How a $1 million dollar prize competition can help disrupt the prison industry

An introduction to "Justice Innovation"

Dear readers: I’m breaking from the usual Gameplan format to share something exciting I’ve spent the past year working on at Dream.Org. If you’re interested in getting involved with Justice Innovation, please reach out!

For the past few decades, we have lived through an age of constant disruption and invention. However, at least one part of society has remained stubbornly unchanged: prisons. The American prison system is a $90 billion industry that causes enormous suffering, doesn’t achieve its purported goals, and hasn’t significantly evolved in centuries. 

Prisons are inhumane. The conditions for both incarcerated people and the people who work in prisons are usually horrendous, filled with violence, poor healthcare, dismal food, and isolation. Most people come home from prison more broken than when they went in. 

Prisons are ineffective. Despite lavish government spending–$50,000 per person per year, often far more–prisons deliver terrible recidivism rates, along with many people struggling with unemployment and homelessness after incarceration. 

Prisons are resistant to change. The worse prisons are at rehabilitating people in their care, the more likely people end up right back in prison, creating a greater demand for prison beds. Law enforcement unions and so-called “tough on crime” politicians also fight attempts to reform the system at every turn. 

These problems are well-documented, and advocates have tackled them through organizing, legislating, litigating, and pressuring elected officials to improve prison conditions and the policies that send people to prison. These changes can improve peoples’ lives, but winning them is very dependent on political currents, which are typically hostile to criminal justice. For example, after a run of significant wins from 2016-2020, the post-pandemic crime increases and 2022 midterms coupled to essentially shut down political reforms for two years. During this time I had a number of conversations with people in the field about how we could enlist sympathetic allies from other sectors, like tech, to join the criminal justice conversation. What if we could marshall the energy, brainpower, and money of the tech and entrepreneurial communities to disrupt the prison industry? 

Plenty of people are apprehensive about mixing criminal justice and technology for understandable reasons. Technology has historically been a source of oppression, not liberation in this field–from surveillance technology to bail algorithms to ankle monitors. But technology also offers significant opportunities to reach and connect people in new ways, and to scale much faster than our sclerotic nonprofit system allows. Sure, there are some great individual programs already out there. However, we need ideas that can scale easily across different geographies and political settings. Our capacity to change the American prison system would be so much more powerful if we created a robust ecosystem of social impact companies and nonprofits using technology to change the kind of support people receive in and out of prison.

We’re not starting from scratch. Traversing the country for the past year, we’ve met with people already doing great work. Last year we ran an accelerator program with Village Capital and worked with organizations connecting people to lawyers (Good Call), finding people good jobs after prison (Untapped Solutions), and clearing peoples’ records (Rasa). Organizations like the Next Chapter and EmergentWorks are also connecting formerly incarcerated people to well–paying tech jobs. Many of these companies are led by formerly incarcerated people.

On Tuesday morning, we’ll be giving the world a preview of what’s next. This past year we launched a Justice Innovation Prize, giving away $1 million to the best ideas for disrupting the prison industry. More than 250 people submitted ideas, with 75 going through a rigorous process that included peer review and analysis from a panel of criminal justice experts. The four criteria by which we evaluated these ideas were innovation (is this new?), impact (if this works, how much will it help people?), scale (can this work anywhere in the country without being overly resource intensive?), and feasibility (can you pull this off?). 

We were thrilled with the demographics of who applied - 74% of the applicants were BIPOC-led, 61% were women-led, and 71% were led by a justice-impacted person. Not exactly your typical Silicon Valley numbers. The applicants were also geographically diverse, which was refreshing, given that so many of our industries, including the nonprofit sector, are often dominated by California, New York and DC. 

Out of this impressive group, we whittled it down to five finalists, who each received a $50,000 planning grant, and a chance to compete for one of three $250,000 prizes on Tuesday, when we will host a live pitch event from the stage at SOCAP23 (the country’s biggest social impact conference) in San Francisco. 

These five finalists are FreeCap, JusticeText, Creative Acts, Unlocked Labs, and Just Income. FreeCap is creating an ESG lends for people to see how publicly traded companies contribute to the prison industrial complex. JusticeText uses AI to help public defenders sort through massive discovery logs to help their clients. Creative Acts uses virtual reality to provide cutting edge support to incarcerated people before they come home from prison. Unlocked Labs employs currently incarcerated software developers to design in-prison educational and vocational training programs. And Just Income is deploying UBI for recently returned citizens to break the cycle of recidivism fueled by poverty. 

If you live in the Bay, please join us for the Justice Innovation Prize pitch competition (it’s free) and hear from all of these innovators directly! Register here.

These ideas are just the beginning, and the good news is that the money is already there. The government already spends $90 billion on a system that doesn’t work. We need to get into the hands of people who are from the community, and are using their creativity to help people instead of harming them. Technology is here to stay, and only becoming a bigger part of our lives. Let’s harness it for good, and use it as part of a broader arsenal to take down the prison industry.