Success after Prison

In 2016, I delivered a keynote address at a judicial conference attended by over 1,000 participants, including federal judges from the Ninth Circuit, prison administrators, and representatives from the Department of Justice. During my presentation, I called on the audience to join me in advocating for meaningful reforms that would empower individuals to work toward earning their freedom.

That presentation became a turning point, leading to opportunities to take a more active role in promoting these reforms. I began collaborating with the Bureau of Prisons, the California Department of Corrections, and other law enforcement agencies. My core message was simple: if we provide a clear pathway to success after incarceration, more individuals will follow it. By incentivizing the pursuit of excellence, we can create a system where both individuals and society as a whole thrive.

That keynote speech, inadvertently, inspired me to write Success after Prison. It's a self-directed workbook, the third part in a series:

• Earning Freedom showed how leaders taught me how to think differently. By thinking differently, I could create an adjustment strategy that would keep me motivated while serving multiple decades in prison.
• Prison: My 8,344th Day shows readers how to life intentionally while going through every day. It prompts people to think about the decisions they're making, and how those decisions relate to the life they want to lead upon release.
• Success after Prison is a follow-up workbook, showing the relationship between decisions I made while in prison, and the income opportunities that opened because of those decisions. It provides readers with a reason why they should live deliberately while serving the sentence.

Everyone must choose how to navigate their sentence, and those choices directly influence the opportunities ahead. Hard work and strategic decisions can pave the way toward achieving the highest level of freedom in the shortest time possible.

This workbook shares how I built multiple income streams after my release from prison—each tied to the deliberate choices I made while serving time in facilities of every security level. I didn’t wait for government programs or waste time dwelling on the barriers of incarceration. Instead, I anticipated challenges and focused on overcoming them.

Through Success after Prison, readers will find inspiration and practical strategies to take charge of their lives as if they were the CEO of their own future. The self-directed exercises encourage focused effort and preparation. Readers are urged to create a profile on PrisonProfessorsTalent.com to document the ways they’re using their time inside to build a foundation for success after release. By investing in these efforts, individuals can develop self-advocacy skills that lead to greater liberty and opportunity, as quickly as possible.

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