Frederick Hutson has always had an eye for business, however his innovative marijuana trafficking business put him jail. “They put me in handcuffs and arraigned me at the courthouse just down the street from where I sit now,” says Hutson. “I don’t know that I’ve changed, because I still have a high tolerance for risk and a desire to solve problems creatively. But I have matured.”
However, Hutson used his time in prison in a positive way and came up with a solution to a major issue that American inmates face every day: “I know the population I’m building this business for, and that’s my advantage,” Hutson tells of those 2.3 million inmates and their loved ones. “You put all those people together, and that’s a large market. But more importantly, I saw first-hand that inmates who stayed in touch had a better chance of not going back to jail after they got out.” He used his own experience and turned it into an innovative business idea.
“Connectivity with the outside world is crucial to the fight against prison recidivism”, tells David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “Nearly 95% of prisoners are coming home, so what kind of people do we want back in society?” he says. “A successful re-entry is always linked to how well an inmate kept in touch with the outside world. To the extent that a company (like Pigeonly) can mitigate the harsh and stressful world of prison and give people that sense of self through contact, that is very positive.”
Hutson’s start-up, Pigeonly offers loved ones a better way to contact their friends and family in prison: “It’s how I know our competitors can’t duplicate us tomorrow,” he says. “In my experience, staying in contact with family from prison is difficult,” Hutson says. “It costs about $70 a month for 300 phone minutes. To get photos, my mom would have to take time off work to drive to print the photos and go to the post office to mail them. Smartphones were just coming out, and I thought, ‘Why can’t this be solved?'” However, he solved the issue while in prison. His innovative solution has reached countless prisoners and helped them better reintegrate into life outside of prison and have a better chance of staying out of prison in the future. He now works as the company’s CEO. By 2015, Pigeonly had sent approximately one million pieces of communication and helped to facilitate up to eight million minutes of telephone calls by prisoners.
“I’ve helped kids talk to their dads and moms and saved real people real money in the past year, and that’s humbling and motivating,” says Hutson. “Not for what I did before, which was stupid and hurt my mom and my family. But I enjoy being an example now,” he says. “In the black and brown community, people don’t knock on certain doors because they think they shouldn’t. We usually don’t have uncles who majored in computer science, so we start barbershops and mobile car washes, which are fine. But I’m here to say, you can knock on this door, too.”