Brad Rouse
After graduating from Harvard and working on Broadway,
I violated America’s drug laws in 2007.
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Today, I assist defendants and their families through WhiteCollarAdvice.com.
Our team helps clients tell their stories and achieve positive long-term outcomes. I happily work as a wise counselor,
sober coach, despair doula, and good neighbor.
Or listen to the podcast below
NYT "The Daily" Podcast
(Beginning at 18:30)
Brad live on WPLR 99.1 Chaz & AJ Show Connecticut
US Weekly Article
"Diddy Is ‘Trying to Stay Positive’ for 1st Christmas Behind Bars: Details of His Holiday Meal, More (Exclusive)
"Former inmate Brad Rouse, who spent time at MDC between 2008 and 2009 and now works as a mentor assisting criminal defendants and their families, tells Us that Christmas was especially tough on fathers with young kids at home. “The holidays were more painful for them,” he says, adding, “It’s a very hard, difficult place.”
The inmates are cut a few breaks. Mangel says staffers give prisoners time in the enclosed recreation yard to play sports tournaments, and they’re free to enjoy dominos, chess and card games. Religious services are usually offered, and TVs are on and tuned into major sports events. There can be a sense of camaraderie. “It wasn’t easy to be in jail during holidays,” says Rouse, “but we were all in it together.” (He recalls an inmate drawing customized holiday greeting cards featuring sketches of Santa or their kids for fellow prisoners to mail to their families in exchange for tins of mackerel.) Another former inmate who was incarcerated in the ’90s and early 2000s agrees the mood is lighter, at least for a little while. “Everybody gives a pass that day,” he tells Us. “Like, if somebody’s gonna get hurt, don’t do it on Christmas. Wait until tomorrow, you know?”
EL País - US Edition Articl
Brooklyn Jail, world epicenter of crime and new home of ‘El Mayo’ Zambada
"It’s not all about the rich and famous and horror stories about the “hole.” “MDC saved my life,” says Brad Rouse, who was imprisoned there for a year on drug charges. Rouse, a former Harvard graduate who teaches inmates, says conditions are extremely difficult for those who live and work there, but he credits most of the staff for trying to reintegrate inmates. “There’s a unique emotional intensity, you have anger and grief in huge amounts, and people going through the worst time of their lives all crammed into one huge human warehouse,” he adds.
Rouse was housed from 2008 to 2009 in an area known as “general population,” where conditions are completely different. The regular units are spread out on two levels, with two-person cells, common living and recreation areas, though there are no outdoor spaces. “It was like the United Nations, there were people from hundreds of countries and cultures, and I remember it being bustling,” he says. “Nationality is important to the groups inside — there are West and East Africans, people from Russia or Asia, Latinos, Muslims,” she says
In the same unit, one inmate might be devastated by the death of a family member, and next to him another might be elated because he was about to get out, Rouse says. There is also a small section for female inmates in the same jail, and the ventilation ducts sometimes became spaces for flirting and getting to know each other better, despite being several levels away. But life in prison is often routine and monotonous, based on a system of rules that determine when you have to eat, go out or stand at the side of the bed for daily counts. There are jobs, too. In New York, an inmate earns a minimum of 16 cents an hour and a maximum of 65 cents if his job is related to manufacturing, according to official records from last year. Each assignment also entails different degrees of freedom and permission to move around different areas of the prison, and influences the point system that guides the passage of prisoners through the prison system. Mangel admits that for many of his clients it is a lesson in humility. “Your fortune may be worth billions of dollars outside, but inside you are collecting trays or scrubbing floors,” he says.
Following the closure of the Manhattan correctional facility in 2021, Brooklyn is the only federal detention center in service for New York. Its deterioration, from reports of spoiled food and unsanitary conditions to complaints of overcrowding and accounts of extreme violence, prompted Judge Jesse Furman earlier this year to refuse to send one of his defendants to MDC, arguing that the conditions at the jail are “appalling” and “unacceptable.”
“At least four inmates have committed suicide in the past three years,” Furman said in a court opinion last April. “Smuggling, from drugs to cell phones, has become widespread,” he added. “It has reached the point where it has become a matter of routine for judges in this district and the East to give defendants reduced sentences because of the conditions at MDC.”