Activist. Author. Artist.
Bianca Tylek is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry, the author of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, and 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 groundbreaking work has brought relief to countless families impacted by incarceration and wreaked havoc on the prison industry. She leads the movement to make prison and jail communication free and has blocked financing for prison construction, challenged the malicious bankruptcies of prison healthcare providers, pressured corporations to stop facilitating death penalty executions, and so much more.
Bianca’s TED Talk has garnered 1.5 million views and her work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and more.
Oh, And speaker.
From gala keynotes and corporate retreats to movement conferences and intimate dinner parties, Bianca has been invited to speak about the prison industry and her work to dismantle it at events all across the country. She has testified before Congress, presented to staff at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters, and served as a panelist at SXSW. She regularly lectures at Columbia Business School and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her remarks are always candid. Her delivery is always passionate. And her impact is always inspiration.
The multibillion-dollar U.S. prison industry — and how to dismantle it
A phone call to a U.S. prison or jail can once cost as much as a dollar per minute — a rate that forces one in three families with incarcerated loved ones into debt. In this searing talk about mass incarceration, Bianca exposes the predatory nature of the billion-dollar prison telecom industry and presents straightforward strategies to dismantle the network of corporations that has a financial interest in seeing more people behind bars for longer.