Residents of a Texas town that's home to a now-famous women’s prison camp are openly airing their concerns that President Donald Trump could pardon the most notorious inmate housed there.
Chatter has picked up as the traditional Christmas pardoning season nears that Trump could extend a pardon to Ghislaine Maxwell, accomplice of the late Jeffrey Epstein, for her sex trafficking crimes and free her from Federal Prison Camp Bryan, where she was controversially transferred over the summer as controversy around their sex trafficking network rose to fever pitch, reported HuffPost.
“If the president releases her, it would be a slap in the face to the entire justice system,” said Emily Trull, a 27-year-old life insurance saleswoman and Trump voter who thinks Maxwell belongs in a "real" prison.
Trump has not ruled out a pardon for his longtime friend, who's serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes, and there's never been an official explanation for how Maxwell wound up at the prison camp after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
“Everyone that I talked to was very upset and disgusted by it,” an inmate at Bryan told HuffPost on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution from prison officials. “She should never be camp status, no matter what.”
The prison camp is less than a mile from downtown Bryan and about five miles away from Texas A&M University, and while the facility is surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with rings of razor wire, there are no guard towers or concentric layers of barriers.
“It’s widely known that camps are easy to escape from," the inmate said. "Even the fence there doesn’t go around the front."
The type of inmates who prison rules typically allow to be incarcerated at Bryan are not inclined to attempt escapes, because they're usually sentenced for relatively short periods for non-violent and white-collar crimes, but Maxwell still has at least 12 years left on her term – which provides an incentive for her to walk away and free up Trump from dangling a politically risky pardon.
“You can literally walk out, and they aren’t even supposed to chase you,” the inmate said. “The guards don’t carry weapons or anything.”
