From Penitentiary To Centre Stage: This Former Inmate Hopes His Mobile App Will Reduce Recidivism Rates

Just 15 at the time of his conviction, Marcus Bullock was sentenced to a penitentiary full of men twice his age. Now he is the founder of Flikshop, a mobile app for people to upload and send digital postcards with photos and messages that make their way to their loved ones currently incarcerated.

To use the Flikshop app, users pay 99 cents to send a message and upload a photo that can be sent to prisons and jails across the nation.

Bullock also has a Flikshop Angels program that allows people to pay for credits that are then donated to a family to connect to a loved one incarcerated.

The inspiration for the app came from his own experience. In 1996 in his mid-teens, he was arrested for carjacking, and it landed him an eight-year prison sentence.

“My best friend and I carjacked a guy when I was in my sophomore, and he was in his junior year in high school. We tapped the window with a gun, we demanded the keys to the car, jumped into the driver’s side and we sped off and left him standing there. We were arrested the very next day and I got sentenced to eight years in adult maximum prison as a result of that carjacking,” Bullock told Atlanta Black Star.

So he knows firsthand the impact a message from a loved one outside prison walls can make.  After he was released from prison in 2004, he never forgot the impact a simple message could do for his friends still locked up.

From then on – he started researching how to develop a mobile app that would eventually become Flikshop and then he got approval from 2,700 detention facilities from across the country for Flikshop postcards to go to inmates.

The app has reportedly helped ship over 700,000 postcards and connected over 170,000 families.

According to the Sentencing Project, 1 in 81 Black adults is serving time in state prison, and according to the Department of Justice which tracks the recidivism rate every ten years, about 66 percent of prisoners released are re-arrested by three years later. 

Bullock believes that if inmates are connected with their loved ones they would feel less hopeless, more excited about the future, and could take active steps to turn their life around.

He also founded the Flikshop School of Business, a program that teaches returning citizens life skills and entrepreneurship via computer coding and software development.