Before this book, I wrote another one: How to Be a Correction Officer and Not Get Killed. That book was the story — the whole thing, start to finish, what happened to me and what I did in the middle of it to still be standing at the end. This book is what's left after you take that story and boil off everything except the doctrine.
Every commandment in these pages is something I lived first and taught second. I am not quoting Sun Tzu or Frederick Douglass or Viktor Frankl because I read them in a seminar and thought they sounded right. I'm quoting them because I found them after I'd already learned what they were talking about the hard way, and their words were the first time I had language for something I'd already survived.

So before you open Commandment I, understand what you're actually holding. This isn't a textbook written by someone who studied corrections. It's a doctrine written by someone who was inside it — who made calls under pressure that didn't always go right, who carried some of those nights home and had to figure out how to put them down, who is not writing to you from a podium but from the same tier you're standing on. If you want the full story of how I got here, read the other book. If you want what I extracted from it — the parts that are teachable, repeatable, and built to keep the next officer alive and intact — that's this one.