WEBVTT

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B.J. was one of many fellow inmates

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who had big plans for the future.

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He had a vision. When he got out,

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he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight,

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and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision.

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He'd spent 10,000 dollars

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to buy a website that exclusively featured women

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having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter)

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It was my first week in federal prison,

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and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV.

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In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men

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whose business instincts were in many cases

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as sharp as those of the CEOs

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who had wined and dined me six months earlier

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when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate.

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Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with

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had been drug dealers on the outside,

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but when they talked about what they did,

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they talked about it in a different jargon,

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but the business concepts that they talked about

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weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton:

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promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user,

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focus-grouping new product launches,

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territorial expansion.

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But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days.

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For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive.

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It's a lot harder than you might think.

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Contrary to what most people think,

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people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life

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when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life.

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You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant,

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toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it.

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And it's hard for a couple of reasons.

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First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent

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from what you'd pay on the street,

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and second, you don't make a lot of money.

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I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job,

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unloading trucks at a food warehouse,

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for $5.25, not an hour, but per month.

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So how do you survive?

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Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles.

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There's legal hustles.

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You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency.

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You charge another inmate to clean his cell.

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There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell.

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There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell.

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And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in,

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you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography,

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cell phones, and just as in the outer world,

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there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise,

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the more profitable it can potentially be.

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You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars.

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You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open

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and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks.

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You want a dirty magazine?

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Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars.

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So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects

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of prison life is ingenuity.

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Whether it was concocting delicious meals

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from stolen scraps from the warehouse,

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sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers,

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or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags

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tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less,

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and many of them want to take this ingenuity

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that they've learned to the outside

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and start restaurants, barber shops,

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personal training businesses.

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But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that,

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no rehabilitation at all in prison,

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no one to help them write a business plan,

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figure out a way to translate the business concepts

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they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises,

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no access to the Internet, even.

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And then, when they come out, most states

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don't even have a law prohibiting employers

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from discriminating against people with a background.

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So none of us should be surprised

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that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend

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within five years.

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Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it.

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But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do

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whatever I could to make sure

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that guys like the ones I was locked up with

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didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had.

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So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way.

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The best thing we can do is figure out ways

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to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit

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and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons,

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because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills

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that's going to help them, and they'll be right back.

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All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles.

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Thank you. (Applause)