Sean “Diddy” Combs is hoping to serve out his prison sentence at a low-security New Jersey facility that has previously housed some infamous inmates, including “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli.
In a letter to Combs’ Manhattan sentencing judge on Monday, the hip-hop mogul’s attorney, Teny Geragos, requested that the court “strongly recommend” to the Federal Bureau of Prisons that Combs be moved to the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix.
FCI Fort Dix — located more than 70 miles from New York City, where Combs is currently behind bars — has what’s known as a Residential Drug Abuse Program that Combs’ lawyer suggested would be beneficial to the recovering addict.
“In order to address drug abuse issues and to maximize family visitation and rehabilitative efforts, we request that the Court strongly recommend to the Bureau of Prisons that Mr. Combs be placed at FCI Fort Dix for RDAP purposes and any other available educational and occupational programs,” Geragos wrote to US District Judge Arun Subramanian.
The RDAP is an intensive, nine-month drug and alcohol program. Successfully completing it and additional prison programs could shave a year or more from Combs’ more than four-year sentence, prison consultants told Business Insider.
Last week, Combs was sentenced after being convicted in July of prostitution-related charges for transporting hired male escorts across state lines for drug-fueled sex performances with ex-girlfriends that Combs called “freak offs.”
It will be up to the BOP to determine if Combs will be accepted into these programs, or if anything in his presentencing report, including references to violence against his girlfriends, will get him excluded, the prison consultants said.
The 55-year-old rapper has been locked up at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn since his September 2024 indictment — and his time there will count toward his overall sentence.
The New Jersey facility that Combs wants to be moved to has the largest federal prison population in the United States, with just over 4,100 male inmates.
“It’s extraordinarily understaffed,” said Sam Mangel, a prison consultant who has two clients housed at Fort Dix.
The prison is where Shrekli, who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, served part of his sentence before being transferred to a low-security facility in Pennsylvania and released in 2022.
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Several reputed mobsters and a number of disgraced politicians, including former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, whose sentence for corruption charges was commuted by President Donald Trump in 2021, have also been incarcerated at Fort Dix.
Mangel said he wouldn’t advise his clients to serve time at Fort Dix unless the RDAP program was available. While the prison experiences roughly the same levels of violence and contraband issues as all low-security facilities, the lack of staffing is a problem, he said.
“It is a terrific prison if the goal is to attend programs, and build a new record, and be productive,” said Justin Paperny, who heads the prison consultancy, White Collar Advice.
“The benefit to a large prison like that is that there is going to be more programming, more resources,” Paperny said.
The BOP, Department of Justice, and attorneys for Combs did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Combs’ lawyers have said they plan to appeal the music tycoon’s prison sentence. They had pushed for a prison sentence of time served, which would have resulted in Combs being released soon.
Combs’ attorney, Marc Agnifilo, told reporters last week that in handing down a 50-month prison sentence, the judge “acted as a 13th juror” and “second-guessed the jury’s verdict.”
At Combs’ trial over the summer, the jury cleared the onetime near-billionaire of the top sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges, allowing him to dodge a potential sentence of life in prison.
“We think we have strong bases to appeal,” Agniflio told reporters after Friday’s sentencing hearing. “The strongest bases is that the jury reached a verdict on coercion. It found there was not coercion.”
