Thane Grauel

The (Westchester County, N.Y.) Journal News

You worked on Wall Street but that six-figure salary wasn't enough.

You got greedy, caught and convicted.

Prison's next, fear and anxiety grow daily. Your wife, kids and parents are along for the ride.

It might be time for a prison coach – a consultant who's survived behind bars and can teach you to do the same. The first thing he might tell you: Don't watch "Oz."

Myths and misinformation abound in Hollywood and television depictions of prison, says Bill Doane, who spent 26 years in New York prisons after fatally stabbing a man Brooklyn.

Yes, there is violence, there are stabbings, Doane says. But he maintains homosexual rape is not common in New York facilities and inmates don't fall into the Hollywood stereotypes — musclebound black men pumping iron, Latinos with pencil-thin mustaches, white supremacists with tattoos and shaved heads.

Doane was released a year ago, and since has been counseling vets in Suffolk County, where he lives. He also works with Prison Preparation Consultation Services. Most of their clients are of the white-collar variety.

The prison coaching business was started by Joey Petrucelli of Scarsdale, N.Y., who served 19 years for a fatal shooting outside a night club in 1993. The two met in the Comstock Correctional Facility upstate, said to be one of the toughest in the country.

Petrucelli and Doane meet not just with the future inmate, but with the relatives as well.

"The family is doing time along with them," Petrucelli says. "We tell them what's going to happen, what they're going to go through ... It's a vast and complicated system."

They get late-night calls, sometimes from relative who watched an episode of "Oz" and is terrified or from someone who can't figure why their brother was abruptly transferred to another institution.

Teaching prisoners how to survive goes beyond showing them how to carry themselves.

Doane, who earned two bachelor's degrees while inside, says that prisoners need to get GEDs and take other classes to qualify for certain jobs. The education can make the difference between earning 55 cents a day and earning $1.55 a day.

Educated prisoners, like those who come to Petrucelli and Doane, can tutor the less-educated.

"A mentor is an asset," Doane says. "You have value. It gives you a form of protection."

"For me there was nothing better to see some young guy with a homemade shank in his pocket, looking for trouble, then you see him two years later and he's reading Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,'" Doane said

By the time Petrucelli got out he had taken most of the classes needed for an associate's degree from Bard College, and had training in air conditioning/refrigeration repair. He quickly landed a job in the real world, then had the idea of putting his knowledge of the inside to use. Petrucelli also works in construction now.

"Education is the key to the prison system," Petrucelli says. Without education, "they're going to resort to crime again. It's a cycle. Education is key."

Doane says many taxpayers think prisoners shouldn't have access to training and education as part of their punishment. He disagrees.

"The punishment is not the bars, the walls," he says. "It's the isolation from the world. The alienation from your family, and the real truth that you've thrown your life in the sewer."