NATIONWIDE — Today, Worth Rises Founder and Executive Director Bianca Tylek demystifies the prison industry and the opportunity we have to dismantle it in a new TED Talk: The multibillion-dollar US prison industry — and how to dismantle it. Tylek illustrates the expansive size of the prison industry and the remarkable harm it causes communities decimated by mass incarceration as well as broader society, but she also provides hope that change is possible. She uses prison telecom and the prison phone justice movement to illustrate the problem she recognized and the solution she devised when starting Worth Rises.
“Many people are not familiar with the prison industry and few know the extent of its greed. This invisibility has protected the industry and its exploitative practices. That’s why it’s so important that we expose it, the private and public actors involved, and their predatory behavior. At Worth Rises, we are working to bring the industry into the limelight, make it part of mainstream conversation, encourage public outrage, and inspire people to action. This talk gets to the heart of that work by putting the prison industry and the harm it causes on one of the world's most viewed and admired educational stages: TED. There’s nowhere these prison profiteers can hide now,” said Bianca Tylek.
One of the nation’s foremost experts on the prison industry, Tylek joined 20 other emerging leaders and early stage innovators from around the world as a TED Fellow in 2020. After the 2020 TED Conference was transformed into a virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, TED decided to studio-record the TED Fellow talks for the first time. The production transformed Tylek’s 6-minute talk into a captivating short film exposing the prison industry. Tylek pulls the veil off the guarded prison industry and offers an open invitation to viewers to join the fight to dismantle it.
Tylek remarks on the success of Worth Rises’ campaigns in her TED Talk, “We fought the consolidation of two major market players in front of the Federal Communications Commission and won. We blocked the $150 million investment by a public pension with a private equity firm that owned a prison telecom corporation. We removed one of the largest investors in the field from a major museum board. In just two years, we toxified the industry and threatened its business model, causing an investor selloff. More importantly, that means millions of families connected and billions of dollars protected from the predatory hands of prison profiteers. It means fewer dollars invested in promoting human caging and control. And it means at least one mother won’t have to sit in the dark to talk to her son again.”