One evening,
after watching the nightly news with my then-five-year-old son,
he asked me a question I thought I would have a ton of time to answer.
I thought the complicated questions typically came at eight or nine years old,
but my son looked me in the eyes while I was tucking him in,
and with a very straight face he asked me,
"Daddy, why did you go to jail?"
My wife and I often thought about this moment.
We knew this question was coming,
and we wanted to handle it well.
But that night, I had a question to answer.
So I decided to tell my son how I ended up going to prison
when I was just a 15-year-old kid.
This picture was taken when I was 14 years old.
That's my mom,
my sister,
and that cute little baby, that's my niece.
She's 23 now,
and it drives me crazy every time I think about how old I'm getting.
(Laughter)
This was the last photo that I took
just a few weeks before I made the worst decision of my life.
A friend of mine and I,
we approached a man sleeping in his car,
pulled out a gun,
demanded the keys to his car
and sped off.
That decision landed me in front of a judge,
with my mom and my sister standing just a few feet behind me,
as they listened to me get sentenced
to eight years in adult maximum security prison.
This is the next family photo that I took with my mom.
But this time, it was taken in the prison visiting room.
Now don't let the waterfalls and the trees
and all that stuff in the background fool you.
(Laughter)
This was one of the hardest times of my life.
In fact, for the first two years, I battled depression
by living in denial about my prison sentence.
I would commonly say things to my mom like,
"I mean, Ma, I know you don't think
that this judge is really going to keep us here through Christmas."
And then, "... Valentine's Day."
And then, "... the last day of school."
And then, "... the first day of school."
And on and on.
I promised my mom that one day,
someone would see that I was drowning in those cells,
that someone would tell us that we could breathe again
because they just wanted to teach me a hard lesson.
But one day, as I'm walking around the prison rec yard
with my friend Danny B,
I asked him, "How long have you been here?"
He told me that he had already served 31 years.
My palms immediately got sweaty,
heart dropped down to my toes,
and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Because that's the moment when I realized
that I would have to serve all eight of my years.
Now, the story of going to prison as a teenager
is not an uncommon one.
But for my family,
this was the most tragic thing that had happened in our lives.
I missed my family terribly.
And just like every other teenager,
I just wanted to open up gifts on Christmas morning
and graduate from high school with my friends.
And because of the intense security in prisons,
internet access is limited.
There's no easy emailing,
no texting
and definitely no social media.
This means that the meaningful moments like prom night or college graduation
or the tons of free content that you and I digest every day
very seldom gets shared with the cousin, sibling or best friend in prison.
I became very dark.
My childhood and the dreams of it, they disappeared.
And those slamming steel doors clanking shut every night
in the prison housing unit,
they forced me to grow up fast.
I can tell you firsthand
that there is something about the violent cards of prison
that completely cripple hope.
I even tried to push my mom away,
because I didn't want her to be subject to the collect calls
or the eight-hour drives for the one-hour visits,
those horrible body cavity searches
that she would experience coming into the prison visiting room.
But as many of you parents here know tonight,
you can't stop a mother's love.
(Laughter)
So what did my mom do?
She made a promise while sitting in a prison visiting room.
She promised she would write me a letter
or send me a picture
every day from that day forward until I came home.
I had six years left to do on a sentence,
our lives were completely crumbling around us,
and here comes this happy-go-lucky lady
prancing into a prison visiting room like I'm in summer camp,
with a new plan to send me a bunch of pictures.
(Laughter)
Such an interesting time.
Little did I know,
it would be my mom's letters that saved my life.
My mom would take pictures of a cheeseburger
or a mattress at a department store --
(Laughter)
and she would send them to me along with a letter
with a promise that one day I would enjoy a fat, juicy burger
or sleep on a comfortable bed.
My mom assured me that there was life after prison.
In fact, my best friends began living vicariously
through my mom's letters and photos --
(Laughter)
giving an entire prison unit a glimpse into what was happening in the world.
After eight years of nightmares of prison never ending,
being dehumanized,
strip-searched,
watching people get wheeled down the prison walkway in body bags,
I was finally released.
And I bet you can't guess
who was there to pick me up that cold morning in February.
(Laughter)
OK, you guessed it --
(Laughter)
my sister and my mom.
The years that we prayed for were finally in front of us,
and the pain of living behind bars was behind us.
Or so we thought.
Like me, most people in prison are coming home one day.
And unlike me,
many don't have the consistent support during and after incarceration that I had.
The struggle is real,
and even I struggled to find a job when I came home.
Each application that I filled out --
from grocery stores to mortgage companies to fashion retail --
they all included the same question,
glowing, pulsating,
waiting for me to add my check:
"Have you ever been convicted of a felony?"
Now, to be honest,
I knew that this moment was coming.
I knew I would have to face this issue.
So I leveraged the mental toughness that I built while going through prison.
But after being declined for over 40 jobs,
even I began to feel deflated.
I thought that I would get my life back
and that all those things were behind me and things would start looking up.
But that decision that I made when I was a 15-year-old kid
continued to haunt me even up until that moment.
But while on a job hunt,
one day, I ran across an application that asked the question,
but this time it was worded a little differently.
This time, the question asked:
"Have you been convicted of a felony within the last seven years?"
Now, after doing an eight-year prison sentence --
(Laughter)
I could honestly say that my conviction was over seven years ago.
I was able to answer that question with an honest "no,"
and finally, I landed my first job.
(Applause)
I was the guy who mixed paint at the paint store.
And eventually, customers would come into the store,
and they would ask me,
"Hey Marcus, how much do you charge to paint my kitchen?"
"Well, Ms. Johnson, we don't paint kitchens,
we sell you the paint so you can paint your own kitchen."
(Laughter)
A light bulb went off, and I launched a painting company
that became the conduit between the customers in the paint store
and the painters who needed consistent work.
After a year or so,
I left that paint store,
we grew our contracting company,
and since then, I have hired tons of other returning citizens.
(Applause)
I stand today with a felony,
and just like millions of others around the country
who also have that "F" on their chest that represents felony,
just as my mom promised me many years ago,
I wanted to show them that there was still life after prison.
I started living my best life,
and I couldn't believe that I was living on a cloud.
But my friends, the same ones I grew up with in those cells,
they would call me and constantly ask for pictures of this new life I was living.
If I traveled, they wanted pictures.
When I got married, they wanted pictures.
But I didn't have the time or the bandwidth to sit and write a letter
or print pictures from my phone.
I would commonly tell them,
"Dude, if I could just text you, my life would be so much easier."
And after searching the app stores for a solution to this problem
and not being able to find one,
we launched Flikshop.
(Applause)
I kid you not --
did you know that the prison phone business
created a billion-dollar industry?
Some of these businesses are predatory,
and so we knew we had to figure out how to disrupt this space.
Flikshop allows our family members to take a picture, add some quick text,
press send, and for 99 cents,
we print that picture and text on a real, tangible postcard
and mail it directly to any person in any cell anywhere in the country.
(Applause)
There are millions of families that are becoming torn apart,
simply because they don't have the time to write a letter,
figure out how to print a photo from their phone,
make a store run to go buy a box of envelopes
and then to the post office to go buy stamps.
We started by connecting 50 families.
And then 100 families.
And then 500 families.
And now, today, I am proud to say
that we've connected over 140,000 families
around the country.
(Applause)
We even commonly receive mail in my office overflowing my desk
from people in prison
like Jason.
Jason says, "I got about 15 postcards last night
of so many words of motivation
that I had to write to you and just say thank you."
Or George, who writes,
"Today I received about six postcards with so much love ...
I do not know where this roof of love has come from."
I cannot believe how blessed I am
to sometimes be able to meet a child
who sends Flikshop postcards to their incarcerated parents.
Sometimes, I'm able to even go to the White House
and address the nation and talk about the need for criminal justice reform.
And this story is just incredible for me, because this wasn't always my life.
I remember very vividly living in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell
with a man that was 22 years old and there to serve life plus 43 years,
and thinking in my head while I'm sitting in that bunk
that together, we probably would die in those cells.
Well, I know that our era of mass incarceration
and the things that we see on the news dealing with people going to prison
is a huge societal issue
that we all have to band together to help solve.
But I am confident
that if we're very intentional about building family connections
in environments where they're needed the most,
then this is a big step in the right direction.
I absolutely love this stage of my life,
this chapter, where I'm standing right now.
But you know who's having way more fun than me at this stage?
My mom.
(Laughter)
I love you, Ma. Thank you.
(Applause)