Vick will end sentence in posh surroundings

Hampton, Va. — Michael Vick will be a nearly free man soon, able to gaze at a placid lake from his five-bedroom house here or take a dip in his backyard swimming pool.

The suspended Atlanta Falcons quarterback will be able to exercise on one of the five workout machines in his 3,500-square-foot brick home. He could watch a movie on his 50-inch flat-screen television. Or he could just relax and listen to the birds chirping in the tall, thin pine trees surrounding his neighborhood on Haywagon Trail.

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Jeremy Redmon/jredmon@ajc.com

Michael Vick’s two-level house in Hampton, Va. — where he will serve out his sentence in home confinement — sits on a half acre at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac of new homes.

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Vick, who is serving a 23-month federal prison sentence for his role in a dogfighting conspiracy, is scheduled to be released two months early from prison in Leavenworth, Kan., to home confinement on May 21.

And that strikes Jacqueline Black as downright unfair.

“That’s not punishment,” said Black, who owns a year-old dachshund named Oscar. “What’s the point?”

“You do the crime, you serve the time,” one of Black’s coworkers said nodding as the two managed a housing center for the homeless next to the federal bankruptcy courthouse where Vick appeared last week.

Black responded: “What happened to the time?”

In practice, though, Michael Vick doesn’t appear to be getting special treatment.

Federal Bureau of Prisons officials declined to comment on the specifics of Vick’s release, and they did not respond to a request for related records under the Freedom of Information Act, except for sending an automatic e-mail reply.

Generally, though, a spokeswoman for the federal agency said it is not unusual for federal inmates to be released early to a halfway house or to home confinement. Vick initially was to be released into a halfway house, but all such facilities in this area are full, so he was given home confinement, said Daniel Meachum, his business manager and one of his attorneys.

There were 1,881 inmates in some type of home confinement as of March 26, according to the Prisons Bureau.

Martha Stewart is among the most recent celebrities to undergo federal home confinement. She was confined to her 153-acre estate in Bedford, N.Y., for more than five months in 2005 and required to wear a monitoring anklet after serving time in prison for securities fraud.

The federal bureau’s policy says the agency shall let prisoners serve up to the last 10 percent of their prison terms, not to exceed six months, in situations such as home confinement to give them “a reasonable opportunity to adjust to and prepare for reentry into the community.”

This is critical in helping inmates find jobs and keep their noses clean, experts said.

“If you have ever traveled into other cultures and spent any length of time there and then tried to come back to your home culture, all of a sudden everything seems a little askew,” said Carl Wicklund, executive director of the Lexington, Ky.-based American Probation and Parole Association. “So you can imagine coming out of prison, which is a very different culture than the community.”

Federal policy says the Prisons Bureau may keep track of inmates on home confinement through electronic monitoring equipment the inmates must wear or by regular meetings or random daily telephone calls.

Some inmates may be allowed to leave their home for work. In those cases, they are supposed to maintain a 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, unless officials approve exceptions. A construction company already has offered Vick a 40-hour-a-week job at $10 an hour.

Keeping inmates on home confinement is cheaper than keeping them in prison because they pay for things such as their own utilities and food. It costs the federal government $70.75 per day, or $25,823 a year, to keep an inmate in prison, according to the Prisons Bureau. Depending on the contract the Prisons Bureau has with a local halfway house to monitor inmates in home confinement, the cost can range from $18.73 to $66.50 per day. Bureau policy requires inmates to contribute a quarter of their gross weekly income to defray the costs of the program.

Vick’s two-level house sits on a half acre at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac of new homes in a community called The Lake at Howe Farms. Hampton has assessed the property at $748,100. Vick says in his bankruptcy-court filings that he plans to keep the house for his mother, Brenda Boddie. Court records also show that most of the furniture and other items in the house are owned by his fiancee, Kijafa Frink.

“I’m happy he will be home because he will be able to spend time with his two daughters,” Frink said Thursday.

No one answered the door at the home Wednesday afternoon. But neighbors said they have spotted a woman, some children, and a family dog at the house. Several said Vick is welcome back.

“He was a good neighbor before he left and I’m sure he isn’t going to change,” said Vonnie Upchurch, who lives across the street from Vick’s house. “I think he got a bum rap.”