Entertainer Lauryn Hill left federal prison today and headed for home a few days early. Hill was sentenced to three months for tax evasion and her start date was to be July 8, 2013. However, with a few days remaining on her sentence, the Bureau of Prisons issued Hill a “get out jail early” card for, among other things, good behavior.
With the time off, Hill has actually spent considerably less time in prison than initially anticipated. After a delayed sentencing because she had failed to make restitution, Hill expected to see a sentence in the range of 24 to 36 months. Her attorney asked that she not spend any time in prison since she was the mother of six minor children. The compromise was a three month prison term plus an additional three months of house arrest which she will begin serving immediately now that she has been released. She will then serve an additional nine months of supervised release.
In addition to the payment of taxes, interest and penalty due, Hill was also charged with a $60,000 fine.
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The sentence came after Hill pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion for failing to file tax returns for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007. At the time of her plea, she posted on Tumblr that she had gone “underground” in order to live without “being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.”
After a hiatus from making albums, Hill had been back in the studio just before her stint in prison. She released a new track, “Consumerism,” today to mark her release, noting that she had scrambled to put it together just before she entered prison because she felt had relevance. She posted a stream of the track on her Tumblr page, together with a brief introduction to her latest project, “Letters From Exile.” She said about her inspiration for the project:
…[i]nspiration of this sort is a kind of news in and of itself, and often times contains an urgency that precedes what happens. I couldn’t imagine it not being relevant. Messages like these I imagine find their audience, or their audience finds them, like water seeking it’s [sic] level.
As for the singer’s post-prison plans? She hasn’t made a public statement but Chris Schwartz, the CEO of her record company, Ruff House Records, seems to have an inkling. Schwartz said simply, “Ms. Hill is ready to get back to work.”
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