How I Moved Myself From a Maximum-Security Penitentiary to the Right Prison — On Purpose

You can't check out of a prison the way you check out of a hotel. There's no front desk, no "I don't like this room," no polite request that lands you somewhere better. When you ask a prison system to move you, you're pulling the handle on a slot machine. You might land anywhere in the country, in any institution, under any warden, next to any set of problems.

I learned that during my fifth or sixth year of a 45-year sentence, right around the time I watched a man get killed.

The moment the clock started

I was confined in a high-security penitentiary in Atlanta. It was violent. Gangs were spreading. And after that killing, something in me settled into a decision: it was time to move.

But wanting out and getting out somewhere better are two very different things. If I simply filed a transfer request, the system could send me to a prison that would quietly strangle everything I was working toward. At that time, I was enrolled in a graduate program. I wanted a master's degree. And I had to be honest with myself about what mattered most.

It wasn't being close to my family. It wasn't even landing in a calmer, less volatile prison — I felt confident I could navigate almost any yard. What I could not control was the system itself. Administrators could throw up blockades that would stop me from receiving university books, from typing my papers, from finishing my degree. So the thing I protected above all else was the environment most likely to let me finish what I'd started.

That's why the first lesson I now teach through Prison Professors is this: you have to define success before you can pursue it. If you don't name the target, every door looks the same — and the system will happily pick one for you.

The vision I was actually chasing

My definition of success was specific. I wanted to walk out of prison unscathed. I wanted to be able to put on a suit and tie, step into any room, and have no one know I'd served a single day unless I chose to tell them.

There's an irony there I've made peace with. My entire career since coming home has been built on the fact that I served 26 years and walked out successful. The whole point of saying it out loud is the message underneath it: no matter how bad your past decisions were, at any moment you can start making decisions that put you on a different trajectory. That truth is available to anyone, at any time. I wanted to become living proof of it — and I wanted to build the body of work that would carry me there, even from inside a dangerous prison.

The friend who asked the obvious question

Everything I built rested on a three-pronged strategy I'd been living for years: get an education, contribute to society in measurable ways, and build a strong support network.

One of the strongest people in that network was a man named Dr. R. Bruce McPherson.

I met Bruce through the most improbable chain imaginable. Someone I knew inside mentioned he had a friend who was a university professor — and the idea struck me as almost absurd in its beauty. Me, a man serving 45 years, becoming genuine friends with a professor? Imagine that. How wonderful would that be?

So I started writing Bruce unsolicited letters. I told him about the bad decisions that brought me to prison, the lessons I'd absorbed from Frederick Douglass, from Mandela, from so many others, and how those lessons had rewired the way I thought. I invited him to write back. He did. That correspondence became a friendship, and the friendship became visits — three or four times a year, flying from Chicago to Atlanta on his own dime, spending his own time away from his family, buying the plane tickets and hotels and rental cars, just to sit with me.

So after the murder, when I told Bruce it was time to transfer, he asked the natural question: "Don't you just ask?"

"Bruce," I said, "if I just ask, I have no idea where they'll send me. They could put me somewhere that kills the master's degree. That would be a disaster."

"Then how do you propose we move forward?"

I told him I wanted to be strategic. I needed to learn which wardens and administrators actually supported educational programs — and then find a way to get to one of them.

The three-tactic Trojan horse

The strategy came down to a sequence of tactics, each one unlocking the next.

Tactic one: persuade Bruce to co-author a serious article with me and get it published in a peer-reviewed journal. Not a letter, not an op-ed — a credentialed, published piece of scholarship.

Tactic two: send that published article to the administrators in Washington, D.C. who oversaw the federal prison system. The article was proof that something real and productive was happening inside these walls.

Tactic three — the Trojan horse — use that credibility to get Bruce permission to visit other federal prisons. Not just to shake hands with administrators, but to sit down with the people serving time there and ask the only question that mattered: what level of support can someone actually expect here for their education?

That elaborate, patient sequence is what moved me. I went from a high-security penitentiary in Atlanta to a medium-security prison in northwestern Pennsylvania called McKean — a place with an administration that would let me type my papers, receive books from the university, work toward my master's, and become a published author. (I wrote about all of this in detail; it's in chapter four of Earning Freedom.)

What "the right prison" made possible

The warden at McKean, Dennis Luther, became so supportive of my work that he did something almost unheard of. He allowed John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton, to bring a group of Princeton students into a federal prison on a Saturday, to sit with me in the warden's own conference room, so I could share my thinking on how to improve outcomes across America's prison system.

Sit with that image for a moment. A man serving decades, with the support of administrators, working alongside a professor from one of the world's leading universities, laying out ideas for reform — inside the very system those reforms were meant to change. That is what choosing the right environment made possible. None of it happens in the prison I left.

What I actually learned

People ask what I took away from navigating all of that. Here's the honest version.

Plenty of people like the system exactly as it is. They aren't motivated to change it, and some of them don't like what I do. That's fine. The work is to keep pushing forward anyway — to keep proving that a person can define success, build the network to reach it, and engineer their own trajectory even from the hardest place imaginable.

I'm grateful to the community that keeps this mission alive, including the Web3 BNB community that launched prisonprofessorstoken.com and funds the free educational materials we send to people in prisons all across America.

I'll stay true to the mission. And to everyone who's part of this community — thank you for being in it.

Adapted from remarks by Michael Santos, founder of Prison Professors. Generated by AI.