Tom Pappert, lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, joined Wednesday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss the decades-long smuggling issue at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Memphis where January 6 defendant Stewart Parks self-reported on Tuesday to serve his eight-month prison sentence for being present at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.
Parks was sentenced in November 2023 to three years imprisonment on misdemeanor trespassing, disorderly conduct, and theft charges by D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amit P. Mehta, who has presided over several trials related to the January 6 Capitol riots. Parks, however, is serving his sentence concurrently, reducing his term to eight months behind bars.
On Wednesday, Pappert reported that FCI Memphis “regularly generates headlines due to smuggling of controlled substances and weapons into the prison.”
While discussing his report during his interview with Leahy, Pappert said he was “concerned for Stewart’s behalf” when he found out the prison in which Parks was ordered to report was FCI Memphis.
“I was disappointed when I started researching and found that FCI Memphis has a 10 or 15-year history of a massive smuggling problem. And it’s everything from weapons to drugs to tobacco,” Pappert explained. “They’ve had at least two guards over the past few years be found guilty, sentenced one to a year in prison, another one, six months of probation. And this is an ongoing problem that resulted in just in the past eight months or so, videos going viral on social media, recorded by prison inmates from within FCI Memphis. And when asked about this, a prison union spokesman said, “it is an epidemic of smuggled devices.” They seize them and they reappear within days.”
Pivoting to the treatment other January 6 defendants have received inside federal prisons across the nation, Pappert analyzed how Parks, who did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine, may be put into solitary confinement as other defendants have.
“This does vary a little bit from facility to facility depending on what the administrators there, the wardens, want to do, but I’ve seen this happen to multiple other people, especially January 6th defendants, where they do have to go through this two weeks of – and it is a little bit different from say solitary confinement because they are supposed to still be given access to lawyers, to phone calls, to books, to materials – however, in practice, they’re still in what our poor January 6th convicted friends call ‘23 and one’ where you are in a room for 23 hours a day and you get one hour to maybe go outside, maybe shower, maybe do the other necessities of life,” Pappert explained.
Leahy, noting how Parks “is not a liar” as Mehta claimed him to be, noted how members of the Tennessee Congressional Delegation will soon be asked to file complaints about the conduct of the judge in Parks case and asked Pappert whether or not such a complaint would have an effect on Parks’ case.
Pappert said such a complaint may not lessen Parks’ eight-month sentence, however, added, “But I do think that all of these January 6 judges need a wake up call.”
“They are completely disconnected from the rest of the country. They are acting like it’s January 7th and everybody is still crying about this so-called insurrection,” Pappert said. “The fact is it was a 99 percent peaceful protest. The only deaths were caused by the Capitol Hill police themselves and the overreaction, now years later, is still only happening because of these D.C. judges who live in a totally isolated world.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
