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About Us:  From Cell 2 Soul Personal Growth and Federal Prison Consulting LLC

Book Cover of From Cell 2 Soul's CEO Scott Brooks' biography about his time spent in federal prison

Our Story

Incarceration As A Reinvention Of The Self

My name is Scott Brooks Jr.  I'm the Founder & CEO of From Cell 2 Soul Prison Consultants. I was a senior at UNCW when I was convicted of a marijuana conspiracy.  The abrupt change from a college kid to a federal inmate with a 322-month sentence required me to develop a unique skill set to fit in and survive.  I started From Cell 2 Soul Consulting to help white-collar criminals and other first-timers adjust to the scary experience.

 

During the late nineties, while attending college in eastern North Carolina, I became involved in a large-scale drug operation that spanned several states within the Eastern Seaboard. My boss's connections in California supplied us with large quantities of commercially-farmed, low-grade marijuana. In addition to that, we set up several illegal grow houses in North Carolina, producing some of the first strains of White Widow in the country. Our group also acquired a contract with a lab manufacturing ecstasy (MDMA) in Miami.

Depending on other connects’ supplies, I sold the above, along with psilocybin mushrooms, various pharmaceuticals, and a number of other hallucinogens while attending school. Our large group ended a six-year run after several members were indicted following a DEA sting on the Miami lab. After the arrest, a few guys still free, including myself, were recruited to collect outstanding drug debts. The plan was to use the money to hire good lawyers for the men in jail.

 

We collected the initial funds without incident, but when a friendly attempt to collect on the final debtor ended with guns drawn, we decided to recruit extra help to return to the residence and get paid. One man who went with us had been brought in by the boss a week earlier. This was my first time meeting him, but quickly realized he was a hot head that I would have preferred leaving behind.  To make matters worse, the night of the collection attempt, he had been drinking heavily.

 

Once we arrived at our destination, we kicked in the front door and secured the house’s occupants in the living room. My partner and I  left the hot head to guard the room while we cleared the rest of the house. As soon as we reached the back bedrooms, I heard a loud pop. For some inexplicable reason, the hot head decided to shoot the other man in the buttocks while he lay on the carpet.  In a terrible turn of luck, the bullet ricocheted off the victim’s hip bone, went through his heart, and killed him.

 

Everyone was arrested a couple of weeks later.  At the time, I was a senior attending my final semester at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, I was indicted under a marijuana and ecstasy conspiracy along with a 924 (C) gun charge. I turned down the US Attorney’s thirty-year plea offer and went to trial.  The jury acquitted me of the ecstasy charges and found me guilty to a lesser extent on the other two.  My Pre-Sentence Report (PSR) advised the court to give me two consecutive (back-to-back) five-year sentences for the weed and firearm charge, but the judge granted the prosecution’s request for a 5K2.2 upward departure on the gun count. They handed down a total 322-month sentence.  I was recently released (2023) after serving close to twenty-three years in federal prison.

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For more details on my background, my first book talks about my past in greater detail:  A Soul Call from Prison

It is a spiritual memoir that talks about my drug addiction during college, along with the long list of other stupid decisions I made, leading me to spend half my life in federal prison. The book’s second half takes spiritual turn as it explains how meditation and several other practices helped me process the incredible guilt, anger, self-hatred, and regrets; and ultimately, helped me cope with all that time behind the razor wire.

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