When the Rev. Jeff Grant speaks at conferences like the Correctional Ministry Summit and the Greenwich Leadership Forum, he speaks as a pastor who spiritually guides and supports people who have lost their way—namely white–collar criminals, along with and their often-neglected families.

“The darkest days of a person’s life can still lead to hope and redemption,” said Grant, co-founder and minister-director of the Progressive Prison Project/Innocent Spouse & Children Project, the first ministry of its kind in the country. It was founded in Greenwich and remains an outreach ministry of Christ Church (among other churches), though Grant now lives in Weston.

Grant speaks from personal experience, having spent 14 months in a federal prison for a financially motivated crime stemming from bad decisions made under the influence of prescription drugs.

“There’s a transformation that goes on in every single person I’ve ever met that has gone through incarceration issues,” Grant said. “Whether they recognize it or not, at some point it becomes clear to them that they are no longer the people that they had been. That’s generally a good thing. These are life-altering experiences.”

Grant was a corporate and real estate attorney practicing in a high-flying law firm in Westchester County. His fall from grace started innocently enough: He suffered a ruptured achilles tendon while playing sports in 1992, and was put on the prescription painkiller Demerol.

“In the course of the rehabilitating that injury, I got hooked on the prescription narcotics,” Grant said. “Doctors were more than happy to continue to prescribe them to me, and I took them for about 10 years. Over the course of that time, I was abusing the painkillers and my judgment became more and more impaired.”