Teach Prisoners Marketing Skills
Opportunity:
Prisoners have limited job opportunities post-incarceration, despite having lots of downtime to learn a new skill. Also, email is becoming an oversaturated, impersonalized way to connect with customers. Prisoners could be contracted to write handwritten notes to drive customer retention.
What This Is:
- A way to improve literacy amongst the incarcerated while learning basic copy writing, marketing and customer service skills
- A new and cost effective marketing / customer service channel for companies to tap into
- A social good program to increase company morale
What This Isn’t:
- Exploitation of labor - prisoners would earn money for each note they write, which they can send home to their families
- Free - prisoners would be given the max pay per unit the system allows for
- A substitution for higher level marketing tasks - this would be copy and paste type simple
Thesis (Read More.)
Prison systems are terrible at training people for reentry to society
- Can learn to cut hair, but can’t become a licensed barber
- Can fight fires, but can’t become a firefighter
- Can make license plates…but only prisons make license plates
- Takeaway: The skills pay the bills, so give people skills if you don’t want them coming back
Handwritten notes are a lost art…except in prison
- The only place it’s still cool to have a pen pal is in jail
- Takeaway: The texting game is not strong at Riker’s Island, but cursive is all the rage
