What Goes in Your Prison Professors Profile

The wrong message on a Prison Professors profile can hurt you as much as no profile at all. Michael Santos and Justin Paperny explain what to include, and how to build a plan long enough to carry someone through a multi-year sentence.

What should go in your Prison Professors profile?

Justin raised a real risk: "We tell people it's free. We give everything away. But every now and again, they may create the wrong message. A judge could read their work and they're focused on themselves, perhaps not identifying with victims. Or a case manager reads it and they're complaining about commissary. It could have the wrong message."

Michael's answer started with a warning against complaining. "It doesn't serve anybody well to complain. That's not inspiring. The system is not fair. There's nobody in the system who's coming to save you."

He explained who's actually reading the profile and what authority they hold. "When a judge sentences a person, the judge says, 'I hereby sentence you to the custody of the Attorney General.' People in your prisons, that's their boss, the Attorney General. That's the executive branch of government, and their responsibility is to carry out the orders of the judge. It is not necessarily to get you home to your family as soon as possible."

Understanding that, Michael said, changes the strategy: "I've got to architect a strategy with clear milestones that is going to begin to convince these people to see me not for the crime, but for how I responded to the crime. What have I done to demonstrate my commitment to living as a law-abiding, contributing citizen? What have I done to show that I'm worthy of a higher level of liberty?" Even small movement counts. "If you can move 1%, 2%, 7% closer, it's worth the effort."

How do you build a plan for a long federal sentence?

A wife wrote in about her husband, 14 months into a six-year sentence, describing every day as feeling the same. She asked what a realistic plan looks like, and noted how hard the calls home have become for her and their children.

Michael answered from his own marriage. He married his wife during his 15th or 16th year in prison, with 10 more years still ahead of him. "To get through those 10 years, I'd follow the same path that we teach in all of our courses. You've got to define success." He'd ask himself what would be different in five years, then reverse-engineer the steps required in the next year. He used federal holidays as markers: "New Year's Day. Martin Luther King Day. President's Day. Memorial Day. Fourth of July. I'd go through it and say, this is what I'm getting done by this day, by this day, by this day."

Applied to the six-year sentence in question, Michael reasoned through it out loud: "Let's say you'd be very successful if you got out at three. He's got 14 months in. He's coming to the top of the mountain. Now he's going to start coming down. You've got to have a plan." That plan needs shared priorities, discussed with both spouse and children.

He described what happens once the plan exists: "You start building what I call your tools, tactics and resources to advance the plan and make yourself a better candidate. Start thinking today about all the obstacles." The emotional shift matters too. "You start to empower yourself. You start to have confidence. It starts to be fun because you're building, you're documenting, you're memorializing, you're exceeding expectations. When you're doing that, you're not waiting for calendar pages to turn."

Why is it a mistake to outsource your case to your lawyer?

Justin raised a common failure point: people create an asset, words on paper, and expect it to lead automatically to a result, without the follow-through that building and writing for years actually requires.

Michael didn't treat this as complicated. "It's hard to outsource everything to somebody else to solve your problems, whether it's your defense attorney or somebody else. That's not the path to success for anyone." He pointed to the professionals in Justin's own community. "A lot of your people are professionals. They went to college. They're lawyers. They're physicians. They're business owners. But they didn't start that way." Apple, he noted, started in a garage with no money.

He drew a firm line around what's actually within someone's control. "We cannot change the fact. Justice or injustice. Maybe you're in there and you shouldn't even be in there. But it doesn't matter. You cannot change the past. A federal judge imposed a sentence. Let's deal with it. If a lawyer has judicial matters they're trying to resolve, that's on the lawyer. It has nothing to do with what you're doing."

The plan, he said, has to be built the same way any other life plan gets built. "You need to architect this plan in the same way you architected the plan for getting out of high school, getting into college, then grad school, finding a way to build your career and getting your first customer. All of that was hard. Nobody else did it for you. You had to do it. You have to do this too."

Frequently Asked Questions

What should I avoid writing in a Prison Professors profile?

Complaints, self-focus, and language that doesn't identify with victims. Michael Santos is direct that complaining isn't inspiring and doesn't serve anyone reading it.

Who actually reads a Prison Professors profile?

Case managers, unit teams, and sometimes judges, all of whom answer to the Attorney General's office, not to the goal of getting someone home faster.

How do you build a plan for a multi-year federal sentence?

Define what success looks like years out, then reverse-engineer the milestones needed each year, using fixed markers like federal holidays to track progress.