July 15, 2026
The Barriers I Faced Building Prison Professors — and How I Overcame Them
One Mission
Prison Professors is a nonprofit with a single mission: to improve outcomes for all people who go through America's criminal justice system. We incarcerate more people per capita than any other nation on the planet. In my view, people serve sentences that are far too long, and I've made it my life's work to improve outcomes and create more pathways for people to earn freedom through merit.
I know these problems from the inside. I was incarcerated for 9,500 days — twenty-six years — and I was released in August 2013. I've had many blessings that allowed me to live a life of meaning, relevance, and dignity, and now I'm home. If you want to understand why this work matters so much to me, you can read more at prisonprofessors.org, where I share our ministry, offer our concept paper, and provide full transparency.
The Resistance I Met
When I came home in 2013, there was a lot of resistance to the very concept at the heart of what I do — incentivizing the pursuit of excellence, creating incentives that inspire people to prepare for success upon release.
Mass incarceration has grown into a $100 billion-plus industry. Entire industries have been built around it, and many of them do not like the work I do. They do not want to see the changes I'm working toward. That's part of what makes this one of the great social injustices of our time. We incarcerate too many people. They serve sentences that are far too long. And some serve under harsher conditions than they should simply because they come from another country.
One of the sponsors of our work, Changpeng Zhao — CZ — served his sentence under conditions far harsher than would have been the case had he been a U.S. citizen. In my view, it was an injustice that he was in prison at all; a civil remedy would have been far more appropriate. That's the ecosystem of mass incarceration.
The Hurdles
Setting up Prison Professors meant clearing a series of very real hurdles:
No revenue stream. There is no money in this work. I had to figure out how to build it without any revenue whatsoever.
Reaching people inside. I had to help people in prison recognize that they have a duty and a responsibility to become the change they want to see.
Winning over the administrators. I needed the people in the Bureau of Prisons — some of whom were once responsible for keeping me in solitary confinement — to believe in me and allow me back inside federal prisons.
Collecting the data. To make a compelling case for reforms that incentivize excellence and let more people earn freedom, I need data.
Overcoming these took a deliberate, intentional approach. And it started with me.
Starting With Maslow
Abraham Maslow, a former Harvard professor, developed the theory we know as Maslow's hierarchy. The idea is that we have to solve basic problems first — if we don't eat, we can't start thinking about higher social concepts. So the first thing I had to solve was making sure I could eat. After twenty-six years in prison, I had to become financially independent.
The groundwork I laid while I was incarcerated gave me a high level of confidence that I could. Inside, I earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, became a published author, and built a large support system. I also married the love of my life, Carol, while I still had ten years left to serve. Carol and I have now been married more than twenty years — our twenty-third wedding anniversary is coming up in June.
That's one of the core concepts of Prison Professors. If you work through our programming, you develop that same confidence — the confidence that you can overcome the enormous complications that await after release. For many people coming out of prison, there are five possible outcomes: they'll be unemployed, underemployed, homeless, back in trouble with the law, or successful. Through our courses, I try to share the strategies that allowed me to become successful in prison, and then financially successful when I came home.
From Working for Money to Working for Impact
I overcame the financial hurdle through investing — first in real estate, then in crypto and the stock market. I built a net worth of more than $4 million, and at that point I realized something: I didn't need to work for money anymore. I needed to work for impact.
So I began investing my own money to build the Prison Professors nonprofit, and I made three promises:
I would never lie to anybody.
I would never ask anybody to do anything I hadn't done myself.
I would never ask anybody to pay Prison Professors for any of the work I do.
Everything we do is free. We don't even have a mechanism to generate revenue. And because I put my own money in, I found that other people were willing to support the mission, too.
Why "Free" Changes Everything
Because I give everything away for free, I was able to develop relationships with prison administrators. I could tell them, honestly: these are courses I'm going to offer to improve the culture of confinement and, more importantly, to end intergenerational cycles of recidivism and poverty — and it won't cost the institution anything, and it won't cost the individual anything.
That's how I began to overcome the resistance. I started getting permission to visit prisons and make live presentations to tens of thousands of people, one institution at a time. I'm frequently on airplanes, in airports, in rental cars, and in hotels, going from one prison town to another. On Monday, June 1, I'll be leaving to make presentations in a prison in Pennsylvania.
The Longer Mission
All of this is part of a longer mission: to change the laws. I need to get thousands of people involved and collect data from those going through our courses to demonstrate that people who work through Prison Professors are more likely to find employment, become successful, and avoid further problems with the law — ending the intergenerational cycles of poverty and recidivism.
Realistically, if I'm going to succeed, I'll need about $3 million a year. I'm worth maybe a little over $5 million depending on market conditions, but I can't pour all of that in — I'm 62 years old, and I have to prepare for retirement, too. This is a legacy project for me. It's how I make sense of the twenty-six years I served: by helping as many people in prison as I possibly can. I'm deeply grateful to several high-net-worth supporters who make it possible for us to give everything away for free.
Where We Are Now
Right now, we're in the community-building stage, which is why I'm so grateful to the Web3 community and to everyone at prisonprofessorstoken.com for organizing thousands of people behind our efforts. They've donated more than $500,000, which goes a long way toward the $3 million annual budget we're working to build.
Everything we're doing is methodical. I'd encourage you to visit prisonprofessors.org, engage with us, and ask questions. I'm really looking forward to the Ask Me Anything session whenever the community feels the time is right.
My name is Michael Santos, founder of Prison Professors, and I look forward to answering the next question soon. Be cool.