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)
和许多囚犯一样, B.J.有着宏大的未来计划。 他的愿望是,出狱之后 不再贩毒,坦荡做人 他正在努力将他的两项爱好融合成一项事业。 他花了一万美元 购买了一个网站 网站的主要内容是美女在奢侈跑车的上面或者里面做爱。(笑声)
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.
那时我进联邦监狱刚刚一周, 但我很快就发现那里的情形和电视上很不一样。 事实上,监狱充满了聪明、野心勃勃的人 六个月之前 作为密苏里州参议院”冉冉升起的新星“ 我和CEO们一起吃饭 进监狱之后,我感觉囚犯们的商业直觉和高管们一样敏锐。 我的狱友中95% 都是因为贩毒被捕的, 他们说起自己的过去时 会用到独特的行话 但他们谈到的经商理念 和沃顿商学院工商管理硕士的一年级课程颇为相似: 促销激励,新顾客可以免费试用 针对某一顾客群体的新产品发布, 市场拓展。
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.
他们并没有整天沉浸在对过去光辉岁月的追忆之中。 大多数情况下,他们不过是为了生存而已。 这可能比你想象的要困难很多。 和大部分人所想的不同 人民,纳税人是不支付 囚犯在监狱的生活费用的。你必须自己养活自己。 你必须付钱购买肥皂、除臭剂、 牙刷、牙膏等等(一切的生活必需品)。 有几个原因导致在监狱中生存颇为困难。 首先,所有东西的价格都比 市场价高出30%到50%, 第二,你挣得钱不多。 我为卡车卸货。这是一份全职工作, 在一个食品仓库给卡车卸货 一个月,不是一个小时,赚5.25美元。
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.
怎样才能生存呢? 我们必须做买卖,各种各样的买卖。 有合法的买卖。 以邮票为货币买东西。 有偿为狱友打扫牢房。 也有轻微违规的买卖,比如在你的牢房里开个理发店。 违规情节稍微严重一点的是:在牢房里开纹身店。 也有违规情节非常严重的买卖:从外面偷运 或者请人偷运毒品、色情制品、 手机,和监狱外的商业世界一样 监狱里存在着风险收益的平衡,所以一项生意风险越大 它所能带来的利润可能也越高。 在监狱想买一根香烟?3到5美元。 想要翻盖的、 和人脑袋差不多大的手机?300美元。 想要色情杂志? 那可能要花1000美元。
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.
你可能也发现了,灵活的头脑 在监狱生活中非常重要。 无论是用从仓库偷来的废料 烹制美味的食物 还是用指甲钳为人做发型 抑或是用挂在树上装满岩石的洗衣袋健身 囚犯们知道如何在物质条件贫乏的条件下生存 很多人也希望能利用自己 在监狱中培养锻炼出的灵活头脑 在出狱之后开餐厅、理发店 或者搞个人健身辅导。
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.
然而监狱中没有意在帮助囚犯重返社会自力更生的课程 囚犯在监狱中并没有得到真正的改造。 没有人帮助囚犯撰写商业计划, 帮助他们找到把来自直觉的商业理念 转化为合法生意的方法, 囚犯们甚至不能上网。 随后,出狱之后,很多州 没有禁止 雇主歧视有前科的求职者的法律。 所以在三分之二的囚犯出狱后 五年之后还会再犯的事实面前 我们根本无需惊讶。
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.
我对联邦政府撒谎,因此在联邦监狱服刑一年。 不过,出狱之后,我发誓 尽全力帮助那些 和我的狱友们有相似经历的人们 让他们不要再继续浪费生命。
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)
因此,我希望你们能够考虑伸出援手。 我们的最佳选择是 想办法扶持监狱中的创业精神 发掘囚犯身上隐藏的巨大潜力 因为如果我们不这么做的话,囚犯们就无法学到 能够帮助他们谋生的新技能,他们还会回到监狱当中。 而他们在监狱里所能学到的不过是新的骗术而已。 谢谢。(掌声)