Justin Rhedrick: On His Experience In Prison, Finding Bitcoin, & Helping People In Prison Learn Financial Literacy.
There is much to learn from a man who has lost and found his way and continues to search for the promised land.
NEW podcast episode is out!✨ Below is a short preview of the episode, but I encourage you to listen to the full conversation as I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface with this piece. Listen here: Justin Rhedrick: From Prison to Bitcoin to Helping People In Prison Learn Financial Literacy.
Justin Rhedrick knows what loss feels like.
When he was a senior in high school, his mother lost their home to foreclosure during the 2008 market crash. Soon after, he watched his close friend be killed at a party.
“It was traumatic… I just kind of went a different way in life… It made me look at life totally different. In all honesty, like 100% different.” – Justin Rhedrick
Despite the challenges of his senior year, he managed to go to university. He studied Business Administration at North Carolina A&T State University for two years and even made it to the Dean’s list until several events edged him out of school.
He was partying, smoking weed, and drinking alcohol. To add to this concoction, he realized he’d still have to pay school fees upon graduation, which he thought made no sense. Worse, his professor told the class there would be no jobs available once they graduated. Justin felt he couldn’t afford to continue paying for university. So, at 19 years old, he quit college.
Desperate for money and under the influence of the wrong crowd, he sought easy ways to get quick cash.
“I had gone home and I was hanging out in my neighborhood with some folks and committed a robbery that led me in jail for three years – from 21 to 24 [years old].” – Justin Rhedrick
In prison, he was no longer Justin Rhedrick. He was OPUS number: 1247165. OPUS stands for “Offender Population Unified System.” According to Justin, that number acts as your I.D., “your bank account number, your new social security number.” (What does being a number do to someone’s self-esteem?)
In the early days of prison, he slept as much as possible:
“To try to minimize my waking hours in prison… I think I slept my whole first year.” – Justin Rhedrick
Perhaps sleeping served as an escape, as a time to process the new reality in his subconscious, and as a time to try and put the broken pieces back together again. But he couldn’t sleep his life away. He now had to decide who he would be during and after prison.
Psychologist and holocaust survivor Edith Eva Eger once said, “Victimhood is optional… We become our own jailers when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.”
This is why stories are powerful and form who we are. Each of us tells ourselves stories. But few of us are willing to revise and rewrite our own stories, which is essential in determining whether we sink deeper or soar higher.
Justin did as Edith suggested. By not giving in to victimhood and telling himself a different story, he developed a mental resilience that carried him through one of the most challenging times in his life.
“I just really felt like, you know, alright, I can turn myself around. But [I’ll] have to find something great to attach myself to. Something life-changing.” – Justin Rhedrick
In 2014, after three years in prison and a new narrative, Justin was a free 24-year-old man. He decided to be an entrepreneur and founded a vegan food delivery service. His friend, Isaiah Jackson, was the first to buy his fajitas. Coincidentally, Isaiah was also the first person to tell Justin about Bitcoin.
“[Isaiah] was sharing with me, you know, how early [bitcoin] was… Then he said it was something you can use as a store of value, you can spend it like money, and it was decentralized.
So, when he was telling me it was decentralized, I was like, ‘wait, why does this ring a bell?’ He was telling me what decentralization was, and to me, I was just like ‘damn, it sounds like prison stamps, like postage stamps.’
So, in prison we got to use postage stamps if you can't receive money from your job or your family. And the thing about stamps is if the traditional price of the stamps were like 40 cents, what we did in the prison yard was we would set the price at like 30 cents.
It was our currency because they didn’t have cash in prison anymore in North Carolina. Nor did they have tobacco. When you had cash in the yard and tobacco on the yard stamps was like the third choice [of currency]. But once cash and tobacco was eliminated, stamps became the dominant currency.
So, we had our own price of stamps. We would then exchange goods and services for them. The only downfall was like, if you had too many stamps, the prison guard could come shake down your room and take them but it rarely ever happened.”
It was interesting – and yet obvious – to see that prisons behaved like a free market, with their own monetary system. Could it be that people in prison were inadvertently serving as a case study of the natural ascent of decentralized, peer-to-peer money?
If this decentralized nature of money could work in the microcosm of prison, could it also work in the broader world? Could bitcoin — a decentralized, peer-to-peer money — also work?
And more importantly, could bitcoin provide opportunities to people who don’t have easy access to money after leaving prison? Maybe bitcoin could offer them new financial opportunities.
Bitcoin could help them start a savings account in the face of discrimination and rejection by banks who are wary of their prison record. Bitcoin’s open, public, and non-judgemental access to its monetary network could potentially help them build wealth for the first time. All they would need is a phone and an internet connection. No background check, proof of income, deposits, and so on.
If that’s the case, would we see bitcoin help provide financial access to people who don’t have it? Could it lower money-related crimes? Could it also lower recidivism (the likelihood of a convicted criminal re-offending)? Could it be that simple and that easy?
Or, is there too much to gain from the prison system? Are there people benefitting financially from maintaining the prison system as it exists?
According to Justin, corporations and prisons profit from the free labour of people in prison. Sometimes, an entire town will work at the nearby prison. They will invest in keeping the prison system running as it provides jobs and stability for the whole town.
This makes me wonder. Are prisons and concentration camps, like the one Gulbahar Haitiwaji was in, propping up some of the businesses we use daily? Are there business people who created their wealth from the backs of imprisoned men and women – many of which were imprisoned because they lost their way and made poor decisions as a result?
There is much to learn from a man who has lost and found his way and continues to search for the promised land, so I invited Justin to The Misfit podcast.
During our conversation, we talked about Justin’s upbringing, his experience in prison, the ingenuity of prison inmates, working for $1 a day in prison, keeping his sanity, and how he transformed his life.
He also told me how he hopes to do a prison tour next month (August 2023). The goal is to teach people in prison financial literacy and bitcoin while helping them get employment opportunities in the Bitcoin space.
You can listen to the full episode below (and please do, as I haven’t even scratched the surface of our conversation with this written piece):
Justin Rhedrick: From Prison to Bitcoin to Helping Prison people freed from prison Learn Financial Literacy (or you can listen to it on Spotify here).
Connect with Justin on Twitter @Bitcoin_Vegan and his project, Bitcoin Tranformation Community, at @BTCTC1sat.