Desperate Man funds his retirement by going to prison

[Herman Munster]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/business/mutfund/07essay.html?_r=1&ref=mutfund&oref=slogin

On May 1, Mr. Bowers — or, as he is known to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, prisoner A535976 — handed a teller a stickup note, got four $20 bills and then handed them over to a security guard, telling the guard that it was his day to be a hero, according to accounts by The Columbus Dispatch and The Associated Press.

At his trial in October, he explained to the judge that he was about to turn 63 and had lost his job making deliveries for a drug wholesaler. He said that with only minimum-wage jobs available, he preferred to draw a three-year sentence, which would get him to age 66, when, he said, he could live off of Social Security. And that is what he got.

Mr. Bowers has solved his income problem and the question of health care in a single act. He’s a little like O. Henry’s character, Soapy the New York hobo, in “The Cop and the Anthem,” who hopes to winter over at Rikers Island: “Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable.” The patented O. Henry twist, of course, was that Soapy had a great deal of trouble getting arrested. Mr. Bowers did not.

His lawyer, Jeremy W. Dodgion, said his client is neither unbalanced nor dim. “He’s as charming as can be,” he said. “He’s easy-going, very articulate — he’s no dummy, by any means.”

He said Mr. Bowers was addressing an all-too-common problem.

“At his age, it was harder and harder to find a job with benefits,” Mr. Dodgion said, and “he finally said, to hell with it.” And while most people would find prison a soul-crushing experience, Mr. Bowers had done time in the 1970s on a robbery conviction, Mr. Dodgion said, and so he knew he could survive.

The prosecutor, Dan Cable, summed up for The A.P.: “It’s not the financial plan I would choose,” he said, “but it’s a financial plan.”