Chapter Summary
If you’re searching “federal prison consultant,” you’ve probably heard the same warning I used to repeat: dirty prison consultants scam people, they prey on fear. In this chapter from my book-in-progress, After the Fall, I explain how I hid behind that line for three years—while people in crisis were calling me and I was letting them go to voicemail.
This is for defendants, families, and lawyers who want help with prison and sentencing, but don’t want to get hustled by someone claiming to be a “fixer” or “expert.”
“So,” he said, “why aren’t you answering your phone when prospects call you?”
“Good to see you,” I said.
“You too.”
Small talk has never been a strength for either of us. I went straight to defense.
“Look at what I was going to sell,” I said. “I’ve been doing well speaking, sharing the Lessons From Prison story. It just doesn’t feel right taking some guy’s money to talk about how to shop in the commissary or get a better prison job. It feels kinda dirty, scammy.”
I’d seen enough junk sold online to people who were scared and uninformed. I didn’t want to be lumped in with that, so I did the safest thing: rationalized my way into doing nothing.
“Right,” he said. “So instead of showing them a better way, you leave them to the guys you call dirty. That’s one way to protest.”
A few days earlier, Michael had walked out of federal prison after twenty-five years. The Bureau of Prisons moved him into a halfway house in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. He would serve the final year of his sentence there with an ankle monitor on at all times.
I flew up to see him. We met at a McDonald’s a short walk from the halfway house.
Michael had spent twenty-five years listening to excuses and rationalizations from men like me. There was nothing he hadn’t heard. He would sit, ask questions, and listen. He didn’t miss much.
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t like the prison consulting industry. I don’t disagree with you. Guys who served a year or two in a camp, asking others to do what they haven’t done or documented. People claiming to be fixers while selling something that provides little to no value. They’re charlatans. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”
I just sat there, taking it in.
“So let me ask you again,” he said. “Why aren’t you picking up your phone?”
I knew a number of men who called me ended up surrendering to Taft Federal Prison Camp, where I served time with Michael. They knew him through his writings on MichaelSantos.net and his book Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. Any person going to prison knew Michael Santos.
When they got to Taft, Michael would ask if they’d found me.
Some would say, “I called him, read his book. He never called me back.”
Before responding again, I thought about buying some time. In my head, I was going to say, Are you enjoying your first Big Mac in twenty-five years? I’ve always preferred the small cheeseburgers. The Big Mac is just too much. Three pieces of bread? It’s too much, no?
But there’s no wasting time with Michael. Inside or out, he had an agenda and didn’t waste time on distractions. Within about ninety seconds I felt like we were back in that prison quiet room. Me as the student, him as the teacher. The only difference was my outfit.
“Let me say it again,” I told him. “I don’t want to get pulled into something I don’t feel right about. You know how I used to joke in prison—‘The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it,’ Oscar Wilde. If I pick up the phone, I’m tempted to sell more than I can actually deliver. So I let it go to voicemail.”
“Wilde?” he said. “You’re building your ethics on a man who stiffed all his creditors and died broke in a cheap Paris hotel room?”
He went back to his fries like he’d asked about the weather.
All I could think was: How the hell does he know these things? Paris? Broke? Come on, man. I did eighteen months and came home with a few good lines. He did a quarter century and came home with more than the quotes—he had the stories behind the people who wrote them.
Every time I tried something clever, he would one-up me like that. It felt like watching Shaquille O’Neal back Chris Dudley down, dunk on him, and shove him out of the way. I could see the replay in my head. I knew which role I was playing and I accepted it: I was learning, and I like to learn.
“You tell people to stop rationalizing,” he said. “You’re still doing it. Now you just quote dead philosophers.”
I shrugged, then said, “When I was a stockbroker I chased money. After prison, I didn’t want to be that person again. I run as far away from it as I can.”
He didn’t argue. He just let his eyes drop to my wrist.
I followed his gaze and looked down at the Rolex. I hadn’t thought much about how that played next to my story about living simply and not wanting to touch money.
He took in the watch, then my shoes, then looked back at me.
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re running.”
I laughed. He wasn’t wrong. This was why I flew up: I needed him to say what I kept dodging.
When I first came home from prison, I made a point of living below my means. I didn’t feel any urge to impress anyone with cars or clothes or some fake lifestyle. Many Friday nights I sat alone in a bookstore, reading for hours, feeling more fulfilled than I ever did as a stockbroker at a steakhouse in Beverly Hills with baseball agents representing my friends and clients. Those guys lied more than anyone I ever served time with in prison.
But that version of me didn’t last. By year three, with a profitable speaking career, the trappings of success were finding their way back: the Rolex, the Ferragamo shoes, the Canali suit. I told myself it was different this time, that I wasn’t chasing money, that I just needed to “look professional” for the next event.
I turned both versions of my life into a story about virtue. The stockbroker who once made millions of dollars now choosing a quieter life and “embracing it,” but still dressing the part when it suited him. In my head, I cast myself as the moral one—the guy who wouldn’t touch a dollar unless he could overdeliver.
Telling myself I lived “minimally” was safer than building something that could be criticized. It was easier to pretend I was above the industry than to enter it and try to change it. I called it integrity; the truth was I didn’t want the fight.
That was the irony. I prided myself on trying—I’d cold-walked into law offices to pitch myself to strangers. I knew I could help defendants in crisis, and Michael being in prison didn’t stop him from guiding me. I had his experience and my freedom, and I chose not to use either.
I could have spent those three years setting a different standard—sharing Michael’s work, being honest about my own experience (strengths and weaknesses), taking fees only for what I knew I could deliver, and pushing back against the worst actors by doing it transparently and better. Instead, I waited for my friend who was still in prison to come home and lead that charge, and I called the waiting period “principled, strategic.”
After one event at Penn State, Professor Linda Treviño shared a quote with me from Robert Heinlein: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Letting calls go to voicemail proved his point.
At night, especially at two in the morning when I’d wake and struggle to fall back asleep, the story felt thinner. I would lie in bed and hear lawyers’ voices in my head, convincing myself my path to riches was as a corporate speaker:
“Consultants are dirty.”
“They scam people.”
“They prey on vulnerability.”
“They play lawyer and get in the way.”
They didn’t mean just “other” consultants. They meant me too, when I reached out. I hated that they saw me that way. I also knew they weren’t entirely wrong, because I wasn’t doing anything consistent to prove otherwise. Rather than change their view, I pulled back and told myself I’d deal with it “when Michael comes home,” or “once I’m married,” or “once life settles down.”
Years earlier, I’d copied a line from Montaigne into one of my prison notebooks: “We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.” In plain terms, we can preach one thing, live another, and still find a way to feel right about both.
I hadn’t really understood that in prison. Sitting across from Michael now, I didn’t need anyone to unpack it. I condemned an industry I also needed. I talked about responsibility on stage and avoided it when a scared man called my phone.
He could see all of that. He didn’t name it or lecture me. He just kept asking questions until I ran out of excuses.
“Since you left Taft,” he said, “you’ve been on planes talking about ethics. You’ve been running that foundation you created in my name, and I’m grateful for that. You did an excellent job getting that grant from The California Wellness Foundation, and you’ve been sending our work into prisons and at-risk youth centers all around the state of California.
“We began to engineer that plan while we were in prison, and I give you credit for organizing it. You raised money. You helped get the courses approved and disseminated. You helped move past the bureaucracy. And you got the materials into places I could not because I remained in prison.”
He stopped there.
“Yet, when one man under indictment calls you directly, you let it go to voicemail.”
He wasn’t wrong. Those three years weren’t useless; I had been speaking, writing, building the Michael G. Santos Foundation, working hard to get that grant, and getting his content into prisons and jails. I wasn’t sitting at home doing nothing. But when someone who looked like me ten years earlier called for help, I disappeared.
“I’ve been hiding behind ‘not ready,’” I said. “Speaking is easier.”
“Of course it is,” he said. “On stage they clap and tell you how brave you are. They wait in line so you can sign their copy of Lessons From Prison. The man on the phone will press you and ask how you’re going to help him engineer a better outcome. You won’t be able to default to Hegel, Thoreau, Wilde, or Nietzsche. You’ll have to work.”
He let a few seconds pass.
“In this halfway house, like in prison,” he said, “every man has a date when he’s going to start. ‘After sentencing I’ll get serious,’ they say. ‘Once I get designated, I’ll start building.’ ‘When I get to the camp, then I’ll change.’ You know how many actually start?”
He didn’t wait for my answer.
“Almost none of them,” he said. “The date just keeps moving. Sentencing, designation, transfer, halfway house. Always one more step away. You’ve heard all of that with me, JP. You’ve seen it.”
He continued.
“You tell men they can’t blame the system for how they respond to it,” he said. “Same rule for you. You’ve had three years. You know what the work looks like: writing, teaching, adding to the assets you’ve already built. Either you’re doing it, or you’re choosing not to.
“Nothing about my agenda changes because I’m in a halfway house. Since 1987, I’ve been building the same record: education, writing, programs, policy work, classes. I’m going to keep doing that. Next week I’ll start teaching at San Francisco State.”
In those twenty-five years, he’d met a lot of men who had lived in a different world before prison. CEOs. Founders. Traders. Some of them sat in the same quiet room with him, talking about what they would do when they got out. A few of those men offered him serious opportunities when they returned home—leadership roles, equity, seven-figure potential.
Many of those same men still support our nonprofit today. He didn’t take any of the jobs.
It wasn’t because he doesn’t like money. It was because none of those offers lined up with what he decided in 1987, when he was shackled and on his way into custody: he was going to spend his life working to change the system that makes failures of so many. If an offer pulled him away from that, he walked away from it.
Watching him now, it was hard to ignore the contrast. I liked to think my values were solid, too. They weren’t. My values bent. His didn’t.
He drew a line in 1987 and stayed on it. Study. Write. Teach. Build. Work to change the system that locked him up. Inside: Life Behind Bars in America. Earning Freedom. Program after program for people in custody. Then, with his release, the same pattern: teaching at San Francisco State, policy work, new content for prisons and jails.
My line moved with whatever worked for me at the time.
He already knew about Sandra. By then we’d been together for a year. Not long after that meeting, we would get engaged. The idea of being a father wasn’t theoretical anymore. A lot of that started with my niece, Clover, born on January 22, 2009, while I was in prison. We share the same birthday.
When she was about two and a half, I took her to a movie at the Topanga Mall with my mom and my sister-in-law, Sunny. For an hour before the show, Clover and I walked the mall holding hands. People smiled at us, assumed I was her dad. I liked that feeling more than I wanted to admit. I knew I wanted to be a father one day, not just an uncle who dropped in between flights.
I couldn’t spend three weeks out of every month on planes to corporate events and still be that kind of dad. I understood that much. If I stayed on the speaking circuit at the same pace, I’d end up like the people I wrote about in Ethics in Motion—the ones who said family was “everything,” then scheduled themselves out of their own lives.
So I knew something had to give. If I was serious about Sandra, about a family, about being home, then the consulting work I kept avoiding couldn’t stay in the “later” pile forever.
In my head, I’d already sketched out the trade: scale back the travel, accept a drop in income, start again from a lower number, like I did when I came home from prison, and build a different kind of business—one grounded in work with people under indictment, not just talks about what they should do.
Sandra had a lucrative career at a Fortune 500 company. She saw the long game. “If we have to live on less for a while, we’ll live on less,” she’d said. We were trying to think a few years out, not just to the next conference.
I’d told her my plan before I flew to San Francisco. That was the real reason I came: not just to see a friend who’d come home from prison, but to find out if Michael wanted to help me build a real consulting practice while he continued his advocacy work with Stanford Law School and his new role as a professor at San Francisco State.
Across the table was a man who had turned down serious opportunities from people he’d met inside because they didn’t match the line he drew in 1987.
Mine bent when my circumstances changed.
He seemed to sense I was still trying to make this about “the industry” instead of about me.
“JP,” he said, “we are not going to ask people to do what we have not done and documented. All of it is verifiable. That verification is why I’m starting a job as a professor at San Francisco State and why I’ll continue my advocacy work. Authenticity and the depth and breadth of experience separate us.
“If you’re going to work with people under indictment, we don’t sell hope and we don’t sell magic. We show them work they can do that doesn’t exist yet in their life. Writing. Plans. Documentation. We help them build something they can put in front of cynical stakeholders and say, ‘Judge me on this, not just on the indictment.’ We’ve done that work for ourselves. If we’re not willing to keep doing it, we have no business asking anyone else to try.”
He checked the time.
“I’ve got to get back,” he said.
We stood up and shook hands.
He walked back toward the halfway house in the Tenderloin, anklet on, curfew ahead of him. I walked toward a taxi.
On the way, I kept thinking about those men who’d said, “I called him. He never called me back,” and about all the others who had never found me at all. I wasn’t thinking about the money I didn’t earn by letting those calls go. I was thinking about the people I could have helped prepare—to avoid embracing silence as a strategy, to hold their lawyer accountable, to start building a record that showed why they were different from the DOJ’s version of them.
People in trouble had reached for me. I’d gone quiet. That part of my story was over.
When I got back to Los Angeles, I sat down in front of a camera and filmed a simple video: Why I Went to Federal Prison. I stayed up most of the night teaching myself how to edit it and posted it to YouTube.
Justin Paperny
FAQ:
Prison Consultants, Ethics, and Preparing for Federal Prison
Are all federal prison consultants “dirty”?
No. Some sell fear, guarantees, and fake “fixes.” The chapter you just read is about me admitting I hid behind the “dirty consultants” label instead of doing the work to build an honest practice and change the perception of the industry.
How can I tell if a prison consultant is legitimate?
Ask for specifics. What have they written? Do they make guarantees about outcomes? Do they push you to act early, or just sell calls? Do they lie about people they say they worked with? I have a podcast coming out that identifies people who claimed to work with people our team helped.
Why did you start answering the phone?
Because I got tired of the gap between what I said on stage and what I did when someone in real trouble called. I already had a record—my book, blog, and experience. After that lunch in San Francisco, I decided to stop hiding behind “not ready” and continue building assets that could actually help defendants, beginning with my first YouTube video Why I Went to Federal Prison.
What should someone do before hiring any federal prison consultant?
Before you hire anyone, confirm they’re authentic and have actually done—and documented—what they’re asking you to do. Michael Santos gives absolutely everything away for free at PrisonProfessors.org. I lead a free weekly webinar on Tuesdays, answering questions and covering sentencing and prison issues. In the end, successful defendants build a body of work they can use to influence cynical stakeholders: judges, prosecutors, probation officers, case managers. A prison consultant can’t build that record for you.
