TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

by Chris J. Anderson

Here’s the opening of the original script sent to us by sociologist Alice Goffman. When I was a freshman in college at the University of Pennsylvania, I took a sociology class where we were supposed to go out and study the city through firsthand observation and participation. I got a job working at a cafeteria on campus, making sandwiches and salads. My boss was an African American woman in her sixties who lived in a black neighborhood not far from Penn. The next year I began tutoring her granddaughter Aisha, who was a freshman in high school. She’s just telling her story in a way that’s natural to her, but by the time she got to the conference, she had a revised opening worthy of the searing passion of her talk. On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey. The first is the one we hear a lot about: college. College has some shortcomings. It’s expensive; it leaves young people in debt. But all in all, it’s a pretty good path . . . Today I want to talk about the second institution overseeing the journey from childhood to adulthood in the United States. And that institution is prison.