Those are legitimate observations, but so is CamperBob's. I have first hand experience of how bad the carceral system can be, but the fact of that awfulness doesn't mitigate the oddness of a very high profile prisoner just falling through the cracks.
The whole thesis here is that what happened to Epstein could happen to anyone, but that's not true. Most people are not billionaires with 24-7 access to the best lawyers in the world and extraordinary leverage over some of the most powerful people in the world. The implicit subtext here is that Epstein is just another human that got chewed up in a system that's generally indifferent if not outright hostile to human life. But people in jail are not mindless components in a dysfunctional system. They still have agency and respond to incentives and are mostly intensely interested in each other, not least because of the inhospitality of the system. They have newspapers and TV in jail, and I very sure that everyone in there was very aware of who their new neighbor was.
Epstein had a lot of advantages, but they weren't enough to buy him a luxurious prison experience. He paid off other prisoners and exploited loopholes, but was still in a spartan cell. The luxurious pay-for-play prisons in the news occasionally are generally municipal prisons; Eppstein was in federal pretrial detention which is much harder to game.
> Jeffrey Epstein, inmate 76318-054, hated his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was cramped, dank and infested with vermin, so Mr. Epstein, long accustomed to using his wealth to play by his own rules, devised a way out.
> He paid numerous lawyers to visit the jail for as many as 12 hours a day, giving him the right to see them in a private meeting room ... he and his entourage regularly emptied the two vending machines of drinks and snacks.
> “It was shift work, all designed by someone who had infinite resources to try and get as much comfort as possible,” said a lawyer who was often in the jail visiting clients.
> Outside the meeting room, Mr. Epstein mounted a strategy to avoid being preyed upon by other inmates: He deposited money in their commissary accounts, according to a consultant who is often in the jail and speaks regularly with inmates there.
> But in his final days, Mr. Epstein’s efforts to lessen the misery of incarceration seemed to be faltering.
> He was seldom bathing, his hair and beard were unkempt and he was sleeping on the floor of his cell instead of on his bunk bed, according to people at the jail.
Exactly. In response to the outrage over his 2008 prison sentence, he was treated much harsher and more in-line with other "regular" prisoners the second time he was imprisoned.
The whole thesis here is that what happened to Epstein could happen to anyone, but that's not true. Most people are not billionaires with 24-7 access to the best lawyers in the world and extraordinary leverage over some of the most powerful people in the world. The implicit subtext here is that Epstein is just another human that got chewed up in a system that's generally indifferent if not outright hostile to human life. But people in jail are not mindless components in a dysfunctional system. They still have agency and respond to incentives and are mostly intensely interested in each other, not least because of the inhospitality of the system. They have newspapers and TV in jail, and I very sure that everyone in there was very aware of who their new neighbor was.