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Earlier this year, I awoke to the sounds of some of my incarcerated peers excitedly talking about their trust accounts (our version of a bank account). Their restitution finescourt-ordered payments added to ones sentence as punishmenthad disappeared. Debts as high as $10,000 wiped clean. On January 1, 2025, California implemented Assembly Bill 1186, also known as the REPAIR Act, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. The new law provides restitution relief for those who have had fines longer than 10 years or are under 18 years old. Outstanding balances that remain for adults fees will be cleared, and the responsibility for paying restitution fees for those under 18 now belongs to the Crime Victims Compensation Board. In a press release about the act, its author, Assemblymember Mia Bonta stated, It costs more to collect fines than they are worth, and those being ordered to pay restitution have an increased likelihood and severity of future incidents of harm. This is a win for justice and it is a win for public safety.” Among those experiencing the impacts of the act was Michael Walker. Sitting in his cell in San Quentin Rehabilitation Centers North Block housing unit, an officer stopped at Walkers door and handed him a copy of his prison account statement. “I didn’t look at it,” he said. “I folded it up and threw it in my locker; but then my neighbor asked me if my restitution fine was still showing. I checked, and sure enough it was gone. I just started smiling.” Walker had no money or assets when the criminal courts ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine over 20 years ago as part of his sentence. While the trial court judge said he could pay his debt off over time, his job in the prisons main kitchen only paid 0.21 cents an hour. For years he felt like the fine was mocking him. He felt a deep sense of what he described as “abject” poverty. “Its not that I didn’t want to pay my restitution, ” he said. I couldn’t. The state does not provide me with the economic ability to pay.” Two tiers down in North Block, Michael Moore experienced a similar sense of relief, his $10,000 also erased. Most of the jobs Moore has held in his years incarcerated do not have a pay number, meaning he has long received no money for his labor; for that reason, Moore is reluctant to work. He’s currently a student via a college program within San Quentin. At first I didn’t believe it, I thought they made a mistake, Moore shared. But then someone told me they had passed a new law. Its like a heavy weight has been lifted. The REPAIR Act comes at a pivotal moment when society is coming to terms with how finances have become a harmfully intrinsic component to realizing freedom from prison. Buried in fines before the REPAIR Act I have been incarcerated for 30 years. I believe in restitution, and paid mine off in 2013. It took me 17 years to pay off $5,000and it wasnt thanks to jobs in prison. Incarcerated people in California earn between $0.30 to $1.50 an hour on average, per the Prison Policy Institute; and with policies like Proposition 6, an effort to end forced labor, getting denied, we aren’t going to see increased wages inside prisons any time soon. I believe in compensating people to whom I have caused harm. But, as Bonta says, the system has long created more victims. Reports show that two-thirds of those paying restitution indicate unpaid fines impact their ability to afford food and rent, 60% say it threatens their ability to pay utilities, and 93% say it affects their ability to pay other debts. Youth of color are also more likely to be ordered to pay restitution and at higher amounts due to targeted policing of Black and brown communities. [Restitution] puts a lot of pressure on people to potentially go for the quick dollar, which is potentially committing another crime,” Bonta said. For decades, the California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation (CDCR) has automatically deducted 55% of our earnings to go toward restitution. It could take a decade or more for those who make less than a dollar a day to pay off these debts, compared to a matter of months with a minimum wage job in society. (There is no statute of limitations for when restitution must be paid in California; incarcerated individuals are not obligated to pay before they leave prison). In response to massive income gaps nationally, many families seek to support their incarcerated loved ones by sending them money. The money they share is also halved by the state toward restitution. Parents have become subject to unforgiving collection practices and the collateral consequences of court-ordered debt, including negative credit impacts, bank levies, and property liens. Restitution fines have also inhibited people from getting paroled. Several months after a California Board Of Parole Hearing (BPH) panel found Vincent O’Bannon suitable for parole in the summer of 2023, he was escorted by two Investigative Service Unit (ISU) officers to an institutional security unit office at the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. After reading him his Miranda Rights, the officers informed O’Bannon they were investigating him at the request of BPH authorities to determine if he was avoiding paying restitution. In monitoring several phone calls between O’Bannon and his wife, they had determined he was having his wife put money into the accounts of incarcerated peers to circumvent his payments. Restitution and other fines’ impact on parole OBannon said he placed money in others accounts in order to supplement the small portions of food the prison provides and to purchase hygiene and other products via commissary. Had he placed the money into his own account, it would be subject to a 55% restitution deduction, leaving him little to meet his needs. With barely enough palatable food and nutrition available to us, incarcerated people depend on our wages to buy other food. CDCR also does not provide incarcerated people with scented soaps, deodorant, hair grease, lotion, or toothpaste, nor do they provide comfortable leisure clothing. Incarcerated individuals have to purchase these items from canteen vendors that have historically engaged in price gouging. Consequently, it isn’t a mystery why the problem of circumventing restitution exists. “My intention was not to circumvent restitution, but to preserve and maximize money from my family, because they also have to pay other bills,” OBannon said. Restitution is already being ollected from my prison pay. At the time, OBannon still owed $3,935.29 on a $6,113.00 restitution order. ISU officers wrote a rules violation report alleging O’Bannon was hiding assets in violation of criminal penal code statute 155.5. O’Bannon was found guilty. The BPH rescinded his parole date and denied parole for three years. (This type of financial transaction monitoring has ripple effects on people who are up for parole and do not owe restitution at all. Some incarcerated people have been punished because they received money from, say, an aunt whose child is also in prison. By virtue of being cousins/related, these two incarcerated people can have their parole threatened). The Prison Policy Initiative released a report last year detailing how, across 16 states, fines and fees impacted parole decisions, sometimes leading to denials. And since 2009, the ACLU has been exposing and challenging modern day debtors prisons as a growing problem across the country. Debtors’ prisons were officially abolished under federal law by Congress in 1833. The U.S Supreme Court has held on multiple occasions that a prison term cannot be extended for failing to pay court costs and fines. In 1983, the court reaffirmed that incarcerating indigent debtors is unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. In April of this year, O’Bannon was able to escape his modern-day debtors’ prison when a Santa Clara County Superior Court judge resentenced him to 10 years with credit for time served. As for the allegations around circumventing his restitution, prosecutors simply asked that he write a letter of accountability. OBannon is now free and owes less than $500 in restitution. However, situations like O’Bannon’s remain a problem for thousands of others facing a parole board hearing in California who hope to preserve their moneyeither made inside or received from their familyin an effort to save, get paroled, and make the money needed to pay off their debts once released. The BPH considers these potential parole candidates as an unreasonable risk of danger to society and unsuitable for release. A new plan is needed to combat carceral debt While the BPH believes people like OBannon should pay their restitution, they aren’t actively advocating for fair wages for forced prison labor so incarcerated individuals can pay these debts, nor do they seem to be concerned about hurting taxpayers who will pay an additional $132,850 a year to keep people like OBannon incarcerated. The REPAIR Act is both a step in the right direction and validation that those like O’Bannon have been long mistreated by these financial confines, and that many others nationally are still being exploited by ineffective restitution measures. Still, other states remain dependent on an archaic response that impacts all partiessurvivors, taxpayers, loved ones, and the incarcerated. It’s time for this country to follow suit in Californias REPAIR Act and additionally end slave wages in prisons. Turning the pockets of poor people inside out will not suddenly create a rushing river of revenue. “In the 32 years I’ve been incarcerated, I only managed to pay $3,000 on a $10,000 restitution fine,” said Alex Ross, a peer support specialist. “I don’t know how many years it would have taken to pay off the rest, had the law not taken it off. I’d probably be dead before I finished paying.” As incarcerated people, we want to be accountable for the harm we have caused. We want to repair and recompense as best we can for the losses that have occured. But the criminal legal system’s practices are preventing us from doing just that. Putting us into perpetual debt or denying peoples parole because of failure to pay restitution or other fees doesnt help anyone. Theres a more effective way to move forward collectively.
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E-Commerce
Design is the main differentiator in the age of AI, Carl Rivera says. For months, Rivera, Shopify’s chief design officer, has been reorienting his team around this idea. And now, with a new acquisition, he’s doubling down on his thesis. Rivera announced that Shopify just bought Molly, a small Brooklyn design studio known for its inventive work with brands like Apple, Google, and Nike. Shopify declined to share financial details of the deal. With the acquisition, Mollys seven-person team will become the new Shopify Product Design Studio, Rivera says, reporting directly to him and serving as an in-house Navy SEAL squad tasked with reimagining the next era of commerce from the ground up, powered by AI. Rivera explains that Shopify is buying Molly for the way they solve problems as a unit. He believes the new team will serve as a template for how the rest of the Shopify UX design structure should work, which focuses on centralized, flexible teams. Mollys role, he says, will be to inject vision, strategy, and future-forward design across Shopifys most critical and experimental projects, helping other teams visualize and build UX breakthroughs instead of siloed features. It comes at a time when Shopify as a whole is pouring resources into being AI-first. Rivera says Molly will be the prototype for this new operating model in which the organization is not centered around departments like payments or shopping carts but around challenges that span across many departments. Were flattening the organization, he says, with expert teams that can be deployed against different problems. Why Shopify is betting it all on design Riveras vision for the AI era is a refreshing challenge to Silicon Valley orthodoxy. In this sort of AI war that we find ourselves in, the companies that are building the foundation models are at the forefront and fighting over talent, he says. But second only to researchers building foundation models, the most valuable talent in the entire market right now are the designers. In that way, he is framing the studio buyout as a strategic land grab. While the rest of the tech world chases PhDs and model benchmarks, Riveras bet is different. He describes it as arbitragea moment for design to win disproportionate value before the rest of the market catches on. The problem of the engineering-first perspective is that the current AI interaction paradigm is extremely stone age, extremely naive, and kind of obviously wrong, he says. Most products still treat AI as a bolted-on feature, not a core experience, which is why UX designers are so important. Rivera believes that most companies in Silicon Valley are ignoring the real arms race, which is happening around the form factor, or the way users emotionally connect to products. I believe so deeply, so strongly, that the thing that will set companies apart, like when anyone can create anything and all products can be generated at will, the difference between one that is functional and that is memorable is the form factor, he says. Its the thing that makes it click for you. The real innovation will be driven by designers who discover and define AIs lasting form factor. Rivera also believes that this UX revolution will happen in New York. If San Francisco built the models, New York will build the experiences, he tells me. Shopifys design ambitions, and dollars, will flow through the citys creative arteriescreating a hub that attracts the worlds best designers to produce the best work of their careers, defining the future interaction patterns of AI. The Molly template Rivera didnt just want to hire any designers. He wanted a very special team, he says. One that would serve as a model for how Shopify should work because the old organization modelisolated specialists attached to siloed teamswasnt made for AI. AI doesnt give an F about the boundaries, he says. It forces you to break up how you work as a company. Founded just two years ago, Molly had previously worked with Rivera on several projects, including Demo Nights in their Brooklyn studio, and collaborations with brands like Apple, Google, Nike, and AirPods. Seeing how they worked, Rivera realized they were the ideal team for that: I had seen that work. I was very inspired by that work. And then, to be honest, I went out to dinner with them . . . You know how you sit down and have a conversation and things click. Yeah, it just clicks. In their site, the Molly team describes their practice as a creative labwriting experimental frameworks, dissecting UI paradigms, and exploring the API-ification of everything. As their announcement of the sale puts it, weve built a deep library of frameworks and strategy, not only for the process of how we work, but in our theory for how products and the web should interact, behave, and disclose content. They see Shopify as the natural next step for deep impact: The studio model excels in a lot of relationships, but one thing its not ideal for: long-term, deep impact across an entire organization. And this is exactly what Carl Rivera and Tobi Lütke approached us about. New studio, new operating model Now, Riveras plan is to turn Molly into the Shopify Product Design Studio. Theyre going to stay as a team, seven people, deployed against some of our most important, most strategic investments, he explains. To that end, their work will be both practical and theoretical. Rivera says they will join product teams to inject vision and clarity about what the next 18 months could look like. That’s not an arbitrary amount of time; Rivera believes thats the maximum you can plan into the future. Meanwhile, the teams will work on taking the necessary steps to making that vision real in a two-week timeframe, working backwards to build it now. Rivera believes Mollys example will spark a shift company-wide: Instead of trying to fit people into process, you have to build process around the people that know how to navigate this time and age. Thats the theory, at least. Now they need to walk that talk. If they dont produce work that is outstanding and that represents the vision Im proposing, then this whole thing falls flat, he laughs.
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E-Commerce
A hundred years ago, it wasn’t easy being a reader. Books were expensive and libraries weren’t common, so it was hard to get your hands on your next read. In 1926, a magazine editor, professor, and book publisher tried to solve the problem with a mail order company called the Book of the Month Club. The men would read upcoming books, select what they considered the best, then mass-produce them, thereby driving the price down. For decades, thousands of readers across America relied on the catalog to discover new literature. But by the early 2010s, when Blake Orlandia recent Harvard Business School graduatestumbled across the company, it had lost its luster. Consumers had no shortage of places to buy affordable books, from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to their local indie bookstore. Book of the Month had sunk to offering books at bargain-basement prices, but even then, it was quickly shrinking. “Amazon did everything that Book of the Month was purporting to do, but better because of technology,” says Orlandi. “The company was basically hollowed out.” [Photo: Book of the Month] Still, Orlandi couldn’t get Book of the Month out of his mind. The legacy company seemed to have so much potential, if only it could be reimagined for the current reading landscape. “Consumers today have a paradox of choice,” he says. “Book of the Month’s original mission of curating books suddenly seemed compelling again.” Along with his business partner, John Lippman, Orlandi bought the skeletal remains of the Book of the Month Club. In 2016, in the midst of the direct-to-consumer boom, they relaunched it as a subscription business targeted at millennialsand particularly women, who make up the majority of its customers. Every month, the club offers a selection of only five recently released hard cover books, largely fiction with the occasional memoir. Since the company acquires the right to publish each title with a “Book of the Month” logo on the cover, it can price these books cheaper than you were to get them at a book store. Members pay between $13 and $17 a book, depending on their plan, but they can skip anytime. Growth mode Orlandi is now the brand’s CEO. Over the past nine years, Book of the Month has grown to 400,000 members. It generates money from subscription fees and is profitable. It has lower margins than a traditional bookseller because it publishes the books itself. “We have a very different business model than a bookstore that pays the publisher for each book it sells,” Orlandi says. “We publish a small number of titles and we’re highly incentivized to make sure we sell all of them.” Book of the Month is now a powerful player in helping to put books and authors on the map, along the lines of celebrity book clubs, like those founded by Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Jenna Bush Hager. V. E. Schwab says when her novel The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was selected by Book of the Month Club in 2020, it exposed her work to a new audience. Until that point, she had been largely seen as a fantasy author, but the club introduced her work to fans of literary fiction. [Photo: Book of the Month] Book of the Month’s success is particularly impressive given that the percentage of Americans that read fiction is actively declining: In 2017, 42% of adults read fiction, and in 2022, that had gone down to 38%. A 2022 Gallup survey found that Americans read an average of 12.6 books a year, three fewer books than they read in the early 2000s. But over last nine years, the company has gained deep insight into the habits and identities of millennial and Gen Z readers, what makes a successful book, and how social media is transforming the reading experience. “There is this narrative that reading is dying because we’re glued to our phones,” says Brianna Goodman, Book of the Month’s editorial director, who runs the team that selects each month’s five books. “But that’s not what we’re finding. People seem to be turning to books precisely to escape being online.” [Photo: Book of the Month] What Women (Readers) Want Over the years, Book of the Month has zeroed in on the demographic of people who still continue to read for pleasure. It found that more women than men are reading on a regular basis: a quarter of men read fiction while for women, that figure is roughly half. “We didn’t have a clear sense of the target market when we bought the company,” says Orlandi. “But we quickly began to figure it out.” Book of the Month’s most devoted members are college-educated women in their early to late twenties, who read one or more books a month. Orlandi says that this age is the sweet spot when people are no longer reading for school, but don’t yet have kids. When the brand relaunched, it tried to make the brand enticing to this demographic of millennial women. Much of its branding was similar to millennial-oriented startups of that era, like Glossier, Away, and Warby Parker. The website and app were clean and minimalist, with playful fonts, and saturated in a sophisticated blue color. In contrast to Amazon’s overwhelming volume of books, Book of the Month focused on curation, spotlighting the five books available that month. In the early years, when social media marketing was still affordable, Book of the Month advertised on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, targeting women with ads that portrayed reading as part of a chic lifestylesomething you did with wine, in an attractive apartment. Over time, when the brand hit a critical mass, it began to grow by word of mouth. Members get a free book for every person they get to sign up. The physical books themselves have become home decor, with members often posting photos of them on their bookshelves. “Our members seem to like the idea of books as objects,” says Goodman. “So much of our life is digital, and there’s something satisfying about seeing a physical pile of books you’ve read and loved.” Now, Gen Z is just hitting the late twenties prime-reading age. But that doesn’t mean that older readers aren’t still valuable. Orlandi says there’s a certain kind of woman who self-identifies as a reader. It’s not just an activity, it’s how they see themselves. Often, it comes from positive childhood experiences with reading, or growing up in a family that valued books. These are the ideal Book of the Month customers and the company spends a lot of effort trying to bring them into the fold. It targets them on social media and rewards customers who get their friends to sign up with free books. “We’re a subscription business, and ideally, we want to have members with us for decades,” says Orlandi. (Readers can pause the service for months or years at a time with no penalty.) “Readers may go through phases when they don’t have time to read, but they will eventually come back to books, and we want to be there to help them find the right one.” It’s All About Curation While cool branding and targeted marketing are important, Orlandi believes that the success of the business hinges on how well it can curate books. If a member has a bad experience with a book, they may quit and never come back. (The company has Reader’s Guarantee that allows a member to get a new book if they don’t like the one they picked.) If they find an unexpected book that they can’t put down, there’s a good chance they will be a lifelong customer. For many readers, trying to pick the next book is overwhelming, given the pace of publishing. This is also hard for authors, who are struggling to break through. But Book of the Month can help cut through the noise. Take V.E. Schwab, whose book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was a Book of the Month pick in the fall of 2020. “As a fantasy author . . . I’d rarely shown up on the shelves of those who preferred more grounded/realistic work,” says Schwab. “But thanks to Book of the Month, my audience not only grew, but so did some readers’ concept of the shapes and scope that fantasy could take.” Goodman, who oversees a team of seven editorial assistants, says picking books is not an exact science. The company hires people they believe have good taste and instincts. Every month, they go through hundreds of books that publishers send their way, and they choose five to seven. Their goal is to choose the very best book in a number of different categories, from romances, to fantasy, to literary fiction, to thrillers. “It’s hard to say exactly what makes it a right pick,” Goodman says. “It needs to feel fresh, like we haven’t read something like this before. The author needs to be doing something original with words.” As experts have analyzed the decline in reading, they argue that screensfrom social media on our phones to video-streaming servicesare edging out reading in our leisure time. Goodman says that part of what her team is trying to do is to get readers hooked on books that are exciting enough to entice them away from their smartphone addiction. This is why pulpy page turners always have a place on the list. Goodman believes that people are also getting tired of being online. They turn to Book of the Month to return to a slower, more analog pace of life, and the company’s curation team takes this responsibility seriously. “People have limited time, and they’re looking to books to get away from their troubles,” she says. “We want to make sure their time is well spent.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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