Jacqueline Polverari: From Imprisonment to Purposeful Advocacy

When a successful title company founder finds herself facing federal prison time, the question isn’t just about surviving the experience – it’s about what comes after, when the real work of rebuilding begins.

I’ve been looking forward to sharing Jacqueline Polverari’s story with you. Here’s someone who built a multimillion-dollar title company from scratch, only to watch it all crumble when poor decisions and a toxic business partnership led her straight into the federal criminal justice system. But what happened next – that’s where her real story begins.

From Business Success to Federal Prison

Jacqueline grew up as the youngest of three in a middle-class Connecticut family, always trying to fill the big shoes left by her talented older brothers. She found her own path through academics and eventually the business world, working her way from assistant at Smith Barney to building what would become a major title company.

The success came fast, maybe too fast. By the mid-2000s, she was running TV commercials and employing family members. But success, as Jacqueline learned, can be dangerous when it’s built on proving yourself to others rather than building something sustainable.

“My success was really just making everybody proud,” she told me. “I had a lot of father issues… I wanted to be number one, and I wanted to be seen… I just wanted to prove myself and just kept pushing and pushing.”

The turning point came when she brought in an attorney as a partner, giving away 48% of her company. When the mortgage crisis hit in 2008 and cash flow problems mounted, Jacqueline made a decision that would change everything – she took out a mortgage on her house to fund payroll, signing her husband’s name without his knowledge.

When the FBI Comes Knocking

The investigation lasted five years. From the initial FBI raid in 2009 to her guilty plea in 2012 to finally surrendering to federal prison in 2015 – that’s a long time to live in limbo, not knowing what comes next.

What struck me most about Jacqueline’s approach was her immediate honesty when confronted. No games, no denials. She knew what she’d done and took responsibility from day one. That decision would serve her well, but it couldn’t protect her from the reality that was coming.

She received a year and a day at Danbury Federal Prison Camp. The hardest part wasn’t the sentence – it was hearing her husband cry in the courtroom. “All I heard in the entire courtroom was my husband crying. I never heard him cry before and my kids weren’t crying because they also never heard him cry before.”

The Real Prison: Life After Release

Here’s something most people don’t understand about federal prison – the camp itself wasn’t the hardest part for Jacqueline. It was everything that came after. The halfway house with its stricter rules than prison. The home confinement. The three years of probation. The constant threat that you could be jerked back into custody at any moment.

“I tell people today, prison’s easy. It’s after all the re-entry,” she explained. “That’s when the hard stuff started.”

But this is where Jacqueline’s story takes a powerful turn. Instead of trying to go back to her old life, she recognized that prison had shown her something important about herself and the system. The day she left Danbury, she made a promise to the women she was leaving behind – women she called “good people” that she felt she was abandoning on the battlefield.

That promise led to Evolution Reentry Services, her criminal justice advocacy work, and her focus on supporting families affected by incarceration. She discovered that families need support groups too – something that became crystal clear when she sat in her first family meeting with her own daughters and realized the trauma she’d never acknowledged putting them through.

“I cried because I thought, this is what I did to my family and I never saw until that meeting,” she shared. “I learned more from those families then I could possibly… These beautiful people who are supporting their loved ones are frozen in time, afraid to have a good time while their loved one is incarcerated.”

Today, Jacqueline collaborates with organizations across the country, was inducted into Connecticut’s Hall of Change, and hosts the Criminal Justice Cafe podcast. She’s living proof that your nightmare can become the foundation for something meaningful – if you’re willing to own your story completely and use it to help others.