Prison Converts.

• Author: Bleyer, Jennifer
• Position: Felon politicians

"That's the building where I made my reputation," says Ernie Preate, looking wistfully at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, courthouse. Preate, a Scranton native whose father's law office overlooked the handsome courthouse square, began his own career here as an assistant district attorney in the early 1970s. He was a voracious prosecutor who won case after case and quickly became a local civic hero especially favored by police. Although an active Republican in a predominantly Democratic region, he won his first run for district attorney in 1977.

Preate served eleven years as D.A., making a name for himself by winning a spate of sensational murder trials. "By the time I was finished, I had put five people on death row," he recalls. "I won nineteen murder cases without a loss, hadn't lost a murder trial since 1977. I was considered one of the best prosecutors in the state." An ardent death penalty supporter, he wrote and lectured on the subject.

Preate also took a hard line on drugs. "I was one of the guys pushing for mandatory sentences," he says. "I thought that the judges weren't giving tough enough sentences for drug crimes, and so I said, `Well, we better set some standards to make sure that these guys really get punished.' I was the prosecutor's prosecutor."

In 1988, Preate became the attorney general of Pennsylvania, a position that extended his political reach and cemented his tough-on-crime reputation. To be fair, he was moderately concerned with issues of ineffective rehabilitation and poor conditions in prison. But by and large, Preate was a hard-nosed general in the drug war, reinforcing local police departments with state troopers and narcotics agents.

Everything changed in 1995, however, when he suddenly found himself--literally--on the other side of the fence. A whirlwind of grand jury investigations showed that Preate mailed in campaign finance reports that failed to list $20,000 in illegal cash donations. He pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was shipped off to a federal prison camp in Duluth, Minnesota.

"I'll never forget it," he says. "In January of 1996, I walked into the mess hall the first night I was up in Duluth, and I turned around and I said, `Oh, my God, what have we created?' It was a sea of black and brown faces. You know, I was a platoon commander in Vietnam, 1967 and `68. It took me about one week to figure out what a stupid war we were in and what a stupid policy we had over there. The same thing happened when I went...