Stewart assigned to West Virginia

NEW YORK — Martha Stewart will do her time for lying about a stock sale at a remote West Virginia prison camp where inmates sleep in bunk beds and rise at 6 a.m. to do menial labor for pennies an hour.

The millionaire celebrity homemaker confirmed Wednesday that she had been assigned to the minimum-security prison at Alderson, but noted that she had hoped to be sent to a facility closer to her family and attorneys.

Stewart, convicted in March of lying to investigators about a stock sale, had asked to serve her five-month prison term in Danbury, Conn., close to her 90-year-old mother and her own home in Westport.

But a source familiar with the government’s decision, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that Alderson was selected because it was more remote and less accessible to the media than Danbury or Stewart’s second choice of Coleman, Fla.

Those prisons also had more serious overcrowding issues, the source said. The Coleman prison, for example, is crowded with inmates moved from other Florida prisons because of the recent hurricanes.

Stewart, 63, must report to Alderson by Oct. 8. She was originally allowed to remain free while she appealed her conviction, but decided this month to serve time anyway to put the “nightmare” behind her.

Stewart said in a statement she was pleased that the government had assigned her “so quickly” to “the first federal prison camp for women in the United States.”

“I look forward to getting this behind me and to vigorously pursuing my appeal,” she said.

Inmates at Alderson typically rise about 6 a.m. and work most of the day, making 12 to 40 cents an hour at jobs such as ground maintenance, sanitation and food services, said Dan Dunne, a federal prisons spokesman.