Consider the source.

Everything on this site comes from one guy with one conviction, one facility, and a business that takes money from people in the worst month of their lives.

You should know all of that before you weigh a word of it. So here it is in one place, instead of scattered across pages nobody reads in order.

I'm not a lawyer.

Never was. Nothing here is legal advice, and that sentence isn't boilerplate I paste at the bottom to cover myself. It's a description of what you're getting.

A lawyer carries a bar license, malpractice insurance, and privilege. I carry none of the three. Your email to me isn't privileged, and if I'm wrong there's no board you can complain to.

Anything with a case caption on it belongs to an attorney: motions, appeals, 2255s, sentencing arguments, anything filed anywhere. When someone asks me that stuff, the answer is get a lawyer, and I say it for free. See also what non-lawyers selling legal work are actually selling.

I'm a convicted felon, and that cuts both ways.

White-collar case, federal time, camp. I'm on supervised release right now, which is the part people forget: this isn't over for me, it's just quieter.

What that buys you is the stuff nobody who hasn't lived it can tell you. What it costs you is neutrality. I was on the receiving end of the Bureau of Prisons, and it shows in how I write about them. When you read me on the BOP, you're reading someone the BOP had.

It's also one flavor of the experience. One security level, one facility, one stretch of years. Wardens change, policy changes, and a compound can go from calm to political in a season. My time is a data point, not a survey.

And I answer to a probation officer. I don't think that changes my answers, but I'd be lying if I told you it can't. There are things a person under supervision thinks twice about publishing.

I sell something, and this whole site is marketing for it.

Consults are $1,000 for three hours, sliding scale if that number isn't realistic, a few slots a month. That's the entire business. Most people who email me get an answer and never pay anything, and that's not a loss leader I resent; it's the point.

But be honest about the machine. The free calculators, the facility guides, the annotated program statement pages: they exist partly because free work builds trust and trust sells consults. That doesn't make the math wrong. The math is the math. It does mean you're reading someone with a reason to be liked.

When I tell you that you don't need a consult, that's true. It's also good marketing. Both things at once.

Client money is the only money.

No referral fees, no affiliate links, no paid placement, no kickbacks, ever. Not from lawyers, not from other consultants, not from commissary or phone or inmate-package vendors, not from treatment programs, not from anyone running a support group.

If a person, a company, or a group gets named on this site, it's because I think it helps you. Nobody bought the mention. If that ever changes, this page changes first and it changes before the page doing the recommending.

I trash an industry I'm standing in.

Three pages on this site exist to warn you off other people's products: the one about paying non-lawyers for legal work, the one about paying to get to a specific facility, and the myths and facts of the consulting industry, which is the one that includes the eight questions you should be asking me. I believe every word of all three.

I also compete with the people they describe, and I benefit when you walk away from them and toward me. That's a conflict of interest sitting right on top of an argument I think is correct.

So don't take it on my say-so. All three pages cite the actual rules and the actual cases. That's why the citations are there. And for what it's worth: there are decent consultants out here, and I'm the last person you should ask to referee which ones.

A lot of this system is secondhand to me.

Camps I lived. Lows are close enough that the day-to-day transfers, and I'll say where it doesn't. Mediums I know through people I trust who did that time, which is watching, not living. Highs and penitentiaries are outside my lane entirely, and I say so instead of guessing. The longer version of all that is who I work best with.

The facility guides mix three sources: what I lived, what people inside or recently out have told me, and public records. Where a page is working from secondhand information, it says so. Where you can't tell, ask me and I'll tell you which it is. I'd rather say "I don't know" than fill the gap with something that sounds right.

Nobody official is behind this.

Not the Bureau of Prisons, not the Department of Justice, not the courts. I'm not former staff, I don't have a back channel, and nobody at the BOP reviews a word of this site.

Which also means I can't move a designation, get anyone into RDAP, add FSA credits, or shake loose a halfway house date. Neither can anyone who tells you they can, for any price.

The program statement annotations are the Bureau's own text with my plain-English gloss next to it. The quoted policy is theirs and it's authoritative. The translation is mine and it isn't.

This stuff goes stale.

Program statements get reissued. First Step Act guidance shifts. PATTERN scoring gets retuned. Halfway house math moves with bed space and whoever's running the region that month. I update pages when I catch a change, not the day it happens.

So for anything that decides a date or a placement, check me against the current program statement, a case manager, or your attorney. I'd rather be checked than quoted.