Inmate Michael Santos shares prison survival strategies

Sam Whiting  -  Saturday, November 24, 2012

On a break from his desk job in Petaluma, Michael Santos climbs into his Chevy compact and drives to a quiet hillside estate, hands on the wheel at 10 and 2.

His wife, Carole, is living in a newly furnished guesthouse and is at the door as he parks and announces, "Honey, I'm home."

Michael and Carole Santos were married while he was in federal prison serving a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. He is now in a halfway house in S.F. Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle / SF

They both laugh because this is her home, not his. His home is in a halfway house in San Francisco, where he is finishing a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking. With credit for good behavior, he spent 25 years and two days, more than half his life, locked up. In that time, he published seven books on incarceration, ranging from the macro, "Inside: Life Behind Bars in America," to the micro, "Prison! My 8,344th Day," and married Carole Goodwin, whom he's known since grade school.

Santos, 48, was released to community confinement in August, but he is still federal prisoner No. 16377-004. There are institutional rules. Plus there are his rules that are strict and unbendable. "If I'm not exercising the same level of discipline that guided me through prison," he says, pondering the pull of recidivism, "I know the statistics."

So after a few minutes admiring the contents of a refrigerator, and a quick hand-holding session with his wife, he is back in the car, hands on the wheel at 10 and 2.

"The entire journey for me has been hyper-deliberate," he says, speaking softly and slowly. "It has all been in preparation for this period of time when I can emerge into society with opportunities to live as a contributing person. Nothing distracts me from what I need to do."

Santos is employed by Golden State Lumber, because its owner, Lee Nobmann, met him in Lompoc, where Nobmann was serving a 13-month sentence for tax evasion. On his way out, Nobmann promised Santos a place to live and a paying job, which has nothing to do with the business of lumber.

"My job is to continue doing what I was doing in prison," he says. "To help the people understand the American prison system, the strategies that I've used to get through it."

'Messiah' to other prisoners

"For people who are lacking in hope he has become a messiah," says Joan Petersilia, a professor at Stanford Law School and scholar in prison re-entry. "There is a dearth of hope in prison, and Michael is trying to give it to them. Through his books he's created this movement, this kind of, 'You can do it, too.' "

His most widely distributed book, "Inside," published in 2006 by St. Martin's Press, is in its seventh printing. In it, Santos describes how he got by as just about the only inmate who was not either armed with a deadly weapon at all times and/or affiliated with a gang, or paying for protection against sexual predators and sadists.

In the federal prison system, prisoners move from place to place and state to state. Santos has lived in 19 of them, and at every new stop a new prisoner is tested for weakness. Santos' first stop was at a high-security penitentiary in Atlanta that, at the time, was the most violent prison in America.

"My strategy was to minimize my contact with the prison population to avoid violence," says Santos, and it helped that he didn't snitch against his partners in crime.

Inmates are locked down for half the day, and released into the compound for the other half. So at 6 a.m., when the doors unlocked, he'd spring to the track for a 10-mile run. Then he'd go straight to work in a prison office, where he'd stay until 5 p.m., when he would go to class until 8 p.m., when he would go to the prison hospital and volunteer.

Lockdown is at 9 p.m., but Santos got two extra hours by volunteering for suicide watch in the hospital. So the cellblock was quiet at 11 p.m. when he finally returned to his cell for bed. He never ate or watched television with the prison population.

Michael and Carole Santos visit briefly at her home in Petaluma, where he hopes to move in February from a halfway house. Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle / SF

The son of a Cuban immigrant father and a mother of Spanish descent, Santos grew up in a five-bedroom house on 5 acres in Lake Forest Park, a Seattle suburb. In high school he played football and was a skier.

"We were a clean-cut athletic family," says his older sister, Julie Santos, a year ahead of Michael in school. "Nothing about our upbringing would lead us to deal drugs."

After graduation, Santos worked for his father's firm, installing street lighting, and helped grow the company, largely through bid rigging and collusion. That gave him a taste for lucre, and he began using company funds to finance cocaine distribution. He made $100,000 in a day, but he wanted millions, so he moved to Miami to work directly with suppliers.

He says he was never part of the drug culture. Then, as now, he was an enterprising businessman, living in Miami and driving a Porsche with a diamond-faced Rolex on one arm and a South American wife in tight designer clothes on the other. "I was being influenced by movies like 'Scarface' and 'Miami Vice,' " he says.

Santos was 23 when the Drug Enforcement Administration caught up with him in 1987. He was charged with operating a continuing criminal enterprise.

This was during the Reagan-era war on drugs, and examples had to be made. His partners testified against him. The jury returned a guilty verdict on all counts.

As Santos awaited sentencing, he picked up a copy of "Treasury of Philosophy" and started learning about Socrates.

"It was this commitment he had toward serving his term with dignity and honor, and I decided that's what I have to do," Santos recalls telling the judge. "I have to find a way to reconcile with society."

As soon as he got to the penitentiary, his wife divorced him. His father lost his business. His parents moved to Miami to be near him, only to have their marriage collapse.

Stuck to education goals

Amid all this turmoil and danger, Santos stuck to his goals.

"One was to educate myself," he says. "One was to find a way to contribute to society. The third one was to start building a support network of law-abiding citizens who could mentor me."

He got his bachelor's degree from Mercer University in Atlanta, majoring in human resources management. The graduation ceremony was deep inside the penitentiary, and Julie Santos recalls that her brother was the only graduate to wear a cap and gown.

Santos then got his master's, and he was working toward his doctorate when a warden put a stop to it, he says, by dropping his access to library books sent by the university.

No warden could stop him from writing, though he says some tried, through disciplinary actions and transfers.

"Part of what makes him unique is his ability to network," says Petersilia, the Stanford professor who responded to a letter that Santos sent her and ended up writing to the prison parole board on his behalf. "His reach within the prison to the outside world is unprecedented."

But he was unable to get outside to attend the funeral of his father, who died eight years ago. His mother, Geri Fierra, living in Southern California, "has been emotionally devoted to Michael the entire journey," Julie says.

Michael Santos answers e-mail in his cubicle at Golden State Lumber in Petaluma, where he is sponsored by Lee Nobmann, whom Santos met while they were both incarcerated at Lompoc. Santos continues to offer help to prisoners who e-mail him from across the country. Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle / SF

Missed reunion leads to wife

When the 20th reunion of Shorecrest High School, class of 1982, rolled around, Santos was in a low-security institution at Fort Dix, N.J., and unable to attend. But Carole Goodwin, who organized the event and had known him since fifth grade, tracked him down through his website.

Divorced, living with two kids in Lake Oswego, Ore., she had been aware of his criminal past but that didn't stop her. "I was drawn to him from the second I saw his picture," she says.

As he puts it, "She went to my website and wrote me a letter. That led to a correspondence and then a romance, and then we got married in a prison visiting room in 2003, at Fort Dix. I still had 11 years to go."