Joe Loya is an inmate in the federal system. He had a chance encounter with Charles Keating while Keating was being escorted to his first shower at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. Keating later went to a "Club Fed" and Loya was sent to do his time at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, PA.

Loya writes his perceptions of the punishment white collar offenders like Keating, Boesky, Milliken, etc. receive. His memoir is scheduled to be published by Harper Collins next fall.

Loya is not persuaded things will change with the current wave of corporate malfeasance. Here's a portion of his article, originally published in the LA Times, then by Pacifica News Service and now on Alternet.

"Middle-class Americans say they want to see greedy, dishonest CEOs punished. But in truth, middle-class Americans are more afraid of boys from the housing projects holding them up in an alley for 20 bucks than they are of Wall Street scoundrels gutting their pensions and portfolios.

Middle-class jurors and judges see something of themselves in the fallen rich. Men like Keating and Milken and former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay reflect the deepest dream of the middle-class -- wealth. Main Street finds Wall Street highly seductive.

The average prisoner understands this instinctively, which is why the men at the Metropolitan Detention Center delighted in intimidating Keating.

The moral panic about corporate America will subside. The average American will finally notice that the CEOs don't resemble the drug pushers, child abductors or terrorists on the nightly news. And just that quickly, CEOs will be fined nominally, given a year or two in Club Fed and allowed to keep their fortunes.

One day, some of them may even become famous philanthropists."

If you would like to correspond with Joe Loya, his email address is included in the Pacifica article.