Biography

Bianca Tylek is one of the nation’s leading experts on the prison industry, the author of The Prison Industry: How It Works and Who Profits, and the Founder and Executive Director of Worth Rises, a national non-profit dismantling the prison industry and ending the exploitation of those it touches.

Bianca is a leader in the movement to make prison and jail communication free. She’s passed and implemented numerous piece of federal, state, and local policy that have provided fully free calls to roughly 330,000 incarcerated people and their loved ones, saved families more than $500 million, and generated over three billion additional call minutes, to date. She was also instrumental in passing game-changing federal regulations that more than halved call rate caps, eliminated ancillary fees, banned commissions to prisons and jails, and prohibited the pass through of surveillance costs to consumers. Bianca has also driven corporate accountability in the space — blocking corporate mergers, influencing investor divestment, informing credit rating downgrades, and forcing the resignation of corporate executives from the boards of cultural institutions. Collectively her work has revolutionized the correctional telecom market and caused the industry’s largest player to default on $1.6 billion in debt. And that’s just her work in correctional telecom.

Over and over, Bianca has exposed the prison industry and demanded accountability with brilliantly innovative strategies and unapologetically aggressive tactics. Her work has cost her targets and their investors billions, while saving millions for the communities tormented by their brutal commercialization of incarceration. Currently, her work focuses on telecommunications, labor, healthcare, operations (i.e. private prisons), community corrections (primarily electronic monitoring), and the death penalty.

Before founding Worth Rises in 2017, Bianca worked for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, Campaign to End Mass Incarceration at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and co-founded College Way, a preparation program for students on Rikers Island interested in pursuing higher education upon their release. Bianca has also worked in various state and local corrections agencies, including those in New York City, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and consulted to the Correctional Leaders Association. And prior to committing her career to criminal justice, Bianca worked as a financial analyst at Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.

Bianca is a sought after expert whose engagements have ranged from testifying before Congress to presenting on prominent stages like SXSW and TED. Her TED Talk has garnered 1.5 million views, and her work has been covered by the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, NPR, The Nation, Mother Jones, CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg, and more. Bianca has also been honored as an Ashoka Fellow, Elevate Prize Winner, Draper Richard Kaplan Entrepreneur, Art for Justice Fellow, TED Fellow, Equal Justice Works Fellow, Harvard University Presidential Public Service Fellow, Ford Foundation Public Interest Fellow, Paul & Daisy Soros New American Fellow, and an Education Pioneers Analyst Fellow. Bianca holds a B.A. from Columbia University (in biology!) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.