Ryan's prison address would bar trip to accept Nobel Prize

One more potential indignity for former Gov. George Ryan.

Beyond the eight-digit prisoner number. In addition to being paid between 12 cents and a dollar an hour to do menial prison work. Besides having prison staff open and inspect his mail before he may read it.

Now this: If the former governor ends up winning the Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was nominated again this week, he'd get none of the pomp, circumstance or hardware that goes with it.

Forget any trip to Scandinavia to bask in the glow of accepting the honor next December. Ryan will at that point still have about 5½ years remaining on his prison term for tax fraud and other corruption charges.

Nor would he be permitted to keep the Nobel Prize medal in his room at the federal facility near Oxford, Wis. Federal prison officials forbid medallions for the same reason they ban belts and neckties.

As for the diploma issued to each Nobel prize winner? Nope. The former governor couldn't have that either simply because, as Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Felicia Ponce explained, it doesn't fit into any category of items permitted.

None of that deters University of Illinois law and humans rights professor Francis A. Boyle, who this week nominated Ryan for the fifth consecutive year.

"All I can say is that it doesn't diminish the contributions that Gov. Ryan has made to abolishing the death penalty here in America," Boyle said. "It was really Ryan who imposed the moratorium here in Illinois and then carried out the commutations that reopened the whole death penalty debate here in the United States."