How to Mentally and Physically Survive a Five Year Prison Sentence

The journey ahead seems impossible right now. That feeling is real and it is shared by almost everyone who has ever faced a significant sentence. But here is something worth knowing: not knowing is actually worse than being there. Once you arrive and begin to understand the environment, the human spirit finds a way to adapt and prevail.

The most important decision you will make in the first weeks is who you are going to be inside. Everything that follows flows from that decision.

Keep to yourself and stay out of other people's business. This is not about being antisocial. It is about protecting your time, your record, and your future. The people who do their time cleanly are almost always the ones who made this choice early and stuck to it.

Use the time to improve yourself in every way available to you. Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. A book is the only escape available to you that costs nothing and carries no consequences. Take every college course or vocational program offered. Exercise consistently. Your body and your mind are the only things entirely within your control and treating both with discipline will carry you through the days when nothing else does.

Five years is a long time measured in days and a short time measured in the person you can become. Inmates who leave better than they arrived made a decision early that their sentence would work for them rather than against them.

Do the time. Don't let the time do you.