About Dr. Prison
What Dr. Prison Is
Dr. Prison is a two-site project helping families navigate the United States federal prison system. DrPrison.com is the free side — a weekly newsletter, long-form guides, and first-person stories, open to anyone. DrPrison.org is the services side — consultation, filings support, and one-on-one coaching for clients who want hands-on help.
Why We Exist
Federal prison is a system most Americans only encounter once — and they encounter it in the worst week of their life. The BOP publishes policy manuals, but those manuals are written for corrections staff, not for mothers trying to figure out if their son will get out in time for his daughter's first birthday. The cost of bad information is measured in months of extra incarceration, in lost housing, in families that fall apart during the sentence.
We close that information gap. We read the policy so you don't have to. We translate it. We test it against what's actually happening inside. And we publish the result, free, in language a tenth-grader can follow.
Who We Are
Dr. Patrick Fisher is a clinical psychologist who has spent two decades treating incarcerated people and their families. His clinical practice sits at the intersection of trauma, substance use, and the realities of long sentences. Patrick reviews every piece of clinical or medical content on this site.
Ken Gaughan spent 35 months incarcerated in the Bureau of Prisons, 12 months on home confinement, and 55 months on pre-sentence supervision — 102 months total inside the federal system. Ken reviews every piece of operational content, because he's lived through what we're describing.
We work with a small rotating group of contributors: formerly-incarcerated writers, practicing federal defenders, and family members who've done the work.
How This Site Relates To DrPrison.org
DrPrison.com is free. No login, no paywall, no newsletter sign-up required to read anything. If you want personalized help — reviewing a PSR line-by-line, calculating FSA credits for a specific person, drafting a BP-9 — that's what DrPrison.org is for. The two sites share tokens, brand, and a data layer where appropriate, but editorially we keep them separate on purpose: the free side shouldn't quietly become a sales funnel.
