January 19, 2026: Monday

Expanding Reach of the Straight-A Guide

One of the principles that guides everything we build at Prison Professors is simple:

• People recover from a crisis when they use a clear framework for making disciplined decisions.

Over the years, our team has produced many free courses to help people develop self-directed mitigation strategies. We design these self-directed courses to meet people where they are—often at moments of fear, uncertainty, or disruption. The courses help them recalibrate. We encourage them to begin by defining success. Once they know what they’re striving to achieve, the next step is to engineer a methodical plan that will take them from where they are to where they want to go.

One of the most effective free courses we’ve created is now fully live on our site: The Straight-A Guide.

• Click to Review our Straight-A Guide

A Framework for Navigating Crisis

The Straight-A Guide gives people a structured way to begin building a profile and architecting an effective strategy while navigating the crisis of a criminal charge. It provides a clear framework for values-based, goal-oriented decision making at a time when many people feel overwhelmed or paralyzed.

Anyone can begin using the Straight-A Guide immediately. It requires no special access, no payment, and no prior experience. What it requires is initiative.

This framework helped me prepare for success while climbing through 26 years in federal prison. It gave me a way to measure progress, stay accountable, and continue moving forward even when outcomes were uncertain. That same structure now serves people who are just beginning their journey through the system.

Adapting the Course for New Audiences

This morning, I had a conversation with Steve, our IT engineer. I told him about plans I have to adapt the Straight-A Guide for specific audiences facing different kinds of crises.

For example, the framework could be highly effective for people who need to recalibrate after being charged with a DUI. In those cases, the issue may not involve long-term incarceration, but it still involves accountability, behavior change, reflection, and documented effort.

Another potential audience includes universities and school campuses. Administrators face real challenges when addressing harm caused by hazing incidents, hate crimes, or other conduct that disrupts community trust. A structured, values-based framework could help institutions move beyond punishment alone and toward measurable learning, accountability, and growth.

The same principles apply across contexts. When we give people a clear structure to reflect, document, and act, outcomes improve.

Building a Scalable Learning System

As we look ahead, we see an opportunity to develop a low-cost Learning Management System built around the Straight-A Guide framework—one that measures outcomes and supports institutions while remaining aligned with our nonprofit mission.

Any revenue generated through institutional use would go directly toward sustaining Prison Professors as a nonprofit and expanding our ability to provide free resources to people who want to overcome a crisis or begin building a better life.

Our commitment remains unchanged:

• We should not deny access to preparation because of a person’s inability to pay.

Crisis does not define a person. If a person responds well after a crisis, those lessons may prove valuable in other areas of life–as they have for me.

We will continue refining, adapting, and expanding this framework so that more people can benefit from the Straight-A Guide