This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. The Michael Berry Show. Jack Abramoff. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for being our guest. It's a pleasure. Thank you. So, how long were you in jail? 43 months, over three and a half years. Did you ever expect you'd be in jail?

Of course not. Absolutely not.

What was the worst thing about it?

Being away from my family.

Is jail as broken as the rest of governmental institutions?

Absolutely. It's the leader in broken government institutions.

Does anybody get better from going to jail? No, it's a storage facility.

There's no effort to make them better.

I, for one, have always had this opinion.

We won't talk about prison the whole time,

but I, for one, have this opinion.

The whole jokes about rape and prison and that whole thing is that jail should be for rehabilitating

and punishing, and the whole concept of rape

only makes people worse. But how bad a problem is it? Well, where I was, it wasn't a problem

at all. I was nonviolent prison, but it is a problem in other prisons. And they try to do stuff

about it, but you're dealing with a bunch of very, you know, very sick guys.

When you tell your children, Daddy went to prison, what do you tell them it was for?

Well, I mean, my kids know my situation pretty well. I tell them the details. You know, I went for three specific reasons. One, I didn't reveal something to my clients I should have. Two,

I didn't, I had money directed to charities we supported instead of to me. And that's tax evasion.

And three, I lavished on congressmen things that I should never have done.

When you look back, if you're telling a young person, hey, look, I was a guy making good money.

You didn't need to do that. I mean, you were fabulously wealthy. You were incredibly successful, and you could have survived without that. When you look back on where you went wrong, why? Well, I think the problem was that I didn't, as I was doing it, really understand where I was at. I sort of was one degree off in my sextant as I started my voyage.

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