CDCR: $20,000 Donation

Instead, Paperny and his colleagues coax a full biography out of each client. They encourage you to write out a full life story in the form of a letter, then rewrite it with editors working through every line, then ask you to read it over and over until, eventually, you sit down for a mock interview. By the time the officer is conducting the real interview, the story he hears is a full autobiography with a beginning, a middle and an end. And somewhere in there is this speed bump in the narrative — your crime.

During these early sessions, a client will often spend time with Brad Rouse, who is the firm’s expert in written narrative. In his previous career, Rouse was a well-known theater director in New York, a Harvard graduate whose credits include the 2012 musical about Andy Warhol, “Pop!” and Billy Porter’s 2005 one-man show, “Ghetto Superstar.” His 2001 revival of the Harold Arlen musical “Bloomer Girl” earned him a segment on CBS’s “60 Minutes II.” But those aren’t his real credentials. Like everyone on Paperny’s consulting team, Rouse has served time in federal lockup. About 15 years ago, he fell heavily into drug use and ended up dealing “five, six, seven types of drugs” — until some 10 agents burst into his West Village apartment.

Often, when clients first encounter Rouse, they are in that post-plea misery marked by social paralysis, thousand-yard stares and near catatonia. It’s a delicate time. Suicide is a real risk. “I remember when I piled furniture up in front of my window, because I’m on the sixth floor,” he said. “I had such a desire to kill myself.” Many of the people he talks to have basically been law-abiding high achievers who justified crossing some line for the first time, lost everything and were staring into a near future of incarceration. “They feel like they’ve dropped through the dance floor and it’s over,” he told me. That’s where the conversation often starts — scattered details, eventually gathered into coherence. “It’s like directing a one-man show,” he said, except the audience is also one person, the judge.

Throughout the spring, Mejia was kicking drafts of the letter back and forth with Rouse and Paperny, and I read them as they became more and more refined. Mejia’s pre-sentencing interview was scheduled in June, and by early summer, a different character began to come into focus — a 15-year-old striver who rode a bus for an hour to work as a liquor-store stock boy and who once won a competition with his “King Lear” monologue, who then left home to become a reconnaissance specialist in the Army before returning to Los Angeles for college and eventually a master’s in business administration. Mejia’s story (which is about half as long as this article) has a Hallmark TV-movie quality to it. But the result is intriguing, almost like one of those standout obituaries, only the subject is still alive.

One unexpected feature of these narratives is how much of the story hints at a rehabilitation that has yet to fully manifest. More than a few felons awaiting sentencing told me that they were already paying back their victims. Many just get jobs — one former C.E.O. I spoke with was working for minimum wage — while others have started entire businesses and kept them operating straight through a lengthy prison term. Part of the reason Paperny pushes his clients to get back to work, any work, is to provide some good, upright-citizen material for the pre-sentencing report, but also to break out of the paralysis that Rouse describes. After Paperny got caught, he remembers letting whole days and weeks go by, ordering two double cheeseburgers, two fries and a shake from In-N-Out while compulsively playing online chess, until the onetime trim U.S.C. college baseball player staggered around his house topping 200 pounds.

If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, maybe you’ve heard an ad for MeUndies. The company was started by a man named Jonathan Shokrian, just before he was sentenced to a short prison term in 2014. He hired Paperny on his way in and ran the company from prison, later expanding it after meeting a bank robber named Grease who, it turns out, was a marketing savant (look it up; worth the read). So by the time Mejia was prepping for his pre-sentencing interview, he had already set up several new enterprises, one of them an online store that sells Rolexes, which can be paid for with crypto (watchhodler.com).

But how the letter handles the present tense is the most vivid transformation. All the self-exoneration has been slyly edited out. The first-person confessional tone is searing. “I write this letter feeling humiliated and heartbroken,” Mejia begins. “I know now that I crossed a red line that exists for important reasons. At first, exchanging cash for Bitcoin seemed legitimate. I see now that I was wrong.” He closes by addressing the judge directly: “It was important for me to show you who I really am. I accept full responsibility for my action and will never return to your courtroom as a criminal defendant.”

The tenor here feels pious, as though somehow the whole process has reverted to the religious origins of incarceration. Guilt, confession, penitence — this legacy vocabulary of criminal justice calls back to a time when confinement was about reform and salvation, before modern punishment turned exclusively on physical torture, the amateur savagery of shower-rape jokes, random beat-downs, the cruelty of solitary. But put all the parts together, and the buoyant takeaway for any judge reading it is that maybe his job is already done. Nothing isolates one’s crime, and all the moral dereliction that comes with it, quite like a story in which the jail time, which hasn’t even started, already seems to be receding into the past.

When the rapper Stat Quo was busted on charges of participating in a scheme to steal millions of frequent-flier miles, naturally he hired a lawyer, but still he was freaking out. “So I went on YouTube. And I was just looking up, you know, ‘What do you do when you have been named in an indictment?’” Stat Quo, legally Stanley Benton, came across the same videos Mejia found and started, in his words, “binge watching.” Every topic that was haunting him — what to do when you’re actually indicted, picking a lawyer, preparing a sentencing memorandum — each had its own video, narrated with Paperny’s trademark confidence. “OK,” Stat Quo remembers thinking, “this guy knows what he’s talking about.” So he hired him.

On the morning I caught up with Stat Quo, he had just gotten back from a Pasadena kitchen where he was cooking breakfast for the homeless three mornings a week. He started doing it years ago, long before he got in trouble, and stayed with it. “Actually, it’s important for me to see that, you know what I mean? Because you know this Hollywood stuff that I’m in — you will lose sight of reality sometimes, you know. My friends’ houses look like malls.”

His full story was pitch perfect. He’d never tangled with the law before, and he has a family. Still, he had the usual long-winded take on his own innocence (his friend had offered him discounted airline tickets, and he bought them without knowing that this friend had gotten them by hacking into other people’s accounts and stealing their miles). But when Stat Quo sat down to work on his narrative, he totally got it. He knew that anyone walking into a presentencing interview is presumed to be a hardened criminal, but a Black rapper?

“My case was out of Dallas, Texas. And let’s be honest here,” he said, “not the most progressive state for a Black man. And listen, I’m not Drake black. I’m, like, Shaka Zulu black. You know what I’m saying?” Three of the other defendants who used these stolen miles got real time. “One guy got up there trying to explain all kinds of [expletive] and making excuses. That’s the wrong thing to But he didn’t have anyone to tell him, because that’s just your natural instinct when you get in front of somebody. ‘Judge, wait a minute, man. I ain’t do nothing. Come on now. Hold on, man. You know, I’m just out here’ — slam.” That guy was sentenced to two and a half years.

“My judge saw me differently,” he said. “She’s like, ‘Based on what I’ve read about you, you shouldn’t even be in here.’” In the sentencing hearing, Judge Jane Boyle said aloud, “I wonder if he even should have been prosecuted.” Then she said, “I’d like to give you six months probation, but I can’t.” Then she turned to a court officer for clarification. “Do I have to give him,” she asked, “a year probation?” Informed that the guidelines required at least one year of probation, she imposed exactly that. “That’s because she was able to read my story,” he said.

Much of Paperny’s advice comes from his own attempts to avoid prison when the Ponzi scheme he enabled collapsed. After being nabbed, he figured he would outsmart the feds with a series of artful dodges and deceptions. In the midst of constructing this web of lies, Paperny insisted that he take a lie-detector test. “I immediately Googled for information on polygraph examinations,” Paperny writes in his self-published confessional, “Lessons From Prison.” He found a $350 online course, which taught him all the “ostensibly proven techniques” to evade the lie detector. “By tightening my sphincter when answering questions,” he wrote, “I supposedly could manipulate the machine’s findings of truth to suit my purpose.” And yet even though he “practiced so fervently” and then “squeezed my innards when appropriate,” the polygraph administrator informed him afterward that “the machine indicated with an accuracy measurement of better than 99.99 percent” that he was lying.

“Justin,” he added, “you’re going to prison.”

Once that reality set in, Paperny prepared the same way everyone does, and how his clients still do — Googling “what happens when you go to prison?” He learned a jumble of information, but then the day came. Paperny reported to the Taft federal prison camp in California, changing his street clothes for a prison outfit. He quickly discovered that there are lots of rules in prison that Quora doesn’t have the answers to, and routines you have to discover by yourself.

Soon enough, he met people and was told about people. There was a guy known as Dopey, another known as Road Runner. He heard about a mysterious figure named the Kingpin, who had served the longest and hardest time. And then there was Drew, the hustler on his floor who lured Paperny into accepting a contraband mattress, a dangerous first step because getting caught by the guards doing anything shady can easily win you an extended sentence. It was all dizzying, so Paperny decided to lie low and do what most inmates do — exercise and try to stay out of trouble.

After a few days, the Kingpin was in the TV room and introduced himself. His name was Michael Santos, and he was busted for dealing in 1987, at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs. For a first offense, at age 23, Santos was sent to federal prison for 45 years. Whatever Paperny might have been expecting — a battle-scarred lifer, a guy who could turn a Bic pen into a shiv — Santos wasn’t it. Instead, he was a self-educated man whose years of reading transformed him into something far beyond your typical jailhouse lawyer — more of a jailhouse philosopher, concerned with the metaphysics of confinement.