Seventeen years. Twenty-five facilities. One long walk home.

Most stories about prison show you the gate. They skip the part that actually changes a man.

The Walk Home is that part. It starts in a Chicago house where fear moved in before the street got its turn. It runs through gang life, cartel ties, addiction, an arrest in Mexico, solitary, and federal silence. It ends in the ordinary work of rebuilding.

JC does not write like a man who only suffered. He writes like a man who suffered and then made choices that caused other people to suffer too. Both are on the page.

JC Almanza is the founder of the Wrong to Strong Foundation, a reentry coach and speaker. He spent more than seventeen years in over twenty-five correctional facilities across the United States and Mexico. Today he walks back through those gates by choice.

The Walk Home is the story he owed himself for a long time.