You might wonder what in the world gives me the knowledge or wisdom to write a survival guide to prison. Well, I’ll tell you—absolutely nothing. I’ve never been to prison. But, like every man, I’ve certainly wondered how I would survive if circumstances ever put me there.

That morbid curiosity sent me on a journey to understand the politics and dangers of prison. When researching for Mayor of Kingstown, I learned very quickly it’s way better to avoid going to prison than to figure out how to survive one.

We filmed Mayor of Kingstown in Toronto and a town north called Kingston—where numerous prisons are located. One of them had been taken out of commission, and we filmed all our prison scenes in that location, even using former inmates as extras in the show. In one particular scene, which was the “initiation” of a new inmate—a child killer, no less—we had to pause filming and bring in paramedics: One of the extras was so traumatized by the reenactment, he had a panic attack that was severe enough to send him to the hospital. Two other former inmates asked to leave immediately, SAG card be damned.

That’s how bad prison can be: Former inmates don’t even want to pretend they are back . . .

But still, none of this tells you why the hell I joined up with Tom to write a book about prison. Not to worry, I’m getting there . . .

I want to be blunt: Tom Nelson’s story is not “I got mixed up with the wrong crowd and stumbled into some trouble once and got caught.” He did it. And then got drunk or high and thought about doing it some more, then did it some more. Then beat the shit out of somebody, and stole some more shit, and got high, and sold more drugs, then beat the shit out of somebody else, then got caught and went to prison, then got out and went right back to selling drugs and stealing shit and beating the hell out of anyone who had an issue with it or him. Then went back to prison. You starting to see the pattern here?

Tom was a fucking criminal.

But in his last and longest stint in California’s theme park of horrors, he decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. He got clean. He discovered physical fitness, and made it his new addiction. Tom became a model inmate and decided that when he got out, he would seek a career in building bodies rather than wrecking them. Once released, he moved to LA and got a job as a trainer in a local gym in Hollywood.

This is where our paths first crossed . . .

I was scraping by in Hollywood, eking out a living as a guest star actor on pretty much every shitty procedural show on television. I played numerous versions of Tom—I was the killer on CSI: NY, I was the killer on NYPD Blue, I was not the killer on CSI, but I sure looked like the killer until the end of the episode. I played a reformed killer on The Guardian, a soon-tobe killer on Walker, Texas Ranger. You get the picture . . .

But guest star work doesn’t pay so well, and sometimes working actors have a pretty negligible social life, contrary to popular belief. Not cool enough to get in the fancy clubs and no money if we did. So, pretty much all any of us did was audition and work out.

I worked out at a gym nicknamed Buns on Beverly because the treadmills were along a glass wall beside Beverly Boulevard, facing away from the street. Which meant the asses of all the models were on display for anyone to sit and ponder during rush hour traffic.

It was here I met Tom. His physique was different from most of the actors who frequented the place and lived on a diet of quinoa and sashimi. Tom was jacked. The kind of jacked you get by doing a thousand push-ups a day. And he looked tough, not like all these Ken dolls heading straight to the spray tanner after their workout. Tom looked like he would knock you the fuck out if you tested him. I liked Tom instantly. We would spot each other, trade workout routines, and bullshit with each other between sets. He became a personal trainer at the gym and trained my wife for years.

Somewhere around 2008, he opened his own gym. I instantly switched from Buns on Beverly to Muscle Mechanics. And I watched it grow over the years into the largest independent private-training gym in Los Angeles.

I finally landed a regular gig as—of all things—a police deputy on a show about a biker gang. After two years of that bullshit, I had “deputied” all the desire to act out of my system. I decided to write my own stories. I moved with my wife and son to Wyoming and wrote screenplays.

Tom and I would keep in touch, and when work forced me into LA, I would work out at Muscle Mechanics, which had quadrupled in size. Tom had bought a place north of town, had a horse he rode through the mountains of Santa Ynez, and was living the life he had likely always dreamed about. And he achieved it with no shortcuts. Hard work and dedication. He had done the statistically impossible—he had rehabilitated himself and become a contributing member of society.

Then Covid hit. And California shut down . . .

One can argue that California took the shutdown a wee bit too far (ya think?), but the state attempted to compensate for the nuclear bomb they dropped on their economy by sending out assistance checks to those forced out of work by the shutdown. I do not know the criteria California used to dole out those checks, though I know out-of-work actors (who were out of work before the shutdown) who received state assistance for years, but gyms were not on the list of businesses eligible for assistance, or at least Tom’s gym wasn’t.

I checked in with Tom in the summer of 2020, and he filled me in on just how fucked he was. I bought a bunch of his gym equipment, which we trucked up to Montana for the cast and crew of Yellowstone to use while we were quarantined away on set.

My life got busier than hell and Tom and I lost touch. Oh, we’d check in every six months or so, but he was a single dad raising a young daughter and I was trying to kill myself making five television series in the same year.

Then one day, I got a message from Tom. He was in a bad way. A real bad way . . . Health issues had him pondering his life, which appeared to be coming to an end very soon. And he was flat-ass dead broke. Like “how do I pay my rent next month” broke. Like “I guess it’s just my kid eating today” broke. He was fucked. A convicted felon with a four-year-old doesn’t exactly leap off the page of a job application. And even if it did, childcare would have cost more than whatever shit job he could muster would pay.

He asked for help. First things first, I got his ass on a plane and ran him through a barrage of doctors to figure his health out. They got to the bottom of his issues, and a road to physical recovery was under way.

Now the money problem . . .

I have a 100 percent failure rate of loaning money to friends and them remaining friends. It never works. And it doesn’t solve the long-term problem for the friend anyway. Just prolongs the issue they must ultimately overcome. I told Tom this, and said, whatever we come up with, it has to solve the problem—not just kick the can down the road a few months. That doesn’t help you and it damn sure doesn’t help your daughter.

Then I remembered a screenplay Tom had written about his life. It read like a nineties action movie (likely the last time Tom had actually seen a movie), which is not what Hollywood was buying at the time. But it was good. And funny. And moreover, it was insightful. Dude could write . . .

Just like every guy in America has discussed with his buddy just how much money it would take for him to get in the ring with Mike Tyson (it’s always in the millions), every guy has also pondered with his buddy: “Bro, what the fuck would you do if you got sent to prison.” “Flee to Canada” is a common response. (Side note: Committing a felony is not the same as dodging the draft during Vietnam. Canadians, friendly though they are, do not want American felons running around the streets of Vancouver, and happily return them to the good ole US of A.) “I’d kill myself ” is another. Then it hit me: What the world needs is a travel guide to the penitentiary. How to survive, navigate the very, very, very sharky waters—where danger lurks—and what mistakes to avoid like the plague.

Identifying the problem is half the solution. And Tom was the solution to the existential question of the American male—how to not die in prison.

I walked Tom through it. I told him it would require a lot of work. A lot of digging up the past. Remembering things he’d rather not remember. But Tom has proved he is nothing if not a survivor. One could argue that he is a master of it. He can teach you to be a survivor, too.

My job in this quest for survival is to constantly, tirelessly, and with every possible metaphor I can muster scare, shock, jolt, and convince your dumb ass to (1) take a fucking Uber; (2) pay your fucking taxes; (3) I know he stole your parking space, but don’t punch the fucking guy; (4) I know you hate Elon, but don’t Molotov cocktail your neighbor’s new Tesla; and (5) you know the fucking rules, so take a breath and think of the consequences, because in prison the consequences are force-fed to you every single fucking day.

So . . .

You got caught cheating on your taxes or cheating your business partner or your boss or the bank, or you robbed a bank. Maybe you had a few too many at the family reunion and plowed through some sweet old couple in the crosswalk—my point is, you fucked up. Then you fucked up again when you didn’t listen to the officer who read you your rights and informed you that you don’t have to speak, or you hired your cousin Larry as your attorney. Your trial date is on the Friday after your judge’s first appearance in divorce court. You see the pattern here—shit rolls downhill and you are at the base of the mountain. Can’t talk your way out of it, buy your way out of it, or beg your way out of it: You are going to prison . . .

Your first thought will be about the time. Eighteen months. Three years. Eight years . . . What happens to the life you built and knew—will it be waiting for you when you return? What about your wife and kids? (Or husband and kids, though the rate of married women being incarcerated is so low, it doesn’t really warrant a book. Men, it seems, fuck up at an exponential rate compared to women.) But it won’t be long before your old life is a fuzzy memory. How long, you ask? Oh, about ninety seconds after the judge reads your sentence. From that moment on, you will live acutely in the present.

You are going to live with anywhere between six hundred and two thousand other men who have proved to society they need a big ole timeout. You will be living under a set of rules made up by men who have demonstrated to society that they can’t follow rules so completely that society kicked them out. Or kicked them in, as it were . . .

There is no book of these rules, nobody will tell them to you, but when you break one—boy, will you know it . . .

These rules will be beaten into you, extorted into you, harassed into you, and if you don’t play your cards right, they just might be boinked into you. Yikes . . . You can take all the jujitsu and boxing and Krav Maga you want, lift all the weights you want, knock out some teeth, get a scary tattoo— none of it will protect you. You are headed to a place where a very long line of men are tougher, meaner, and scarier. Best way to survive? Be something you have chosen not to be up to this point—be smart.

There’s lots to ponder on your state-sponsored time-out, like how to turn your life around once you get out of prison. But before that, you must learn to negotiate the personalities and politics of prison. Gotta learn how to read the room, cuz the room is sure learning how to read you.

This is a guidebook for the accidental felon. The “if I get out of this place I’m-never-ever-ever-doing-anything-like-that-ever-again.” And you mean it. If this is your second or third stint in the slammer, you know all this shit. You could’ve written your own book, but you didn’t cuz you’re a fucking criminal who never paid attention in school and thought a GED is for pussies. So be it.

For the newbie, the fish, the fresh meat—this book is how you survive, how you navigate the sharky waters. How to mind your own business without becoming a target, when to shut up, when to walk away, and when to stand up for yourself. This is how you don’t die. And if you follow the advice of this book (though the fact that you bought this book demonstrates you ain’t the best at taking advice), you just might make it . . .

RULE NUMBER ONE (this one should go without saying): Read this book before you go to prison. This book in prison = new boyfriend by dinner.

Now, let’s get to work. We’ve got a lot to cover. And you don’t have much time . . .