On behalf of our entire team, I welcome you to the community of Prison Professors. I’m Michael Santos.
We offer self-directed resources at no cost or at low cost to help justice-impacted people. Whether a person is at the start of an entanglement with the criminal justice system, locked in a prison cell, or striving to recalibrate after a journey through the prison, that person can:
- Define success as the best possible outcome,
- Create a plan that will lead to success,
- Put priorities in place,
- Develop tools, tactics, and resources to succeed, and
- Execute the plan daily.
The resources we offer will help.
Our team understands how a criminal charge can complicate a person’s life. Besides the initial proceedings, a criminal charge can have lasting consequences. The decisions a person makes at every stage in the journey can influence:
- liberty,
- financial stability,
- family relationships,
- future earning potential,
- access to capital
- ability to travel,
- employment
The more a person learns about the system, the more empowered a person will feel:
- to interact with counsel, and
- to navigate the complications ahead.
Our team at Prison Professors creates free and low-cost self-directed resources to help people learn how to advocate for themselves at every stage in the journey.
Every person on our team has gone through the entire gamut of the system. We’ve gone through government investigations, pre-trial proceedings, sentencing hearings, imprisonment, supervised release, and the collateral consequences that follow for people with a criminal record.
Most importantly, we’ve emerged successfully. We’re transparent, and we never ask anyone to do or say anything that we have not done.
What does it mean to be a “justice-impacted” person?
We would argue that our nation’s commitment to mass incarceration has made us all “justice-impacted” people. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation. We gather information from the Prison Policy Initiative, which shows the pervasive problems:
- In 2022, we imprisoned 1.9 million people.
- Nineteen million people live with a record of a felony conviction.
- Law-enforcement databases profile 77-million people in America with a criminal record of some kind.
- One hundred thirteen million people have a family member who has been to jail or prison.
Clearly, our justice system impacts far more people than individuals facing charges. Mass incarceration has a lasting impact on innocent children, spouses, employers, and entire communities—with disenfranchised people living on the margins suffering collateral consequences at disproportionately higher rates than the broader population.
By spending hundreds of billions to maintain our judicial system, we lose resources that we could deploy to support educational systems, healthcare, and other infrastructure projects that improve our way of life.
For these reasons, we offer information and guidance that all justice-impacted people can use to help themselves, including free and low-cost resources to assist:
- Before sentencing
- how the process unfolds,
- how to understand the implications of a plea,
- how to understand sentencing systems,
- architecting effective mitigation strategies,
- After sentencing
- how to prepare before prison,
- how to take advantage of sentencing reform laws,
- how to build an “extraordinary and compelling” record in prison,
- how to work toward advancing a release date,
- Advocacy News
- how to overcome collateral consequences,
- how to self-advocate from prison,
- how to prepare for a successful career after prison,
- how to use the time inside to restore a reputation.
Every justice-impacted person should work hard to get the best outcome at every stage. The new content we publish regularly helps people learn from anywhere, at no cost. People who want to help themselves can get that information from our website, app, podcast, or other social media channels.
Our Amazon store fulfills orders for low-cost books and courses that we make available.
Live Interactive Webinars:
Those who want our responses to specific questions may participate in our weekly, interactive webinars:
