Shaka Senghor: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. Men and women who are incarcerated. A lot of us come from a culture where hustling was part of our survival. And what I found in my own ability to be successful in a world where they’re constantly telling you that you can’t get employment or you can’t get housing is that the skill sets I learned in the streets from hustling are transferable. So when I got out of prison, I hustled books out of the trunk of my car. I didn’t start off with being a New York Times best seller with a published book by a major publishing outlet, Convergent and Penguin Random House. I started off self-published out of the trunk of the car. And basically, I used the same model that I used when I sold crack cocaine. It’s like you buy low, sell high, and you create profit or create margins based on how you invest. Even with networking — I learned that in the street. I learned that in order to survive in the street, you need to have allies in different areas. And you need to have partnerships if you want to be successful as a drug entrepreneur, a pharmaceutical, [laughs] a street distributor. You need to figure out how to be networked in not even just different neighborhoods but in different cities. So those are transferable skills. The leadership that I developed in the street culture and in prison . . . even in an underground market in prison, I ran a lot of the hustles in there early on. Basically, I would run what we called sucker stores or black market stores, and they have an incredible margin. You buy one product from me; then you owe me two when you get your money. That skill set transfers to any entrepreneur endeavor, and a lot of men and women in that environment have that skill set, but they also have many other skill sets. There’s brilliant artists in that environment. There’s brilliant singers and athletes and creators. And I think it’s one of the spaces where, now, people are starting to realize we’ve been throwing away talent. And always think of it from this perspective, right? I was a fellow at MIT Media Lab, and I did a prison hack there one day. Basically, I gave them five design challenges based on how we survived in prison. And they were as complex as making a tattoo gun out of a tape player motor or ink pen and a guitar string, on to making a lighter out of batteries and wire. These are things that men inside prison do all the time to survive. When I did this hackathon, none of the students were able to complete it in the time that was allotted. It was about three hours. You go in any prison, and guys will complete that task in 30 seconds. When people get caught in there, they’re put in solitary. You make a tattoo gun, you’re put in solitary. Whereas if we’re really thoughtful about what are the best outcomes we can produce, how about we get this person in the engineering class and figure out how they can utilize that skill set when they get out of prison, as opposed to punishing them for figuring out how to survive? What’s the most common medium of exchange in prison? You mentioned doing these deals. What’s the central item traded? Is it dollars? Is it cigarettes?…

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