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)
B.J. je bio jedan od mnogih kolega zatvorenika koji je imao velike planove za budućnost. Imao je viziju. Kada izađe vani, namjeravao je ostaviti drogu zauvijek i nastaviti s normalnim životom, zapravo je radio na tome da spoji svoje dvije strasti u jednu viziju. Potrošio je 10.000 dolara kako bi kupio web stranicu koja ekskluzivno promovira žene koje se seksaju na ili u luksuznim sportskim automobilima.
It was my first week in federal prison,
(Smijeh)
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.
Bio je to moj prvi tjedan u federalnom zatvoru, i brzo sam shvatio kako uopće nije slično onome što vidimo na TV-u. Zapravo, vrvio je pametnim, ambicioznim muškaracima čiji je poslovni osjećaj u mnogim slučajevima jednako oštar onom direktora koji su me salijetali šest mjeseci ranije dok sam bio zvijezda u usponu u senatu Missourija. E sad, 95 posto dečkiju s kojima sam bio zatvoren bili su izvan zatvora, dileri ali kad su pričali o tome što su radili, pričali bi o tome u potpuno drugačijem žargonu, ali poslovni koncepti o kojima su pričali nisu se bitno razlikovali od onih o kojima biste učili na prvoj godini MBA studija u Whartonu: promotivni poticaji, nikad ne naplaćuješ novom korisniku, fokusirani plasman novih proizvoda, teritorijalna ekspanzija.
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.
Međutim, nisu trošili previše vremena na ponovno proživljavanje trenutaka slave. Uglavnom su jednostvano pokušavali preživjeti. To je bitno teže nego što biste pomislili. Suprotno onome što većina ljudi misli, ljudi ne plaćaju, porezni obveznici ne plaćaju za tvoj život dok si u zatvoru. Ti moraš platiti za svoj život. Moraš platiti svoj sapun, svoj dezodorans, zubnu četkicu, zubnu pastu, sve to. A to je teško iz nekoliko razloga. Kao prvo, svemu je cijena 30-50 posto viša od onoga što bi platio na ulici, a kao drugo, ti ne zarađuješ puno novca. Ja sam istovarao kamione. To je bio moj posao, istovaranje kamiona u skladištu za hranu, za 5,25 dolara, ne po satu, nego za cijeli mjesec.
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.
Dakle, kako možeš preživjeti? Naučiš kako muljati, svim oblicima muljaža. Postoje legalne muljaže. Plaćaš sve u markicama. To je valuta. Naplaćuješ čiščenje ćelije drugim zatvorenicima. Postoje ilegalne muljaže, kao što je vođenje brijačnice u svojoj ćeliji. Postoje prilično ilegalne muljaže, kao što je izrada tetovaža u svojoj ćeliji. Postoje jako ilegalne muljaže, poput švercanja, švercaju se droga, pornografija, mobiteli, i kao i u vanjskom svijetu, postoji balans između rizika i nagrade, dakle što je rizičniji poduhvat, potencijalno je i profitabilniji. Želite li cigarete u zatvoru? Tri do pet dolara. Želite li staromodni preklopni mobitel koji je otprilike velik kao vaša glava? 300 dolara. Želite li porno magazin? To se može kretati do 1.000 dolara.
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.
Kao što možete zaključiti, jedan od ključnih aspekata zatvorskog života je snalažljivost. Bez obzira jesu li to ukusno napravljena jela od ukradenih ostataka iz skladišta, oblikovanje kose sa škaricama za nokte na nogama, ili izrada utega od šljunka u vrećama za prljavu odjeću povezanim granom drveta, zatvorenici nauče kako napraviti nešto iz ničega, i mnogi od njih žele prenijeti tu snalažljivost koju su naučili, izvan zatvora i započeti otvarati restorane, brijačnice, poslove osobnih trenera.
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.
Ali nema obuke, ničega što bi ih pripremilo za to, nema nikakve rehabilitacije u zatvorima, nikoga tko bi im pomogao napisati poslovni plan, shvate način na koji bi prenijeli poslovni koncept koji intuitivno znaju u legalno poduzeće, čak niti pristupa Internetu. I onda kada izađu, većina država čak nema niti zakon koji bi zabranio poslodavcima diskriminaciju nad ljudima s takvom poviješću. Dakle nitko od nas ne bi trebao biti iznenađen što dva od tri bivša prijestupnika ponovno počine zločin unutar pet godina.
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.
Gledajte, lagao sam federalnim vlastima. Izgubio sam godinu dana života zbog toga. Ali kada sam izašao, zakleo sam se da ću napraviti sve što mogu kako bih bio siguran da dečki poput onih s kojima sam bio zatvoren ne moraju izgubiti više vremena od onoga koje su već izgubili.
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)
Nadam se kako ćete razmisliti da mi na neki način pomognete. Nabolja stvar koju možemo učiniti jest da osmislimo načine kako njegovati poduzetnički duh i ogroman neiskorišteni potencijal u našim zatvorima, jer ako mi to ne učinimo, oni neće naučiti nove vještine koje bi im pomogle i vratiti će se u zatvor. I sve što će ponovo naučiti u zatvoru su nove muljaže. Hvala vam. (Pljesak)