In a raw, hour-long interview on Tucker Carlson’s show last week, former Congressman George Santos detailed his 84-day federal prison stint, describing squalor, abuse, and a spiritual rebirth that ended with a presidential commutation.
The 37-year-old represented New York’s 3rd Congressional District from January to December 2023 before being expelled.
Sentenced April 25 to 87 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and $373,749.97 in restitution for campaign-related wire fraud and identity theft, Santos was granted clemency by President Donald Trump on Oct. 17, wiping out both his prison term and fines.
Speaking weeks after his release, he called FCI Fairton in South Jersey a rundown facility run by the “unqualified” Warden Lynn Kelly.
Carlson, visibly stunned, opened the interview by admitting, “I didn’t think I was going to see you for seven years, and here you are.”
Santos entered FCI Fairton on Aug. 19.He called his experience “tortuous” and a potential Eighth Amendment violation, likening the minimum-security satellite camp to a dystopian warehouse housing violent offenders. He described bare-bones dorms with bed cubbies, small lockers and a cafeteria segregated by race with multiple TVs.
Once for white-collar criminals, the prison now included drug dealers and gang members, with racial tensions sparked even by remote control access.
"God have mercy on your soul, if you're a white guy and you go near the remote for the black people or the Spanish people. It is all hell. People will literally get stabbed with a shank if they do that,” Santos said.
Health hazards abounded. Santos described ceilings sagging with “bubbles of black mold almost like cotton… dangling off the ceiling,” bathrooms breeding ringworm and listeria, expired food and even canned goods as “Russian roulette… the botulism Olympics.”
Santos described the prison showers as infection-prone and noted that Muslim inmates used the sinks for religious ablutions.
“I walked into a situation like that and it was literally ass washing on the sink, I said, ‘I can’t do this,’” he said.
Hygiene in the facility’s kitchen, he said, was a farce.
“It’s your own personal hell for a germaphobe,” he said.
Santos volunteered in the prison kitchen, cooking meals for fellow inmates despite broken equipment and filth, and recalled making rice pudding from expiring milk.
“I think I was the first person in that prison’s history to have the audacity to make rice pudding, and it turned out good, like New York diner style,” he said.
He said inmates raved about his cooking, praising how it was prepared with care.
While imprisoned, Santos wrote a series of firsthand accounts for the South Shore Press.
“I was writing from prison, criticizing the prison I was in and documenting my journey,” he said.
Between Aug. 12 and Sept. 1, he explored prison life and interpersonal dynamics, reuniting with former staffer Sam Miele amid what he called a “kaleidoscope of humanity.”
He criticized the prison system, political cliques, slow bureaucracy and hazards such as extreme heat and black mold.
After entering solitary confinement on Aug. 28 over a debunked death threat, his writings grew more anguished.
He described “slow-motion torture,” including cold showers three times a week, recycled underwear, denied family visits and medical care and deep psychological despair.
Santos accused Warden Kelly of running a “cruel” regime and called for FBI intervention.
In October, his columns turned introspective, apologizing to family, constituents and Trump for his “self-destruction.”
Following his commutation on Oct. 17, Santos framed his release as a faith-driven “new beginning” dedicated to prison reform, crediting divine grace and Trump’s mercy for his redemption.
Santos claimed his criticism of jail overseers in his columns led to a kitchen shutdown. Despite freedom at the satellite camp, inmates rarely attempted to escape.
“The campers are free, literally free to roam right off, but nobody's stupid enough to do it,” he said.
Fellow inmates included imprisoned former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez’s co-defendants, serving seven- and nine-year sentences for bribery.
“Their gifts were gold bars,” Santos said. “I mean my joke was always the same. I'm in prison. I didn't even get a gold bar.”
While in prison Santos reconnected with Miele, an ex-staffer jailed for refusing to cooperate with Biden-era Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice, illustrating the pressures those connected to him faced.
“It was a snitch system for sure,” Santos said.
While imprisoned, Santos met a “renowned architect” and “former executive for United Airlines,” jailed for private-sector kickbacks he deemed “protocol.”
“This is protocol in the private sector. I worked in private equity… I never bought that stuff, but they were gifts… that’s not a crime, but they put this man in prison,” he said.
Former Congressman George Santos. (YouTube / Tucker Carlson)
Santos used such encounters to criticize the justice system.
“I struggle with the criminal justice system these days because I look at it and I feel like it's an overall zealous system just meant to put people in prison, there has to be some monetary benefiting suppliers when you look at,” he said.
The system, he argued, profits off incarceration via monopolies.He cited Bob Barker Company, connected to the deceased former host of the Price is Right, and Keefe Supply Company, tied to the Bush family, as dominating federal prison supply contracts, suggesting financial incentives may influence sentencing.
He praised many prison guards as “hardworking, amazing people,” but had nothing but disdain for Warden Kelly, calling her “absolutely unqualified” and accusing her of using budget excuses to avoid improvements while spending $7,000 on an office TV.
“She can sue me. I'd love to go to a deposition for calling her unqualified,” Santos said.
Santos also commented on the political leanings of his fellow inmates and how quickly attitudes shifted after his commutation.
“Lots of liberals in prison,” Santos said. “You'd be shocked. You'd be shocked at the number of people who hate the president in prison. But then the moment, which is funny, the moment I got commuted, everybody was like, ‘Oh, Trump's the man.’”
Drugs infested the main prison, including “suboxone, K, ecstasy, molly, cocaine,” smuggled by underpaid guards.
Santos said unlike other prisons, FCI Fairton abruptly stopped his ADHD medication and replaced it with antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs, leaving him “zombified.”
He later spent 41 days in solitary after a false death threat, describing “recycled” clothes, including underwear “complimentary skid marks on them.” Santos said he was held in a 6-by-9 cell so small he could touch both walls with his arms outstretched.
He described drinking metallic-tasting water from the toilet tank.
“These black sediments fall to the bottom of the cup. This is what they're putting you through,” he said.
His neighbor, a convicted murderer, had killed another inmate with a pencil.
Santos penned three suicide notes during confinement, later framing them as a form of protest.
“The preface was, ‘I'm going to kill myself just to fuck with this warden and put a mess in her hand,’” he said. “Look at how desperate I was. I was willing to end my life in my own thoughts to get back at someone who was hurting me.”
He said books sustained him in solitary, of which he read 26 volumes, from fantasy epics to historical sagas, before experiencing a religious awakening.
“It is so much easier to walk in your life with God in it than to ignore it,” he said.
On Sept. 10, a guard told him that Charlie Kirk, a figure Santos admired, had been murdered. Isolated, Santos mentally unraveled, later receiving updates on Trump’s memorial speech.
He said he later met with the FBI on Sept. 23, who deemed the threat to his own life non-credible, but the warden delayed his return to the camp until early October.
Upon learning of his commutation on Oct. 17 via an MSNBC graphic, Santos said inmates mobbed him.
“The entire cafeteria erupted,” Santos said.
He said after the commutation he called Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump ally, who had advocated on his behalf and left the prison that night.
Santos said prison redefined wealth for him after being stripped of family, friends and material desires while also leading him to sobriety.
“Mainly the torturous nature of isolation and the dehumanizing nature of which I was treated really put my entire life back into perspective,” he said.After his release, Santos said he enjoyed hour-long showers and sushi feasts. Now a reform crusader, Santos condemned the justice system’s cruelty and is also speaking out against the death penalty.
“If they can do this to me, imagine what other people are [subjected to],” he said.
Carlson called the interview “an amazing story.”
“You seem like a man transformed through suffering,” Carlson said.
Santos agreed.
"Well, that's not the easiest way to transform,” he said. “No, it's the only way. And it paid off in a weird way at the end. And I'm grateful. Thanks to God and thanks to President Trump and to everybody who helped and walked that long path with me.”