Engineering Sentence Mitigation Strategies

Every week, law enforcement officers bring criminal charges against more than 100,000 people. When people stand before a judge for sentencing, they all hope that the judge will be lenient.

But as the cliché holds, hope isn't a strategy.

People that want the lowest-possible sentence should prepare by engineering mitigation strategies. To help, our team at Prison Professors created this self-directed workbook. It's part of the mission of our nonprofit:

• We teach people how to teach themselves.

My name is Michael Santos. A resource like the workbook we created would have helped me at the start of my journey. In the early 1980s, when I was 20, I began breaking the law. A government investigation followed, and then a criminal charge.

Thinking it inconceivable that a judge would sentence me to prison, I lived in complete denial-even though I knew that I was guilty of every charge against me. I went through trial and I committed perjury on the stand. A jury convicted me of every count. The conviction resulted in my serving multiple decades in prison.

While incarcerated, I learned a great deal. I earned an undergraduate degree from Mercer University, and a master's degree from Hofstra University. I published scores of books to help people understand more about the criminal justice system and the people it holds. Upon my release, in 2013, I became a professor at San Francisco State University, and I began building our team at Prison Professors.

Together, we create resources to improve outcomes for people going through the criminal justice system. Specifically, we show people how to prepare mitigation strategies that will help them at various stages of the journey. This workbook will help participants learn how to:

• Start by defining the best possible outcome.
• Create a plan that will lead to the best possible outcome.
• Show how to put priorities in place to build tools, tactics, and resources.
• Execute the plan every day.

To the extent that a person adheres to the strategies in our Straight-A Guide mitigation workbook, we're confident that the individual will advance his or her candidacy for the lowest possible sentence.

For videos and audio files that accompany this workbook, visit our Prison Professors web properties and social media channels.