June 22--Former U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. won new freedoms Monday when he left a halfway house in Baltimore to serve the rest of his prison term on home confinement. His term ends Sept. 20.
Jackson, 50, a Democrat from Chicago who served 17 years in Congress before his conviction in 2013, gave onlookers a big wave as he departed the facility.
He wore a white T-shirt and khaki suit and carried sunglasses as he stepped out into the warm morning sun.
He and wife, Sandi, a former Chicago alderman who is to enter prison for a year beginning in the fall, own a home near Washington's Dupont Circle.
Jackson entered prison Oct. 29, 2013, after he was convicted for misuse of about $750,000 in campaign funds. He spent the money on vacations, furs, celebrity memorabilia, everyday goods and two mounted elk heads.
He was released from the Volunteers of America halfway house shortly before 8 a.m. Chicago time and left in one of two black SUVs that were there for him, The Associated Press reported. The facility is formally known as the Volunteers of America Chesapeake Residential Re-entry Center.
Ed Ross, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons, told the Tribune on Monday that Jackson had "transitioned to home confinement to serve the remainder of his sentence."
Jackson's father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, called the former congressman's release to home confinement "a good news story."
"It's good news that he has honored his confinement protocols and he's coming out on the time schedule he was assigned," Jackson said by phone Monday from Chicago. "Now he can spend more time with his family and get some kind of job, in the meantime."
The civil rights leader said he did not know what kind of job his son was seeking. "It's a little premature," he said. "We'll know soon."
Jackson Jr. entered the halfway house March 26 after spending about 17 months in federal prisons in Alabama and North Carolina.
He was given a 30-month sentence in August 2013 and began the sentence in late October that year. He later had his sentence cut by about three months because he completed a substance-abuse program in prison.
He also is likely to qualify for a so-called good conduct reduction of his sentence. That provision cuts up to 15 percent of an inmate's term if he or she behaves while incarcerated.
Sandi Jackson, 51, has been ordered to spend one year in prison and may land in a federal facility in Marianna, Fla. She is to surrender voluntarily 30 days after Jackson is no longer under Bureau of Prisons supervision on Sept. 20.
She was convicted for failing to report most of the couple's haul on income tax returns.
Based on a request from Sandi Jackson's lawyers, the sentencing judge agreed to recommend that the former alderman serve her term in Marianna, in the Florida Panhandle. But the Bureau of Prisons is not bound by the recommendation.
In addition to their Washington home, the couple have a home on Chicago's South Side.
Jackson served in Congress from 1995 until he quit in 2012 amid a federal investigation. Sandi Jackson represented the 7th Ward on the South Side from 2007 until she resigned shortly before the two entered guilty pleas in February 2013.
Home confinement lets offenders "assume increasing levels of responsibility while ... providing sufficient restrictions to promote community safety and convey the sanctioning value of the sentence," according to a Justice Department publication, the Legal Resource Guide to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The guide says inmates on home confinement must remain at their residence during nonworking hours and may be monitored either by phone or an electronic device.
The Justice Department guide says inmates' whereabouts and curfew compliance are monitored either through daily phone calls and periodic in-person contacts, or with electronic monitoring, usually involving an anklet.
kskiba@tribpub.com
