Name: 【TED】Jeff Smith: Lessons in business ... from prison (Jeff Smith: Lessons in business ... from prison)
Uploaded: 2017-01-04T00:46:12.000Z
Duration: 5 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

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.

to buy a website that exclusively featured women

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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,

First, everything's marked up 30 to 50 percent

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

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

Well, you learn to hustle, all kinds of 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,

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.

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

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

Whether it was concocting delicious meals

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

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

no one to help them write a business plan,

figure out a way to translate the business concepts

they intuitively grasp into legal enterprises,

And then, when they come out, most states

don't even have a law prohibiting employers

from discriminating against people with a background.

that two out of three ex-offenders re-offend

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

that guys like the ones I was locked up with

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

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

The best thing we can do is figure out ways

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.