From Prison
to Purpose
Jessica Roberts turned her own experience with incarceration into a life devoted to faith, reentry, supportive housing, advocacy, and second chances.
Jessica Roberts does not talk about second chances as an abstract idea. She has lived one.
Years ago, Roberts found herself facing a ten-year prison sentence. Today, she is an author, speaker, reentry advocate, nonprofit founder, and CEO of Your Second Chance Inc., a Metro Atlanta organization working with people whose lives have been disrupted by incarceration, homelessness, and other serious challenges.
The road between those two points is the story behind her book, Triumphant! One Woman's Journey from Prison to Purpose.
But the book is only one part of what she has built.
A mistake may be part of your story, but it does not have to be the end of your story.
When the Future Changes
Roberts describes a moment familiar to many people whose lives have collided with the criminal justice system: the realization that the future you imagined may no longer exist.
In material accompanying her book, she writes about how love, personal choices, and circumstances eventually left her facing a decade in prison.
What followed was not simply a prison sentence. It was a complete redirection of her life.
Over time, Roberts began to see those experiences differently. What once looked only like loss became part of the preparation for the work she does today.
That transformation sits at the heart of Triumphant! The book is rooted in faith, accountability, redemption, perseverance, and the belief that a person's worst decision does not have to become the final definition of that person's life.
Triumphant!
One Woman's Journey from Prison to Purpose
Roberts' memoir traces a journey through incarceration, responsibility, faith, rebuilding, and the discovery of a new purpose.
Rather than treating prison as the final chapter, she tells the story of what happened when an ending became the beginning of something entirely different.
Turning Lived Experience Into Something Useful
There is an important difference between telling someone coming home from prison to "do better" and actually helping create the conditions in which doing better is possible.
A person returning home may need housing, identification, employment, transportation, healthcare, clothing, food, education, and a reliable support system, sometimes all at the same time.
Roberts has built her work around that reality.
Through Your Second Chance Inc., she provides supportive housing for men while helping both men and women connect with employment, transportation, identification services, education, healthcare, clothing, food, and other essential reentry resources.
Safe & Stable Housing
A secure place from which a person can begin rebuilding instead of trying to rebuild while still in crisis.
Practical Reentry Support
Employment, transportation, identification, education, healthcare, clothing, food, and other necessities that make independence possible.
Dignity & Accountability
Support does not mean removing responsibility. It means giving people a fair opportunity to do the work required to build a different future.
Reentry is rarely solved by fixing a single problem. A job does little good without transportation. Housing becomes unstable without income. Employment can become impossible without identification. And none of those things automatically erase the isolation, fear, damaged confidence, or stigma that can follow incarceration.
Your Second Chance describes its work as more than housing. The goal is long-term independence built through structure, community, accountability, and dignity.
She Goes Back Inside
Experience Becomes Credibility
Roberts regularly enters correctional facilities, reentry programs, conferences, and community spaces to share her story with people who may still be standing at the beginning of the road she has already traveled.
She knows what incarceration can take from a person.
She also knows what rebuilding requires when the prison gates finally open.
50 Books. One Message. Many Lives.
One recent effort placed Roberts' story directly into the hands of incarcerated women.
Supporters funded 50 copies of Triumphant! for women at Lowell Prison, carrying a message of survival, faith, growth, and possibility to people still living inside the system.
That may be where a story like hers matters most.
Leadership Beyond Her Own Organization
Roberts' reentry work did not begin yesterday.
In addition to leading Your Second Chance Inc., she serves as Director of Empowering Men and Women on the Move for Re-Entry Inc. She began serving the organization as a board member in 2011 before assuming additional leadership responsibilities.
Her work therefore combines lived experience with years of organizational service and an understanding of the practical barriers faced by people rebuilding after incarceration.
2026 Moxie Awards Finalist
Roberts' materials identify her as a 2026 finalist for the Gwinnett Chamber Moxie Awards, recognition that places her work alongside women making an impact through business, leadership, and community service.
That recognition matters for another reason. People with incarceration histories are too often discussed only in the context of what happened to them years ago.
Roberts' life asks a different question:
What happens when society allows someone to become more than the worst chapter of her life?
In Roberts' case, the answer is an author, nonprofit leader, advocate, housing provider, mentor, and community leader.
Faith and the Meaning of Purpose
Roberts does not separate her transformation from her faith.
Her story describes prison not as something she would have chosen, but as an experience she eventually came to understand as part of a larger purpose.
Faith did not erase the consequences of her choices. Instead, it became part of the process through which she accepted responsibility, rebuilt her life, and eventually began helping other people do the same.
Second chances are not about pretending the past never happened.
They are about deciding what happens next.
Reentry Is Where Policy Becomes Reality
At PrisonProject.net, we spend a great deal of time documenting what happens inside prisons and what happens when systems fail.
But justice also requires paying attention to what happens when people come home.
A person can leave prison determined to change and still fail because there is nowhere safe to sleep, no transportation to work, no identification, no employer willing to take a chance, or no one available to explain what comes next.
That is why organizations led by people with lived experience matter.
Jessica Roberts does not have to imagine those barriers. She remembers them.
And instead of allowing incarceration to become the end of her story, she used it to help build a beginning for somebody else's.
That may be the strongest definition of a second chance there is.
Author. Advocate. Reentry Leader.
Jessica Roberts is an author, speaker, reentry advocate, Founder and CEO of Your Second Chance Inc., and Director of Empowering Men and Women on the Move for Re-Entry Inc.
Her book, Triumphant! One Woman's Journey from Prison to Purpose, tells the story of incarceration, faith, accountability, redemption, perseverance, and rebuilding.