How 'The Real Housewives of New Jersey' 's Joe Giudice Is Prepping for 41 Months in Prison: 'When the Time Comes, You Just Go'

"I didn't know I was doing things wrong in the first place," said Joe Giudice on Sunday's finale of The Real Housewives of New Jersey: Teresa Checks In

Photo: Dave Kotinsky/Getty

Teresa Giudice is now less than two months away from returning home from federal prison – which means her husband, Joe, is that much closer to starting his own 41-month sentence in March.

Sunday’s Real Housewives of New Jersey: Teresa Checks In, the last in a three-part special, showed Joe continuing to prepare to go away from his family.

That meant sitting down with their four daughters and reminding them to take care of one another.

(In one such father-daughter chat, as Milania was shaving his back, she reminded him that she already yelled at anyone who was mean to her sisters at school.)

Meeting with attorney James J. Leonard Jr., Joe said he’s learned to “do things the right way,” a rare and candid acknowledgement of the Giudices’ conviction for fraud.

“I didn’t know I was doing things wrong in the first place. Basically I committed some kind of fraud with mortgages, and I know now it wasn’t the right thing to do,” he told Leonard.

He’d previously met with a restaurateur who spent seven years behind bars and told him, “From the minute you go in, you gotta worry about what you’re going to do when you get out of jail.”

“We’re in this situation, we need to slowly climb out of it and never look back,” Joe told Leonard.

That meant no time for dwelling, either.

Though he would be behind bars three times as long as his wife and face the possibility of deportation to Italy upon his release, Joe said in Sunday’s episode that the only way out was through.

“I ain’t even really thinking about myself going to jail,” he said. “When the time comes, you just go.”