Lead Where You Are
The Pull Up Podcast | Season 1, Episode 1 — lead where you are
They start a podcast. And they say things corrections hasn't wanted to say out loud for decades.
The Pull Up Podcast launched inside Jefferson City Correctional Center — a maximum-security prison in Missouri — with a simple, disruptive premise: leadership doesn't stop at the gate. It starts there.
Season 1, Episode 1 features host Bo Cornelius (Director of Prison Ministry at Our Daily Bread Ministries), Deputy Warden Kyle Kempker, and exoneree Jonathan Irons. Three men. Three radically different vantage points. One shared conviction: the way we run prisons is costing us — and it doesn't have to.
"The Department of Corrections, Not the Department of Incarceration"
Kyle Kempker didn't come out of corrections school preaching servant leadership. He came out third-generation corrections, raised by old-school, firm-fair-and-consistent. Don't cross the line. Don't even approach it.
But somewhere along the way, that never sat right with him.
When you're sitting across from another human being — not a category, not a risk assessment, a person — "treat them all exactly the same" starts to feel like a cop-out. Kempker started treating individuals as individuals. He started building rapport instead of distance.
Then came the hard part: turning "no" into "yes" with the people above him. Staking his professional reputation on a leadership program that the conventional wisdom said couldn't work.
Four years later, not one incident tied to that program. Zero.
The risk, it turns out, wasn't empowerment. The risk was staying stuck.
What 23 Years Inside Actually Teaches You About Leadership
Jonathan Irons spent nearly 24 years incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit. He didn't press his bunk. He spent 20 hours a day reading law, drafting petitions, fighting for his own exoneration — and eventually winning it.
So why come back?
Because the rhetoric on the outside doesn't match what he lived on the inside. Because he knows, firsthand, that there are men in those facilities doing serious, dignified, transformative work that nobody's covering.
And because if you want to face your fears, you lean into them. You don't look away.
Irons' return to Jefferson City wasn't just therapy. It was a statement: there is life in here, there is humanity in here, and you're going to see it.
The Real Question No One Wants to Answer: Why Empower Leaders Behind Bars?
Because the alternative is already failing.
Bo Cornelius puts it plainly: if you spend five years pressing your bunk and then walk out the door, don't be surprised when you're back. The skills you practice in prison — good or bad — are the skills you bring home.
That includes correctional officers. Their kids don't leave their work at the facility gate either. The ripple effect travels. It always does.
The GLA (Growth & Leadership Academy), which Bo coordinates, isn't a program in the traditional sense. It's not an hour on Wednesday afternoons and a certificate at the end. It's culture change — staff and residents in the same room, co-facilitating discussions, practicing accountability, practicing leadership. Closer to the line, not farther from it.
And in the facilities where it's taken hold, wardens describe it as an additional layer of security — not a threat to it.
Prison Culture Change Doesn't Come From Policy. It Comes From Practice.
This is what the episode keeps circling back to: you cannot mandate transformation. You cannot legislate dignity. Threatening people into better behavior and then releasing them into your neighborhood and expecting peace — that's not a strategy, it's wishful thinking.
Change, as Bo says, is only inspired or encouraged.
That means somebody has to go first. Somebody has to take the relational risk. Somebody has to look past the file and see the person.
Kyle Kempker did it years ago at Algoa Correctional Center, when Bo was still incarcerated there. Now they're recording a podcast together in a max-security library.
You never know how far the ripple travels.
Lead Where You Are — Even If "Where You Are" Is a Maximum-Security Prison
The message of this first episode isn't complicated. It's just countercultural.
You don't have to wait for the system to change. You don't have to wait for the right resources, the right administration, the right moment. Find the lane. Get in it. Do something of value with where you are right now.
For incarcerated men and women, that might mean starting a mentorship relationship. For a correctional officer, it might mean being the one willing to approach the line. For an administrator, it might mean giving a program a chance before defaulting to "that's not how we do things."
The Pull Up Podcast exists to show you that it's being done. Right now. By real people in real prisons.
Not theory. Practice.
What's Next on The Pull Up Podcast
Over the course of Season 1, Bo, Kyle, and Jonathan will go deeper into the GLA program — how it started, the fights to keep it alive, and what it actually looks like inside. They'll sit down with Brandon and Cortez, a mentoring pair whose story starts in the most unexpected circumstances. They'll pull up on guys in ad-seg, in hospice ministry, in the hole — and show what leadership looks like in the hardest environments on earth.
If you know someone leading where they are — inside a facility, on a unit, in a program — reach out through Our Daily Bread Ministries. The Pull Up might come to you.
The Pull Up Podcast is produced in partnership with Our Daily Bread Ministries and Jefferson City Correctional Center, with production support from Golden Eagle Creative. If you know someone who exemplifies leadership and positive influence inside prison, reach out — we might pull up on you.
