After a fall, discipline and control look identical, until one breaks you again.
“Dad, sit down. Stop working. You’re really sick. Get some rest.”
That was Alyssa, late September 2025, backpack half-zipped, tone already half-parental.
“Okay, I promise. Have a great day at school.”
“DAD!”
“So little faith, huh? I promise, no work. I get paid to talk about ethics, you know.”
“I’ll get a full report from Mom later,” she said.
I said it the way dads say things when they already know they’re about to break the promise.
I’d promised myself I’d never go back to that twitch, the need to check, prove, produce. Yet here I was, working when my body was dying for rest.
Twenty minutes later, Sandra came upstairs. I was on the couch, pretending to “rest.”
“It looks like you’re working.”
“What are you going to do, drop the dime on me?”
Usually, she laughs at my foolish prison jokes, but not this time.
“Please, babe, sit down. Shut off your computer and just watch TV for the next twelve hours. Can you do it?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Please try.”
“Fine.”
At that moment, I did what any normal sick person would do. I started Breaking Bad from the pilot.
By noon I’d answered a few “quick emails.” By midnight I’d finished the whole series, blanket over me, the Dodgers blew another save, cough drops in a pile. My head throbbed, but the harder part was not answering one more message. I told myself I was sweating out the sickness. Really, I was trying to sweat out control.
After watching Breaking Bad’s “The Fly” twice, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wrote for several hours, then ran downstairs and told Sandra my idea for Chapter 4.
She thought I was sleeping.
“Big news,” I said. “Walter White’s trapped in the lab; I was trapped in the halfway house. I’ll compare the two through Witold Pilecki, the man who surrendered himself to a concentration camp so the world would know. You want to hear it? I have three pages.”
“Oh my God,” was all she could say.
So this is my fly episode, one day, one room, one man trying not to chase what he can’t catch. Walt’s trapped in the lab, wasting an entire day chasing a fly he can’t kill. It’s not really about the fly; it’s about control, the illusion that if you could fix one small thing, you could fix everything. It’s not about insects; it’s about power, his obsession with perfection in a world that refuses to cooperate.
Camus wrote that freedom isn’t doing whatever we want; it’s choosing to do better within our limits. Walt never saw the limit. I keep testing mine, same as I did back then. Watching him chase that fly made me remember another kind of trap, a day sixteen years earlier, when I was also locked in a room I couldn’t leave.
June 4, 2009 — Halfway House Lockdown — Discipline and Control In Federal Prison
At four a.m., I was dressed and ready. I’d figured out how to dodge the halfway-house showers; the prison ones were better. Most mornings I left before dawn, ran five miles at Balboa Golf Course, showered at my mom’s, and reached the Sotheby’s office by eight — desk, phone call to check in, another day of pretending freedom.
But that morning, a staffer’s voice cracked over the intercom:
“Full, total lockdown until further notice. Return your phones to the front desk. You are not going to work today. Return to your room or face the consequences.”
While walking back to my room, I heard the rumors. Gossip in custody moves faster than contraband.
Apparently, two residents had been caught with drugs; rumor was a staffer helped bring it in. Those same two guys were also sleeping with a female prisoner, both at the same time and separately, without knowing about each other.
A guard barked for everyone to return to their rooms, adding that food would be delivered at 6:30 a.m., noon, and 5 p.m. Thankfully, I had food in my locker: apples, granola, coffee, and a combination peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly jar with bread, all brought courtesy of my friends Sam and Karen Pompeo.
As I walked into my room, I paused to think how odd this punishment was. Then again, by then I’d served 388 days in prison and knew the rule: if one or two people screw up, everyone pays. I thought about the guy in the visitation room at Taft Prison who got caught having sex with his wife, or the one who, after several warnings, refused to clean the microwaves. The result? Everyone lost visitation for a week, and no one could use the microwaves for two. One week for the sex, but two for the microwaves.
The lockdown came so quickly that they wouldn’t let us go to work or call our employers. How odd, I thought. Isn’t the halfway house about helping us transition to work? Again, by then, I knew it was never really about rehabilitation or re-entry. It’s all about security. “Preparing offenders for re-entry” looks good on a brochure.
As you’d imagine, the fifty-plus men and women around me were not happy. Dozens started yelling from their rooms.
“Hey, Torta, let me go to work! I’ll bring you back crazy snacks! Come on, Torta!”
(“Torta” — Spanish slang the residents used for a staffer — was a word I’d first learned in prison.)
“Say it again, and the Marshals will be here in minutes. I’ve got them on speed dial!” she yelled into the microphone.
Total silence.
“Okay,” I said to myself. “Looks like I’ve got twenty-four hours here, at least. What should I do?”
For a good hour, I just sat there. My bunkie, John, stayed quiet through all of it, which made sense. He’d served forty years, thirty-five of them in various United States Penitentiaries. This kind of lockdown wouldn’t even make his top thousand.
Sitting on my bed, I reflected. Just eighteen months earlier, as a defendant, I couldn’t sit still. I was pacing, waiting for lawyers to call with bad news. Now I just sat there. I liked it. I could feel the change; I told myself prison had been good for me. Sometimes the right choice is as simple as, “What choice would I have made before prison?”
On a recent pass from the halfway house, I’d bought a handful of books — old, used, collecting dust on my locker. Work had taken over; I had less time to read. About six of them had piled up, including Fighting Auschwitz by Józef Garliński (1975).
For the first time since my release on May 20, 2009, I had forced recovery time. Nowhere to go, no one to call, no lawyer’s office to cold-walk into. No pressure; some days feel so nice without pressure.
Before prison, I would’ve done what Walter White did, pacing the lab, drawing formulas for peace. Instead, I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a book.
That day, I didn’t pace. For once, stillness felt like progress. And for years after, I kept that habit, until I called exhaustion discipline and convinced myself I had no other options, when I had tons.
When the doors finally opened the next morning, I realized I’d left the book on my bunk. Somehow I knew that would be the last book I read for a while — back to life, building. Sixteen years later, the same lesson keeps fading and returning.
Fighting Auschwitz — Purpose Over Control
The memory of that day always takes me back to the book itself, the one I’d left behind in that small room.
It made me think about the other extreme, a man who risked his life not to control chaos but to bring meaning from it.
Pilecki showed me what surrender looks like when it’s sacred; Walt showed me what it looks like when it’s poison.
Where Walter White chased purity, Witold Pilecki chose purpose.
I sat down in that locked halfway-house room, kicked off my Hoka running shoes, and opened Fighting Auschwitz.
A few minutes in, I thought I’d found a typo. The book was printed in 1975; mistakes happened back then, right?
A line said he’d volunteered to enter Auschwitz. I assumed it had to be misprinted. I read the line again, no typo.
Camus wrote about limits; Frankl about meaning. Pilecki showed what happens when a man turns both into action.
A Polish officer named Witold Pilecki, husband, father of two, volunteered to be arrested so he could enter a concentration camp that everyone else in the world was trying to avoid. Volunteered.
Even though John rarely spoke, I felt the need to share what I was reading.
The room was quiet except for the low hum of the air vent, halfway-house quiet, the kind that makes you whisper without knowing why.
“John, this guy volunteered to go not just to prison but to the concentration camps,” I said.
He just nodded once, then said, “Yup.”
“Apparently, he wanted to see what was happening firsthand in the concentration camps.” I was in disbelief.
Three years inside hell. He smuggled notes to a world that didn’t want to listen.
I underlined that and looked around my room — walls, bunk, silence — realizing how small my own confinement really was.
The author described Pilecki’s first days inside the camp: men stripped, beaten, assigned numbers instead of names. He watched friends die from disease and exhaustion.
In secret, he built a resistance group — trading food, hiding medicines, writing reports he smuggled to the Polish underground. He found a way to build order from chaos. Every note he managed to smuggle out helped form a small rebellion.
Those messages described the gas chambers and executions; they became some of the first eyewitness evidence the world received about the Holocaust. He stayed there three years, escaped, told the Allies, and when they ignored him, kept fighting.
After the war, Poland traded one dictator for another. The new communist government feared men like him, those who had resisted both the Nazis and anyone else who tried to rule them. They arrested him in 1947, accused him of espionage, and tortured him for months. The trial was a theater; the verdict was pre-written. In 1948, they executed him with a single shot to the back of the head.
Before they killed him, he wrote:
“I tried to live my life so that in the hour of my death I would feel joy, not fear.”
I had to stop reading for a second. This man surrendered himself to a concentration camp, knowing he might never get out, all so he could alert the world to what was happening.
“How could someone purposely walk into hell?” I said, mostly to myself. “I can’t comprehend it. Still can’t.”
I sat back and looked at the wall. My “hell” had been losing a career and going to prison, through my own choices. His was starvation and torture. The comparison embarrassed me, but it also clarified something: courage scales differently when the purpose does.
Moments like that reminded me of why I became such an intentional reader in prison. Reading with purpose forces you to look at your own life and ask what you’ve actually learned.
When I read that Pilecki wanted to meet the end of his life with joy rather than fear, it made me think about my own.
I’m not comparing 388 days in a minimum-security camp to his nightmare; that gap is wider than comparing my seven-year-old son Jason to Shohei Ohtani. But in my small, modern way, I wanted the same thing he did: to reach the end of my journey feeling peace instead of fear, gratitude instead of envy.
Who wouldn’t want that? To reach the end knowing you finally made peace with your own life?
Years later, Michael carried the same message I’d learned in that room into prisons across the country. He’s on a tour now, visiting nearly fifty federal prisons. Recently at USP Leavenworth, one prisoner told him he’d read a thousand books in prison, a huge number. But when Michael asked what he’d learned from even one of them, why he’d chosen it, and how the book might guide him moving forward, the man froze. He admitted it. He would’ve learned more if he’d written reports about the books, documenting the lessons, turning them into assets, and sharing them through PrisonProfessors.org.
I hadn’t been much different when I first arrived at Taft. I skimmed, skipped pages, wasted time. Then Michael started asking me the same questions he had asked that man in the USP. My honest answer proved my reading habit led to the same outcome as watching a movie: wasted time.
Learning to read deliberately was one of the greatest benefits of going to prison. I read less now than I did then, but when I read, it’s deliberate.
That day, the book gave more than words; it gave perspective.
Pilecki belonged wholly to his mission, his commitment to bring attention to the slaughter he’d witnessed. Reading him forced me to confront my own small, often meaningless commitments. The reasoning is simple: if he could do it through torture, I could do it through freedom.
As I finished reading the book around 3 p.m., it struck me that what Pilecki lived was the same thing Viktor Frankl later wrote about, accepting responsibility for meaning even inside suffering you didn’t choose.
Both men faced the unthinkable and still decided how to respond. That decision, how to respond, was all any of us ever really controlled.
The book closed, but the noise in my head didn’t. Walt chased perfection to escape meaning; Pilecki accepted imperfection to serve it. I’ve spent sixteen years toggling between the two.
John never said another word that day, but when I looked up from the book, he gave a small nod, like he already knew the story, and the lesson too.
Return to 2025 — The Fly Wins
Two a.m. Blanket across my lap, cough drops on the table, Breaking Bad paused on The Fly. Hours later — same couch, cough drops still on the table.
Earlier today, I found Fighting Auschwitz in my office. The words haven’t changed since 2009; I have. Back then I read about Pilecki and imagined what it would be like to meet him, the man who surrendered himself to a concentration camp so the world would know. Sixteen years later, my admiration is the same, but the focus is different.
Then I admired his courage; now I admire his willingness to accept responsibility for overcoming a nightmare he had no role in creating.
Over these years I’ve watched hundreds of people in our community live versions of that same idea. Some guilty, many not. Some are forced to plead because innocence can’t always win at trial. Prosecutors chasing headlines. Yet they keep building, writing, volunteering, preparing, accepting responsibility rather than complaining about injustice.
Frankl didn’t just write about meaning; he tied it to responsibility. Pilecki lived it long before it had a name. Michael modeled it every day I knew him.
All three showed me that peace doesn’t come from control; it comes from showing up and accepting responsibility for your life.
I was back on my laptop again, answering messages I didn’t need to answer. Every one of them felt urgent, even when it wasn’t. Sixteen years later, I was still learning that sometimes the hardest work is stopping.
That day while binge watching Breaking Bad and writing this chapter, I learned someone stole my work online. Another threatened to defame me. For a minute I wanted to react. Then I remembered the fly, it’s never the thing you chase that matters; it’s the energy you waste chasing it. This time, I let it go. For once, the fly didn’t win.
Sandra was still awake. Around midnight she walked in, the Dodgers game long over, The Fly still paused on the screen.
“You’re still up?” she asked.
“Almost done,” I said. “Just finishing this chapter.”
She looked at the laptop, the open book, the half-empty tea mug.
“You wrote about resting all day,” she said softly, “and you haven’t stopped since.”
There wasn’t judgment in her voice — just recognition. The kind that comes from living beside someone long enough to know their patterns.
“Back then you didn’t have a choice,” she said. “Now you could rest, but you won’t.”
She leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, half-tired, half-amused — the look of someone who’s seen this movie before.
She was right. Sixteen years after learning stillness in confinement, I was free and chasing control again — proof that lessons survive only as long as you practice them, and the practice never ends.
Walt had his lab; I had my desk (or couch) — both of us trapped in self-made rooms.
I smiled. “Guess some habits outlast the sentence.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe the fly always wins.”
I smiled. She was probably right, at least most days.
She turned off the light and went to bed. I stayed where I was, thinking about that line, the fly always wins.
We all have one, that single pointless chase that drains more from us than it gives back.
I’m no different from Walter White, still chasing control disguised as purpose. The only progress is that I can see it, and stop, at least for tonight.
Tomorrow, Alyssa will probably ask whether I actually rested. She already knows the answer. That’s how most lessons repeat. Quietly, in front of your kids.
I shut the laptop and sat for a few minutes, realizing that while I’m proud of this chapter, I didn’t win today. If anything, it’s a loss, a reminder of how hard it is to hold on to the habits I once promised to keep, the same habits that once brought so much joy to my life: like a single day of stillness, without pressure, in a halfway house.
The fly wins, at least tonight.
Reflection Journal — Practicing Stillness
Don’t skim. Read the next book like your sentence depends on it.
What stayed with you after the last page?
What’s the fly you keep chasing, the one you call progress but know is control?
Written by Justin Paperny
Co-Founder, White Collar Advice, Author of Lessons From Prison and Ethics in Motion
Helping people create mitigation strategies that lead to shorter sentences and earlier release.
P.S. Some questions about this chapter.
What does “The Fly Wins” mean in the context of federal prison?
It’s a metaphor for control. In Breaking Bad, Walt obsesses over a fly he can’t kill. In prison, I learned that the harder you chase control, the more you lose it. The fly always wins when ego takes over discipline.
How can discipline and control look identical but lead to different outcomes?
Discipline builds structure; control builds tension. One makes room for peace, the other destroys it. I had to live both to tell the difference.
Why include pop culture like Breaking Bad in a story about prison?
Because truth hides best in fiction. Breaking Bad captured the psychology of obsession better than most courtrooms ever could.
What lesson should people under investigation take from this chapter?
That the urge to control outcomes — prosecutors, judges, or perception — is the same trap. Focus on disciplined preparation instead of obsessive management.
Who is Justin Paperny and why does he write about prison?
I’m a former stockbroker who served time in federal prison, co-founded White Collar Advice with Michael Santos, and now help people prepare for sentencing, prison, and life after release.
