An $8,094 hoodie: Unlock gear puts the price of prison education on the shirt
Every lock on Unlock gear funds a month of education in prison, so each piece costs as many dollars as it has locks. More than 60 public figures wore it.
Today is the first National Unlock Day. For Edovo, the nonprofit that puts free education on prison tablets, Buena turned the humble 🔓 emoji into a donation: post it with #UnlockDay and #Edovo, and donors pay for a day of education for someone in prison.1 Post one, or post a thousand.
A million people inside still can’t open a single lesson
Education is one of the few things in the justice system with numbers this clear. A RAND meta-analysis found that people who take part in education in prison have 43% lower odds of going back, and better odds of finding work when they get out.3
Edovo has spent twelve years bringing that education to people inside, free to them and free to the prison. About a million incarcerated people can now open its courses on a tablet.2 Another million can’t. Their states haven’t approved the app, or their facilities lack the tablets, the network or the staff. In many places the tablets are already there, but people can only use them to pay for things like movies. Nearly all federal prisons are missing.
What Unlock Day is up against
- 1Mpeople in prison who can learn on EdovoIncarcerated people with access to Edovo’s free courses today.
- 1Mmore still locked outPeople in prisons and jails without access, because of state approvals, missing tablets or missing infrastructure.
- 43%lower odds of returning to prisonFor people who take part in education while incarcerated, according to RAND.
- 1 🔓= 1 day of educationEach unlock emoji posted with #UnlockDay and #Edovo funds a day of learning, paid for by donors.
Money alone won’t open those doors. It also takes public demand, visible enough that the people who approve prison programs notice. So Edovo needed something it had never done: a big, loud, public moment.
The smallest act we could think of
Our brief from Edovo asked for a social-first campaign that anyone could join in seconds, whether they had ten followers or ten million. We kept shrinking the ask until it couldn’t get any smaller. Not a petition, not a donation form, not a video. One emoji.
The 🔓 is already on every phone. It means exactly what it says. And typing it costs nothing, because Edovo’s donors pay for each one. Every lock posted unlocks a day of learning for someone inside. Every feed full of locks is also a public vote for opening access to the million still waiting.
One emoji. One day of school for someone in prison. Post as many as you like.
That last part matters. There is no cap. Someone who posts a single lock gives one day. Someone who pastes in a wall of them gives months. Instagram allows up to 2,000 emojis in a single post, and the generator lets you use every one.
A counter, a post generator and kits for chaplains
To make the emoji count, literally, we built unlockday.org. A live counter tallies locks across platforms and shows the total climbing in real time, alongside how many people have joined and how many their posts have reached.2
For anyone who doesn’t know what to write, the site has a Social Post Generator. Pick a ready-made post, choose Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, LinkedIn or Bluesky, slide in the number of locks, and share. We also made kits for the communities closest to the cause: churches, religious groups, and corrections staff themselves.
Edovo’s own channels have been warming people up for a week. Starting March 18, its feeds filled with learner stories, the case for prison education and a running promise: donors had committed to cover five million emojis. The posts pointed people to unlockday.org to sign up for a reminder, so they would be ready with their locks when the day came. Today is that day.
Posting from the inside
The most moving posts today aren’t coming from celebrities. They are coming from people in prison, who are posting their own #UnlockDay messages through Edovo’s tablets into the campaign’s feed.
Their words sit on unlockday.org next to the counter. “Edovo gave me the tools and encouragement I needed to start fresh,” writes Brianne, a learner in Florida. Samuel, in South Dakota, got Edovo in his facility last October.2
The people who run prisons are joining in too. The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services shared the campaign today, asking people to post the lock with #UnlockDay and #Edovo.1
Who’s holding the lock
Unlock Day launches with artist Halim Flowers. Sentenced at 16 as an adult to two life terms, he spent more than 20 years in prison before his release in 2019. His work has since hung in the Museum of Modern Art’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration.5 For Unlock Day he made the art for a line of clothing priced in locks, where every lock printed on a piece funds a month of education.
Education was my lifeline in prison — it gave me purpose, direction, and the ability to rewrite my story.
Public figures are posting locks today, many of them wearing that gear. Skai Jackson, Kerry Washington and Chelsea Handler are among them, along with Amy Schumer and Rosie O’Donnell.2 A coalition of organizations is posting with them, including MasterClass, The Last Mile, Compassion Prison Project, Lionheart, Second Chancer, the Eckhart Tolle Foundation and Prison Professors, whose founder, Michael Santos, served 26 years in federal prison.4
Unlock Day is built to come back every March 25. This first one is a test of a simple question: if the smallest act on the internet could pay for school behind bars, how many people would take it?
