Can Socrates reveal the meaning of life for a prisoner? After making a series of bad decisions, including selling cocaine, Michael Santos was convicted to 45 years in prison. There he discovered a book on the prison library cart that changed his life. Now Michael is a free man, a writer, an adjunct professor and a speaker on social injustice. He has reconciled with society and teaches tens of thousands of prisoners to be great citizens. While in prison, he wrote his life story, multiple nonfiction and criminal justice textbooks, and ghost wrote the stories of many incarcerated individuals.  Listen to discover how he served his sentence with dignity, his 3 steps to surviving prison, the key moment that turned his life around, and his latest prison project.

Michael Santos encountered Socrates in prison

…and it changed his life.

Michael Santos is known as the “Prison Professor.” As a young man, he made a series of bad decisions, including selling cocaine, and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. Santos eventually decided to “reconcile with society and become a better citizen.”

After spending 26 years in the Federal Penitentiary System, Santos was released in 2013 and hired by San Francisco State University as an adjunct professor, teaching criminal justice students and others wanting to improve the outcomes of the nation’s criminal justice system.

Michael credits an anthology discovered on the prison library cart, The Treasury of Philosophy, with changing his life. It included the story of Greek philosopher, Socrates, who had been imprisoned, awaiting execution. Having been given the opportunity to live the rest of his life in exile, Socrates refused the opportunity to escape. Michael recalls Socrates’ response to those trying to help him:

“Socrates said, ‘We live in a democracy, and in a democracy, we have to take the good with the bad. I don’t agree with this law, but I have taken all of the good that society has to offer: it’s clothed me and fed me and protected me from foreign enemies, and I took all of that. So, I have the right to work to change laws I don’t agree with, but I don’t have the right to break laws… and because I broke the law, I would rather take the punishment with my dignity intact than run away like a coward.’”

Michael credits that powerful statement with changing his attitude while in prison. Asking himself if there was anything to help him serve his sentence with his dignity intact, he set out to accomplish goals for himself. Michael says he couldn’t comprehend a 45 year sentence, so he started working toward accomplishing his goals in the first ten years.

“I said, ‘in ten years, I am going to earn a university degree, I am going to publish something, and I’m going to find ten people who believe in me,” he recalls. Those goals provided him the motivation he needed to survive prison and led him into a writing career. He credits men such as Socrates, Nelson Mandela and Viktor Frankl for keeping him inspired to accomplish those goals.

Motivation For The Future

Michael hopes that his struggles, pain and success will help people find something of value that may change their own lives. His life changed because of writing his story, and essentially re-writing his future.

“It gave me an opportunity to try and create a new narrative of my life. I really wanted to demonstrate a sense of remorse for the bad decisions I had made as a young man and I wanted to show that prison maybe the context of my story but the reality is that it’s a human story. We all face struggle and adversity at some point in our life and the strategies that empowered me, as those days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months and months turned into years and years turned into decades, could be universal,