a crime syndicate.

You are a criminal, literally, and you’ve also said that your own prosecution was politically motivated. It sounds as if your worldview was actually quite similar to that of your neighbors. If you put my rap sheet alongside the Clinton rap sheet, I think that would be almost a prima facie case that they have gotten away with far more than I have. My crime consisted of giving away too much money. I didn’t benefit from it in any way.

Many conservatives these days are calling for reforms of the criminal-justice system. Do you think you’ll be joining that fight anytime soon? No, but I have been somewhat shaken in certain assumptions that I used to have about America’s criminal-justice system.