Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73

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In the summer of 2003, as Martha Stewart’s trial on charges connected to securities fraud was nearing its conclusion, the CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper aired a segment speculating about how severe her punishment would be if she were convicted. “Sometimes,” Mr. Cooper said, “it seems as though rich criminals seldom end up swapping smokes on Cell Block H. So if it’s not hard time in the joint, what kind of sentence could she get?” His guest was Herbert Hoelter, a sentencing reform advocate who, to fund his nonprofit work at the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, had become a concierge to the federal prison system for white-collar criminals, helping them to secure alternative or shorter sentences and to navigate life as an inmate. “Our philosophy isn’t that punishment should not occur,” Mr. Hoelter said, “it’s that it should occur in different ways.”