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“A mistake I made was being too friendly with too many people,” he adds. “You eventually fall into a routine where you’ll associate with people who look like you, you’ll eat at certain tables in the hall. The advice I give my clients is look for someone who looks like you and get them to teach you the ropes.”

Weinstein’s own situation will be complicated, of course, by the fact that he is now one of the most widely known sex offenders in history. It is likely that he will be placed in protective custody, Parker thinks, to stop him meeting the same fate as James “Whitey” Bulger, the organised crime boss who was beaten to death in his West Virginia cell in October 2018. But this may be no good thing: while shielding him from violent inmates, protective custody usually means less freedom, too.

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Although Parker would not recommend it, some ultra-wealthy clients like Weinstein decide to bribe other inmates, either by buying objects such as radios and MP3 players at the prison commissary, or by arranging payments to be made outside prison: “There are probably going to be people around,” says Parker, “think of them as groupies. They want to be a wealthy person’s friend.”

In British prisons, Dagworthy advises strongly against any display of largesse, warning that gangs have been known to threaten wealthy inmates with violence unless their families, on the outside, pay up.

But there is no harm, he thinks, in a well-connected inmate such as Weinstein using their education to help others, like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption (1994), a former accountant who thrives by doling out financial advice. “There’s high levels of illiteracy in prison – they’re getting letters from family or lawyers, and they can’t reply. Anyone who’s able to read and write is always useful.”

Ultimately, Parker says, Weinstein might not have such a terrible time in prison as he expects: “It’s typical for people who are sentenced to long terms in prison to despair. But what eventually happens is that your former life falls away. So it’s not ‘what am I missing – my girlfriend, my family?’ Instead, it’s: ‘On Tuesdays I play the sports league’, or ‘on Thursdays I go watch a movie in the library’. You develop a different life in there. The first six months are really hard. The last six months are also really hard. But the 10 years in between, they’re really not that bad.”

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