Kids-for-cash developer Robert K. Mericle may be a multimillionaire, but his spending power in the prison commissary will be the same as everyone else: a maximum $160 every two weeks.
Mr. Mericle on Monday morning reported to a prison camp on the grounds of Federal Correctional Institution at Schuylkill, interrupting his life of privilege to begin a one-year jail stint that subjects him to a strict list of rules.
If Mr. Mericle, Inmate No. 15135-067, intends to remain in control of his real estate empire, he’s allowed business associates as visitors but is forbidden from conducting business by telephone, according to a copy of the prison’s rules and regulations handbook.
A federal judge in April sentenced Mr. Mericle to one year in prison for concealing information from federal agents investigating two Luzerne County judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, in the infamous kids-for-cash scandal. The 51-year-old’s federal crime stems from his paying $2.1 million to the judges who were accused of conspiring to shutter a county-run juvenile detention center and sending scores of juveniles to two facilities built by Mr. Mericle’s construction firm.
Mr. Mericle will live around, work with and serve time with about 300 other inmates at the minimum security camp, which consists of two dormitory-style housing units, an administration building, and athletic fields surrounded by woods, rather than fencing or barbed wire. The prison camp is part of the campus of Federal Correctional Institution at Schuylkill, but is isolated from the secured, medium-security main prison next door that houses about 1,375 inmates.
The prison is 62 miles from Mr. Mericle’s home in Jackson Twp., making visits from friends and relatives much more convenient than if he had been sent far away.
Mr. Mericle pleaded guilty on Sept. 2, 2009, to failing to disclose to federal investigators and a grand jury that he knew the judges were defrauding the United States by lying about the money on their taxes. However, his sentencing was postponed for years because he was supposed to be the key witness in the corruption trial of former state Sen. Raphael Musto, who was declared not competent to stand trial early this year and then died in April a day before Mr. Mericle’s sentencing.
At Mericle’s sentencing, U.S. District Judge Edwin Kosik told Mericle he was guilty of “very serious criminal conduct” and needs to be punished accordingly.
Mr. Mericle will spend the entire year in federal custody because inmates sentenced to one year or less in the federal system are not eligible for good conduct time.
 
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