B.J. var en af de mange medfanger der havde store planer for fremtiden. Han havde en vision. Når han kom ud, ville han forlade stofferne for bestandig og han ville leve stoffri, og han arbejdede faktisk med at sammenlægge sine to visioner til et. Han havde brugt 10.000 dollars til at købe en hjemmeside der udelukkende viste kvinder der havde sex oven på eller inden i en luksus sportsvogn. (Latter)
B.J. was one of many fellow inmates who had big plans for the future. He had a vision. When he got out, he was going to leave the dope game for good and fly straight, and he was actually working on merging his two passions into one vision. He'd spent 10,000 dollars to buy a website that exclusively featured women having sex on top of or inside of luxury sports cars. (Laughter)
Det var min første uge i statsfængslet, og jeg lærte hurtigt at det ikke var det man så på TV. Faktisk, myldrede det med smarte, ambitiøse mænd hvis sans for forretning i mange tilfælde var lige så skarpe som dem hos de administrerende direktører der havde haft mig med ude og spise og drikke seks måneder tidligere, da jeg var en stigende stjerne i senatet i Missouri. Nu havde 95 procent af fyrene jeg var låst inde med været narkohandlere uden for murene, men da de talte om hvad de gjorde, talte de om det i en anden jargon, men virksomhedskoncepterne som de talte om var ikke ulig dem man lærte om i det første års undervisning af en MBA ved Wharton: slagsfremmende incitamenter, man afkræver aldrig betaling fra en førstegangs kunde, fokusgrupper til lanceringen af nye produkter, territorial udvidelse.
It was my first week in federal prison, and I was learning quickly that it wasn't what you see on TV. In fact, it was teeming with smart, ambitious men whose business instincts were in many cases as sharp as those of the CEOs who had wined and dined me six months earlier when I was a rising star in the Missouri Senate. Now, 95 percent of the guys that I was locked up with had been drug dealers on the outside, but when they talked about what they did, they talked about it in a different jargon, but the business concepts that they talked about weren't unlike those that you'd learn in a first year MBA class at Wharton: promotional incentives, you never charge a first-time user, focus-grouping new product launches, territorial expansion.
Men de brugte ikke meget tid på at genopleve hæder dagene. For det meste, prøvede alle bare at overleve. Det er meget sværere end man skulle tro. I modsætning til hvad de fleste folk tror, betaler folk ikke, skatteborgere betaler ikke for ens liv når man er i fængsel. Man skal betale for sit eget liv. Man skal betale for sæbe, ens deodorant, tandbørste, tandpasta, det hele. Og det er svært af flere årsager. For det første, er prisen sat 30 til 50 procent op i forhold til det man betaler udenfor, og for det andet, tjener man ikke mange penge. Jeg lossede lastbiler. Det var mit fuldtids job, at losse lastbiler ved et lager, for 5,25 dollars, ikke i timen, men om måneden.
But they didn't spend a lot of time reliving the glory days. For the most part, everyone was just trying to survive. It's a lot harder than you might think. Contrary to what most people think, people don't pay, taxpayers don't pay, for your life when you're in prison. You've got to pay for your own life. You've got to pay for your soap, your deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, all of it. And it's hard for a couple of reasons. First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent from what you'd pay on the street, and second, you don't make a lot of money. I unloaded trucks. That was my full-time job, unloading trucks at a food warehouse, for $5.25, not an hour, but per month.
Så hvordan overlever man? Jamen, man lærer at svindle, alle mulige slags svindel. Der er lovlig svindel. Man betaler alt i frimærker. Det er den gangbare møntenhed. Man afkræver en anden indsat for at rengøre hans celle. Der er ulovlig svindel, som at man har en frisørsalon i ens celle. Der er rigelig med ulovlig svindel: Man har en tatoveringsforretning i ens celle. Og der er meget ulovlig svindel, hvor man smugler, man får smuglet ind, narko, porno, mobiltelefoner, og ligesom i verden udenfor, er der en risiko-præmie afvejning, så jo mere risikabel et foretagende er, jo mere profitabel er det potentielt. Vil man have en cigaret i fængslet? Tre til fem dollars. Vil man have en gammeldags mobiltelefon man kan klappe op og er på størrelse med ens hoved? Tre hundrede dask. Vil man have frække blade? Jamen, det kan være så meget som 1.000 dollars.
So how do you survive? Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of hustles. There's legal hustles. You pay everything in stamps. Those are the currency. You charge another inmate to clean his cell. There's sort of illegal hustles, like you run a barbershop out of your cell. There's pretty illegal hustles: You run a tattoo parlor out of your own cell. And there's very illegal hustles, which you smuggle in, you get smuggled in, drugs, pornography, cell phones, and just as in the outer world, there's a risk-reward tradeoff, so the riskier the enterprise, the more profitable it can potentially be. You want a cigarette in prison? Three to five dollars. You want an old-fashioned cell phone that you flip open and is about as big as your head? Three hundred bucks. You want a dirty magazine? Well, it can be as much as 1,000 dollars.
Så I kan nok se, at en af de afgørende sider ved livet i fængslet er opfindsomhed. Om det var at udpønse lækre måltider fra stjålne madrester fra varehuset, at forme folks hår med neglesakse, eller konstruere vægte fra sten i vasketøjsposer bundet til tre lemmer, fanger lærer hvordan man klarer sig med mindre, og mange af dem vil tage denne opfindsomhed som de har lært til verden udenfor og starte restauranter, frisører, personlig træning virksomheder.
So as you can probably tell, one of the defining aspects of prison life is ingenuity. Whether it was concocting delicious meals from stolen scraps from the warehouse, sculpting people's hair with toenail clippers, or constructing weights from boulders in laundry bags tied on to tree limbs, prisoners learn how to make do with less, and many of them want to take this ingenuity that they've learned to the outside and start restaurants, barber shops, personal training businesses.
Men der er ingen træning, intet der forbereder dem på det, ingen rehabilitation overhovedet i fængslet, intet til at hjælpe dem med at skrive en forretningsplan, finde på en måde til at oversætte forretningskoncepterne de intuitivt forstår til legale foretagender, selv ingen adgang til internettet. Og så, når de kommer ud, har de fleste stater ikke engang en lov der forbyder arbejdsgivere fra at diskriminere mod folk der har en baggrund. Så ingen af os bør være overraskede over at to ud af tre tidligere lovovertrædere begår en forseelse igen inden for fem år.
But there's no training, nothing to prepare them for that, no rehabilitation at all in prison, no one to help them write a business plan, figure out a way to translate the business concepts they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises, no access to the Internet, even. And then, when they come out, most states don't even have a law prohibiting employers from discriminating against people with a background. So none of us should be surprised that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend within five years.
Hør engang, jeg løj for banksystemet. Jeg tabte et år af mit liv på grund af det. Men da jeg kom ud, sværgede jeg at jeg ville gøre hvad jeg kunne for at sørge for at fyre som dem jeg var låst inde med ikke skulle spilde mere af deres liv end de allerede havde gjort.
Look, I lied to the Feds. I lost a year of my life from it. But when I came out, I vowed that I was going to do whatever I could to make sure that guys like the ones I was locked up with didn't have to waste any more of their life than they already had.
Så jeg håber at I vil tænke på at hjælpe dem på en eller anden måde. Det bedste vi kan gøre er at finde på måder til at pleje den foretagsomme ånd og det enorme uudnyttede potentiale i vores fængsler, fordi hvis vi ikke gør det, kommer de ikke til at lære nogen nye færdigheder der kommer til at hjælpe dem, og så kommer de lige tilbage. Det eneste de lærer indenfor er nye svindelnumre. Tak. (Bifald)
So I hope that you'll think about helping in some way. The best thing we can do is figure out ways to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit and the tremendous untapped potential in our prisons, because if we don't, they're not going to learn any new skills that's going to help them, and they'll be right back. All they'll learn on the inside is new hustles. Thank you. (Applause)