Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today's interview is the second half of a story that began on the podcast yesterday.

I spoke with Walt Pavlo about the MCI Worldcom accounting fraud that led to his incarceration.

Today, we're talking about prisonology, the company that Walt co-founded to help white-collar felons

navigate the Bureau of Prisons and prepare for their incarceration.

Walt, thank you for joining me again, and why don't you tell us a little bit about prisonology?

I would hope that the name itself implies what we do, right? It's everything about prison. What I found when I first looked at being incarcerated, I was incarcerated for over two years, I knew nothing about prison. I didn't know, I mean, the only thing I knew about prison was Kuhn-Luke and Shawshank Redemption, right? I didn't know anything. And I didn't know where I was going,

what it was going to be about. And what I found over the years is that a number of white-collar

defendants didn't know either. And so what we did was we created an expert testimony, consulting

firm, and an education firm to talk about Bureau of Prisons policies, which I co-founded with Jack Donson, who worked for 25 years at the Bureau of Prisons.

We have some probation officers, some counselors and stuff with the Bureau of Prisons.

And we put all this together to provide an education platform so that people would understand what federal prison is like and to help navigate the policies

once you're incarcerated. That's what prisonology is.

You started by saying you didn't know what to expect. To your knowledge, was there a service

like this when you were first headed to prison?

If there was, I would have paid for it. I would have gladly, you know, just done it because

what I was faced with was sort of guessing what it was going to be like.

And often what I find is that our preconceived notions without knowing, you know, really the facts, we tend to exaggerate and make things worse than really what they are in real life.

And that's just unhealthy for everybody.

You know, prison is bad. It's not a country club, and nor is it Shawshank Redemption, you know, for white-collar offenders. And what you need to do

is the true victims in that uncertainty are more than just the defendant. They're the family.

And, you know, when there's uncertainty with,

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