Has Prison Lost Its Capacity To Shame?

Ah, the glamour of the slammer. Just before Paris Hilton slipped off to jail, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in Times Square posed a paraffin Paris in prison stripes in the public lobby.

The jailbird did her job.

"Young kids, little kids, men, women — pretty much everybody knows what's going on with her," a museum worker, Karen Ali, said. So is prison the new pornography? You know — something that used to be shameful, but has lately become hip and cool and a possible career booster to boot?

That seems to depend on who you are, what you're famous for — and what you do when you come out. Hold your head up high and you can have the world at your feet. This may be hard for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby to appreciate at the moment. Having just learned he is facing a 30-month sentence, he probably feels this is the end for him.

It's not, public relations consultant Peter Shankman said. "He'll come out and he'll get a book deal and he'll do a little better if he names names." The public won't dwell upon his conviction, said Mr. Shankman, simply because, "Libby did not make a sex tape. We're going to be having fantasies about Paris Hilton in jail. We don't want to have fantasies about Libby."

Speak for yourself. And yet, he's right: Most people won't hold Libby's prison time against him.

Nor are they holding it against Michael Milken. Convicted in 1989 on charges of securities fraud, the "Junk Bond King" spent nearly two years in prison. Shortly thereafter he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and since then, he has thrown himself into not only raising money for the cause, but literally speeding up the research. Fortune Magazine quotes Mayor Giuliani – yes, the man who put him behind bars – saying, "He is a pioneer and really created a movement."

See? No hard feelings.

The former chairman of Sotheby's, Alfred Taubman, is another high flyer back on – or perhaps never off – track. During his year in federal prison for price-fixing, Nancy Kissinger sent him pictures of her puppy. Once sprung, he posed with her husband and Donald Trump in a photo shoot. Now he's got a memoir out, "Threshold Resistance," peppered with insights like, "It really is a different experience reading Art + Auction… in a federal penitentiary." Funny stuff.

It's not that jail necessarily burnished these convicts, it's just that it doesn't seem to have burned them either. Moreover, even as the stigma dissipates, the curiosity factor doesn't.

Martha Stewart's time in jail does not seem that different from her boyfriend's time in orbit. Both got to experience something most of us never will. Dinner party guests like to hear about that stuff. And if jail was good for Martha (she lost weight and gained a poncho), for Paris, "It's like a publicity stunt," the author of "Punk Marketing," Richard Laermer, said. "Lindsay Lohan is probably firing her publicist right now for not getting her into jail." Jail time has served many people well — or at least their reputations — from Socrates to Galileo to Martin Luther King and Lenny Bruce. While I don't see Paris Hilton — or Mr. Libby — writing, "Letter From a Los Angeles Jail," I do see both of them emerging and getting on with their lives, and the rest of us respecting the fact they did their time.

I just hope we don't have to watch bootleg videos of it.