I grew up separated by two countries and two languages — treated as an American in Mexico, and as a Mexican in the U.S. Never quite belonging fully to either one. But my family, and my mother specifically, have always been the constant of my entire life. However tired she was, however much she had going on, she always found the time to remind me and my siblings how loved we were. That has never changed — not before any of this, not once during it, and never after.

I built a good life. I built a family. I built a business from almost nothing — produce, import and export, trucking and logistics — and made it into something real. I’ve always been extremely proud of that. I still am. My goal was always to leave a legacy for my children — something they could come back to and be proud their father built.

But as time has gone by, I’ve understood that legacy has changed. The legacy I’m trying to leave for my kids now isn’t about buildings, assets, or businesses. It’s a legacy of helping people — of an organization that pays it forward, that can have a real impact on people’s lives, change families, and hopefully advocate for real change in the way our system works.

Writing this years into my incarceration, I’ve realized my crime wasn’t running my business. The reality is that my crime was letting myself ignore what was going on around me. I knew more than I ever admitted to myself, and I kept going anyway. My biggest mistake — my biggest crime — was looking the other way. A lot of people who knew me said the obvious thing afterward: “We always knew. He had something else going on.” Maybe it was obvious. Or maybe I was just the last one willing to see it.

But one thing I know for certain now: every single thing that’s happened is a God-ordained opportunity. Every challenge is God’s way of giving us a chance to do something differently — an opportunity to transform, to grow, to truly value what matters. Everyone who’s incarcerated says they value freedom more than ever. In reality, it’s so much smaller than that. It’s the sun hitting your face. A hug from one of your kids. Saying goodnight to your mother. A real conversation instead of fifteen minutes on a wall phone. That’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned, and it’s what I’m sharing with you now.

By the time September 2023 came around, everything in my life outside the business had already come apart. I was drinking every day and calling it social. My business owed money I didn’t have easy ways to repay. I was being pressured by the wrong kind of people — people I’d once trusted — and in many ways, I wasn’t prepared to handle any of it. I was trying to hold everything together: the businesses, my personal problems, my family problems, the drinking, the fear. All of it had become its own kind of prison, long before the handcuffs were ever actually put on.

The first jail cell I ever sat in, in Kankakee, had no windows — gray walls, gray floors, a dorm with sixty people who had nothing to do and nowhere to be but exactly where they already were.

The government’s initial position was for more time than I could reasonably expect to live. Luckily for me, I found purpose in researching my case. I had to find ways to stay busy, and I found a small room with a case-discovery computer, where I started by reading through my own case — page by page, thousands of pages. I came to realize that nobody else was going to do that work for me. I was the biggest advocate I had. No attorney, regardless of how expensive or how court-appointed, was ever going to understand my case better than I did.

I began building a timeline that turned into the beginning of the very story you are reading today. For probably the first time in my life, I was actually writing the story of my own life — and exactly where it had led me to.

Somewhere in all that writing, I noticed something everyone around me kept saying — a promise that was never actually intended to be kept: “When I get to prison, I’ll start over. When I get to prison, I’ll change.” That sentence is what changed everything. That day, I made a decision instead: my situation wasn’t going to define my future. Not this cell. Not this case. Not the county-issued clothes on my back. Nothing was going to stop me from reaching my goals and succeeding. And more importantly, nothing was going to stop me from giving back to every single person around me in a state of desperation. I knew that if I was going to be successful, I was going to come back and give back to every one of them.

I want to be clear about something: When I Get To Prison was not founded after my release, with resources, with time to plan, with any certainty about how my case would even end. It was founded completely from inside that cell — before I knew my sentence, before I had a single dollar to put behind it, before anyone had a reason to believe it would matter.

As I began changing my mindset, I decided that I was never going to be strong mentally if I wasn’t strong physically too. I’d played football most of my life and never once, in all those years, run a full mile without stopping. One morning, I laced up my shoes and started to run — in that little gym the size of a garage, I completed the first full mile of my life. Those first fifteen minutes turned into an hour. That hour turned into the ten or twelve miles I run every single morning now, a few years running. You start to understand that your body is one thing in that building you still have control over — your mind, your health, all of it — something you’re able to transform, every part of it.

That mindset didn’t stay in the gym. I started taking educational courses and programming. I earned certificate after certificate until I lost count. I enrolled in Thomas Edison State University. And somewhere through all of it, I met a fellow inmate named Georgie, who became the closest thing I have to a brother — one of my biggest supports on the inside. Not someone who just agreed with me, but someone who always challenged me. He was the first person to read everything I wrote and tell me, straight to my face, when it wasn’t good enough. That’s real support from the inside — the kind that pushes you harder.

The few people who make up my family read through everything I did, empowered every part of it, and embraced every single idea I proposed. Each one of them, in their own way, helped turn this dream into the organization it is today — whether it was reading what I wrote, replying to what I told them, or sending me books, letters, emails, pictures, videos. Every one of them helped me build what this was already becoming.

Over my years incarcerated, I’ve helped write more than a hundred allocution letters, personal narratives, and release plans for other people — never once asking for anything in return. But by teaching mitigation to others, I learned far more than I ever could have on my own.

One of the things I’m proudest of was becoming a tutor for the GED program at MCC Chicago — but more importantly, starting the pre-GED program inside my own housing unit. I can say today that more than seventy-five people went on to earn their GED through the door that my program helped open.

One of the stories that’s had the biggest impact on me is the story of Chris. He’d spent nearly his entire adult life incarcerated — free in the outside world for maybe six months total since he was sixteen years old. I remember the first time he asked me to help him write a letter to his judge, more than a year before his sentencing, laying out everything he intended to do: his GED, his CDL, a real trade, a real life. For one reason or another, his sentencing date got pushed back a full year, and he made sure to use every single one of those days to reach as many of those goals as he could. When he finally stood in front of that judge again, his second letter opened like this:

“Your Honor, I wrote to you over a year ago telling you about everything I wanted to do. Now I’m writing to tell you about everything I have been able to do since.”

He received a sentence below his federal guidelines — not because of what I did or taught him, but because of what he decided to do for himself. The letter I helped him write was only the documentation. Every argument inside it was his. Every single word was something he took the initiative to do.

To this day, I ask everyone I meet inside the same question: if the warden walked in right now and told you the doors were open — that you were free to leave — what would you do? Almost nobody has a real answer. Not because people are bad, but because nobody has ever asked most of them to have a plan for the moment they’ve been waiting for. People constantly think about what happens next year. They rarely think about what happens today. I think that question is a whole problem contained in a single sentence — and it’s the center of what this organization is built around: not just a plan for the day you’re released, but a life plan. A plan that sets you up for the future. A plan that lets you navigate whatever comes next.

May 15, 2026. We sat in that courtroom awaiting sentencing — my family, the government, my attorneys. The government was asking for the high end of my guideline range. My attorney argued for something closer to time served instead. Though my case had real arguments about culpability, the judge recognized that what I had done during my three years of pretrial incarceration was unprecedented — that in all his years on the bench, he had never seen anyone do what I had done. He asked my attorney to read the full record into the court: every program, every certificate, every person I’d worked with, every character letter, the book I’d published, the organization I’d built — all of it, because he wanted it on the record. I believe, in that moment, he understood exactly what this organization was going to become.

My guideline range was 121 to 151 months. I was sentenced to 72 months — six years, a downward variance below even that.

I didn’t get that sentence because I beat the system. I didn’t find a legal loophole, and I didn’t testify against anyone. I got it because, starting in the first week sitting in a county jail cell, I did the one thing that was always mine to do: I built a record. I changed my mindset. I documented my journey, one day at a time. I decided to write down who I was becoming instead of who I had been.

In transit between facilities, I met other men carrying cases nearly identical to mine — men who never built that record, never understood what mitigation was, never changed their mindset, never took responsibility the way the system actually asks you to. Some of them are serving decades, and they’re still not out. I’m not trying to compare myself to anyone. I simply had to survive long enough in the system to see it firsthand, sitting next to me on that bus ride.

People constantly ask me what I’m actually doing this for. No one’s going to read it. The judge doesn’t care. The prosecutor definitely doesn’t. So what’s the point?

I don’t believe a prison is only a building. There are so many types of prisons — a prison of the mind, a prison of poverty, a prison of addiction, a prison built entirely out of never once being told you’re allowed to become someone different than who you were. A lot of people are born without ever knowing they have options. All of these are prisons I’m trying to help people get out of.

Through my time incarcerated, I’ve come to understand that our greatest strength isn’t that we never fall down. It’s that we have the ability to get back up, every single time, and keep going.

I want anyone reading this — sitting on day one of something they didn’t choose, in a place or a situation they don’t want to be in — to understand one thing clearly: rehabilitation begins on day one. Not the day you’re sentenced. Not the day things get better. Not the day it stops raining. Not the day the sun comes out. Not the day you’re happy. Not the day you’re not tired. Not the day you’re released.

Today. Whatever day this happens to be for you — today, you have the opportunity to change your life. This is what I’ve learned. This is what I’m sharing. This is what this organization is all about.

This isn’t my story. It’s one story. I’m just the first one who wrote it down.