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How The Prison Industry Dehumanizes And Profits / Bianca Tylek

Nov 11
Episode 1870: How The Prison Industry Dehumanizes And Profits / Bianca Tylek
Prisoners knitting socks for soldiers at sing sing 1915

I think that our own humanity is preserved when we preserve the humanity of others and our own humanity is undermined when we undermine it in others. So I think from just a sort of civilization and like moral and ethics perspective, I think humanity is just key and core. Before you even get into those who might have faith beliefs and things like that, that should tell you otherwise. But from a practical perspective, it's also really important because 95% of people who are currently incarcerated are coming home. And if you spend the years that they're inside treating them less than human, then you shouldn't be all that surprised that people come home and struggle to fit back into a society that they have now come to understand, doesn't care about them, doesn't believe that they deserve the right to the same. Basic human rights is the rest of us. There is nothing practical about dehumanizing people. If you believe in any form of rehabilitation and you want to successfully reenter people and reduce recidivism and improve public safety, if you wanna do all of those things, then at every step of the way you must recognize the fallibility of humans and then treat them as such as the neighbors you would want them to come home and be. I think there's like our system in dehumanizing people and stripping people of their basic human rights really undermines our own sort of safety and goals.

Bianca Tylek speaks to This Is Hell! about “The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits" that is published by the New Press.

Bianca Tylek is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry and is the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises, a national non-profit dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches. Bianca’s work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and more. 

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Bianca Tylek

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Bianca tylek
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Bianca Tylek

@BiancaTylek

Bianca Tylek is the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises and one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry. As a leader in the national prison phone justice movement, Bianca has passed numerous pieces of federal, state, and local legislation to make prison and jail communication free and increased the regulation of the prison telecom industry. She has also blocked corporate mergers, influenced investor divestment, and forced the resignation of predatory corporate executives from the boards of cultural institutions. Collectively her work has revolutionized the prison telecom market and brough the industry to its knees. Bianca has also blocked financing for prison construction, challenged the malicious bankruptcies of prison healthcare providers, and pressured corporations to stop facilitating death penalty executions. Her novel strategies have wreaked havoc on the prison industry, and her work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Atlantic, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, and more.