The Associated Press
A Michigan man has been sentenced to six years in prison for leading a six-year scheme that coached federal inmates with no addiction problems on how to lie their way into a drug and alcohol treatment program that can shave up to a year off prisoners’ sentences.
Tony Pham, 52, of Grand Rapids, appeared before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven, Connecticut last Friday. He pleaded guilty two years ago to fraud charges.
The case shone some light on the unregulated world of prison consulting, in which some ex-convicts and former prison employees charge thousands of dollars for their inside knowledge to help people prepare for life behind bars.
Federal prosecutors have long suspected abuses in the treatment program, which has enrolled a deep list of high-profile convicts.
Prosecutors said Pham's Michigan-based RDAP Law Consultants charged clients who did not have drug or alcohol problems for tips on how to get into the federal Bureau of Prisons' Residential Drug Abuse Program.
Those included telling them to show up drunk when reporting to prison and how to fake withdrawal symptoms when they were behind bars.
Completing the nine- to 12-month, 500-hour treatment program for nonviolent offenders is one of only a few ways federal inmates can get their sentences reduced.
Pham, who fled his native Vietnam with relatives in the 1970s after war there ended, completed the program himself while serving a three-year prison sentence for a previous fraud conviction a decade ago involving online sales of dietary supplements.
The latest scheme ran from September 2012, shortly after Pham was released from prison, to January 2019, and his consulting business raked in at least $2.6 million from clients, prosecutors said.
Two of Pham’s employees, Samuel Copenhaver and Constance Moerland, also from Michigan, also were charged with fraud and pleaded guilty. Copenhaver was sentenced earlier this year to a year in prison, while Moerland was sentenced to two years of probation in 2019.
Pham's public defenders, Ashley Meskill and Kelly Barrett, urged the judge to consider Pham's mental health problems — including post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder and severe alcohol abuse disorder — and to sentence him to community-based mental health treatment with strict supervision.
They said Pham was sexually abused as a child and traumatized by the Vietnam War and by living in refugee camps when he was young — problems that were not raised in his previous fraud case.
“Mr. Pham suffers from severe mental health and related substance abuse conditions, which unquestionably led to his offense conduct and yet were never acknowledged, let alone treated before,” Meskill wrote in a sentencing recommendation. “Imprisonment will be unable to treat and will exacerbate Mr. Pham’s mental health issues.”
Barrett declined to comment after Friday's sentencing.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, nearly 9,200 inmates participated in the Residential Drug Abuse Program this year. Prison officials reject thousands of inmates' applications for the program each year, according to data obtained by The Associated Press under a public records request.
According to the latest available data provided to the AP, nearly 30,000 prisoners applied for the program in the 2017 federal fiscal year and nearly 16,200 were allowed in. The AP first requested the data in November 2017 and did not receive the information until this past September.
To get into the program, convicts must present evidence they had substance abuse or addiction problems during the year prior to their arrest. Upon completion, their sentences can be reduced and they can spend the last six months of their sentences in a halfway house.
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