FCI Fort Dix: The low-security prison where Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs wants to serve out his sentence

By Eric Levenson, CNN

(CNN) — If lawyers for Sean “Diddy” Combs get their way, the hip-hop mogul will spend his next few years in a massive low-security prison with a drug abuse treatment program, not too far from family.

Combs’ lawyers on Monday asked Judge Arun Subramanian to recommend to the Bureau of Prisons that he be placed at FCI Fort Dix, a federal correctional facility in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

There, Combs can “address drug abuse issues” and “maximize family visitation and rehabilitative efforts,” defense attorney Teny Geragos wrote in a letter to the court. The letter specifically noted FCI Fort Dix’s “RDAP” program, or Residential Drug Abuse Treatment Program.

The letter comes days after Combs was sentenced to four years and two months in prison for his July conviction on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. He has already served just over a year in detention since his arrest last September and so is now looking at less than three more years behind bars.

FCI Fort Dix is the largest single federal prison in the US with just over 4,100 total male inmates, including about 3,900 at the FCI and about 200 at an adjacent minimum-security satellite camp, according to its website.

The prison is attached to the military base Fort Dix in southern New Jersey. It’s about an hour’s drive from Philadelphia and about an hour and a half from New York City, where Combs was born and where he is currently incarcerated.

The prison has hosted a number of high-profile figures, including “Real Housewives of New Jersey” star Joe Giudice, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli.

‘I found it wide-open for a prison’

Christopher Zoukis, the consulting division director of the law practice Elizabeth Franklin-Best PC and the author of “The Federal Prison Handbook,” said he generally advises his clients to avoid FCI Fort Dix.

“Fort Dix is a weird beast,” he said, noting it has had problems with gang violence, contraband drugs and phones and not enough staff.

In general, low-security prisons like FCI Fort Dix are “pretty laidback places” with little violence, Zoukis said. They tend to have dorm-style settings and communal bathrooms.

One appeal of a place like Fort Dix is its RDAP program, an “intensive” 9- to 12-month treatment program for prisoners with substance abuse problems. Graduates of the program can get their sentences reduced by up to a year, Zoukis said.

“RDAP is great because if you qualify for the time off your sentence, then it can be a massive sentence reduction,” he said.

Writing for Vice in 2017, the filmmaker Seth Ferranti – who served over two decades in federal prison on drug charges – reflected on his experience at FCI Fort Dix.

“When I first transferred to the low-security facility myself, in 1999, I found it wide-open for a prison—more like a little town of its own,” he wrote. “Coming down from higher-security facilities I spent the bulk of my 21-year sentence in, I was surprised at the laid-back attitudes of both the staff and inmates, who seemed to operate on a different wavelength from the more ferocious federal pens.”

“Don’t get it twisted, though—this is still prison, and at the end of the day, prison sucks, no matter where you’re at,” Ferranti added.

The prison has had several high-profile incidents of contraband in recent years.

Shkreli, for one, was reportedly running his pharmaceutical company from behind bars using a contraband smartphone, according to the Wall Street Journal. He was later transferred to a prison in Pennsylvania.

In 2020, several men were arrested and charged in a scheme in which they used drones to smuggle cell phones, phone chargers, tobacco and other items into the prison, according to federal prosecutors.

The Bureau of Prisons will ultimately make the decision of where to place Combs. The bureau’s Designation and Sentence Computation Center makes these decisions based on a number of factors, such as security, bed availability, program needs and judicial recommendations. The bureau generally attempts to place inmates in facilities within 500 driving miles of their residence.

The Department of Justice said it does not take a position on where Combs should serve his sentence.

The Bureau of Prisons operates minimum, low-, medium- and high-security prisons. Low-security prisons house about 36% of inmates, while medium-security house 33%, according to federal data.

The Bureau of Prisons’ public information office said in an automated email it was not available to respond to a CNN inquiry, citing the government shutdown.

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CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report.