(dramatic music)
- When I was 15 years old, my best friend and I,
we committed a carjacking in a shopping mall parking lot
and that crime led us in front of a judge
that would give me eight years
in adult maximum security prisons.
You know, when I was in prison,
it was 18 bucks for a 15 minute phone call.
My mom had to accept that call
and that rate charge to speak to her only son.
(dramatic music)
- My mom told me, Marcus, I see you slipping
into this hopelessness and I want you to know
that there's definitely life after prison.
And she made a promise to me to
either write me a letter or send me a picture every day
for the remaining six years of my prison sentence.
- Family connection is so important.
I wanted Marcus to know that he had a family
he had friends on the outside.
- [Marcus] My mom's letters and pictures
will completely change my life.
There are millions of people
that are living in these prison cells
who desire so desperately to be able to be connected
to someone or something.
So we built a mobile app that helps connect family members
to their incarcerated loved ones.
Our users are able to take a picture, add some quick text,
and for 99 cents
we print that picture and text on a real tangible postcard
and we ship it to any person, anywhere in the country.
- Flikshop is reaching out to other partners
to see how we can collaborate together.
It raises the consciousness of people
within the organizations to understand
how important social justice is.
- Most people will see just a simple postcard
but what they don't realize is
that there are organizations that are sharing information
about healthcare plans or vaccination information.
The Florida Rights and Restoration Coalition,
the postcards that they shipped out
helped influence the voting population of Florida.
Or even some of our partners like Free Mind's Book Club
who are helping to connect with young people
in cells all across the country
and keeping them connected back to their community
in very meaningful ways.
- Free Minds uses creative arts to build community
and support our currently
and our previously incarcerated members.
Right now currently we serve a thousand members.
Sometimes they need help with jobs or food,
housing, transportation.
We try to find that support for them.
We use Flikshop as our prison book club program.
- Me and a couple of other peers of mine,
we run around doing all the type of stuff
we wasn't supposed to do, and it landed me in jail.
I did 13 years and with Flikshop,
when you get pictures of a Martin Luther King statue,
memorial and all that type of stuff,
that's a sense of home coming to you.
It just cured that home sickness just for a little bit.
- We built Flikshop on aws.
Now we use aws machine learning technology
to scan each one of our photos
to ensure that we're capturing photo contraband
all the way through how we're beginning to learn
how to synthesize all of these massive pools of data
so that we can organize it
and allow for our customers to be able to engage
with our platform in an interesting way.
All of these features were things that it really
honestly came after eight years of my market research
of living inside of these cells.
- Never did I ever think about the fact
that I was sending him those pictures and letters
that it would come to where we are today.
Flikshop postcards can be sent to
your neighbor across the street, to grandma,
to persons who are in nursing homes,
who are in treatment centers.
- Now we're excited about the next frontier
of what we're building.
Not only are we being thoughtful
about connecting you back to your family
and now connecting you back to your potential employer
but also the folks who wanna come home and be entrepreneurs.
They're the before and I'm the after.
I can't wait to be the model for what it is
that they can now see
as a possibility when they come home from prison.
- As we look at everything that's happening
around the criminal justice system
and how engaging communities are,
I see Flikshop really making a tremendous impact
across the country.
(upbeat music)