In the moments after the verdict, Donald Trump would not be hauled off to prison right away. White-collar defendants are typically allowed to remain out on bail pending sentencing, which means, in the case of our former and maybe future commander-in-chief, that he could continue to campaign for president in the meantime. But let’s game it out: If Trump is found guilty, how long till he has to put on an orange (or, as we’ll learn, olive-green) jumpsuit?

This may seem like a strange time to take the prospect of a timely conviction seriously. We’re currently waiting (and waiting and waiting) for a panel of appellate judges in Washington, D.C., to decide whether Trump is immune from prosecution in special counsel Jack Smith’s case covering his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. But make no mistake: When (and it should be when, not if) Smith’s trial gets back on track, Trump is in serious trouble.

Ninety-nine percent of the January 6 cases that have gone to trial have ended with a conviction. Also, Trump faces a particularly unfriendly jury pool in D.C., where polls suggest as many as two-thirds of residents believe he is guilty. Trump’s advisers are treating the case like the threat that it is. They’ve told him bluntly that he needs to win his reelection bid in order to avoid prison time. (Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, declined to make Trump available for an interview, telling me that the premise of the story was “designed to try to undermine President Trump.”)

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the D.C. case, would set a sentencing date — say, two to three months from the date of the conviction. If the trial takes place by the end of the summer, sentencing could happen just weeks before the election.

According to federal sentencing guidelines, Trump’s potential exposure is very high, at least on paper. Mark Allenbaugh, who once worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Sentencing Commission, sketched out an aggressive calculation for me that would result in a recommended sentence north of 20 years based on the violence and physical injuries that resulted from the siege of the Capitol, Trump’s status as both a public official and the leader of the effort, and a provision of the guidelines that permits an increase in the recommended sentence when “the offense was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion.”

Federal rules require judges to treat defendants equally “to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct.” Here, we should look at what happened to the hundreds of people who have been sentenced in connection with the siege of the Capitol. Most of them — 467 out of 749 people, as of the start of the year — have been sentenced to a period of incarceration. Some of the most serious and defiant offenders, particularly those who engaged in violence or were carrying weapons, have received lengthy, yearslong terms of imprisonment. Others have received fairly modest sentences, measurable in single-digit months — perhaps because they pleaded guilty or their misconduct on the day was limited. Still others, like the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, were sentenced to several years in prison despite the fact that they did not engage in violence and ultimately pleaded guilty.

Put it all together, and it is far from clear why a nonviolent foot soldier in a campaign that Trump is accused of setting in motion should go to prison but Trump, if convicted, should not.

Judge Chutkan may also have been the worst possible draw for Trump among all of the judges in Washington. She has sentenced every single convicted January 6 defendant in her courtroom to a period of incarceration — at times ordering them to serve even more time than the proposal from prosecutors. At a hearing in late 2022, she gave a 50-year-old Ohio woman named Christine Priola 15 months after she pleaded guilty to obstructing Congress’s electoral certification. “The people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution,” Chutkan said. “It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”

The federal prison camp in Pensacola, Florida — an all-male minimum-security facility that currently holds about 500 convicts — is an eight-and-a-half-hour drive from Mar-a-Lago, not far from the border with Alabama. The complex contains 20 buildings, a track for jogging or walking, and designated recreational areas for inmates to play a variety of sports, including basketball, volleyball, soccer, and tennis. The prison has housed a variety of white-collar offenders, including former New York congressman Chris Collins (who was serving time for insider trading before being pardoned by Trump), and it is currently home to former reality-television star Todd Chrisley, who was sent there after being convicted of financial crimes.

FPC Pensacola, as it is known, is a leading contender for the prison that would house Trump. The process of selecting a facility for a convicted felon usually begins in the Designation and Sentence Computations Center of the Bureau of Prisons in Grand........

© Daily Intelligencer