An app that helps incarcerated people stay connected to their families | Marcus Bullock
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2019
⏱️ 14 minutes
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Summary
Over his eight-year prison sentence, Marcus Bullock was sustained by his mother's love -- and by the daily letters and photos she sent of life on the outside. Years later, as an entrepreneur, Bullock asked himself: How can I make it easier for all families to stay connected during incarceration? Enter FlikShop: an app he developed that lets families send quick postcards to loved ones in prison and help keep open a critical line of support.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This TED Talk features entrepreneur and justice reform advocate Marcus Bullock, recorded live at |
| 0:07.4 | Ted Salon Trailblazers 2019. |
| 0:12.2 | One evening, after watching the nightly news with my then five-year-old son, he asked me a |
| 0:18.9 | question I thought I would have a ton of time to answer. |
| 0:23.0 | I thought the complicated questions typically came at eight or nine years old. But my son |
| 0:29.1 | looked me in the eyes while I was tucking him in, and with a very straight face, he asked me, |
| 0:35.9 | Daddy, why did you go to jail? |
| 0:40.9 | My wife and I often thought about this moment. |
| 0:43.9 | We knew this question was coming, and we wanted to handle it well. |
| 0:49.1 | But that night, I had a question to answer. |
| 0:52.3 | So I decided to tell my son how I ended up going to prison |
| 0:57.0 | when I was just a 15-year-old kid. |
| 1:00.9 | A friend of mine and I, |
| 1:03.2 | we approached a man sleeping in his car, |
| 1:06.0 | pulled out a gun, |
| 1:07.8 | demanded the keys to his car, and sped off. |
| 1:11.9 | That decision landed me in front of a judge |
| 1:14.6 | with my mom and my sister standing just a few feet behind me |
| 1:17.8 | as they listened to me your sentence |
| 1:20.2 | to eight years in adult maximum security prisons. |
| 1:26.2 | This was one of the hardest times of my life. |
| 1:30.6 | In fact, for the first two years, I battled depression by living in denial about my prison |
... |
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