An $8,094 hoodie: Unlock gear puts the price of prison education on the shirt

Most charity merch says you gave. Unlock gear says how much. Every lock printed on a tee or hoodie pays for a month of education for someone in prison, so each piece costs exactly as many dollars as it carries locks, from a $1 tee with one lock to an $8,094 hoodie covered in them. Today the first pieces ship to donors, after the collection put more than 60 public figures in locks for Unlock Day.

A dollar buys a month of learning

The collection started with a number from Edovo, the nonprofit that puts free courses on prison tablets: about a dollar pays for a month of learning for one person inside. That is a remarkably small price for something that cuts the odds of returning to prison by 43%.³

We wanted a way for the people most committed to Unlock Day to give more than an emoji, and to show it. People give more when they get something back, and more still when the thing they get shows what they gave. So we made the clothes the receipt. Count the locks and you know how many months of education you paid for.

Priced in locks

Most pieces are named for their number, and the number is the price. One is a $1 tee with a single lock. A lock tee comes in at $128. One Sixty is a hoodie at $160. Two Sixty Six Pattern is a cream tee at $266. The tag, the name and the count of locks on the fabric always match.

The locks themselves are small, almost like a knit texture, gathered into patches across chests, sleeves and backs. Up close they read as a pattern. From across a room they read as a crowd. The main mark is a lock drawn as one loose scribble with a keyhole at its center, so even the logo looks like it was made by hand, not stamped by a corporation.

8,094 days, 22 patches

The top piece is a different kind of object. Eight Thousand Ninety Four was made with Halim Flowers, an artist from Washington, D.C. At 16 he was sentenced as an adult to two life terms. He served more than 20 years before he came home in 2019, and his work has since been shown at the Museum of Modern Art.²

His painting sits on the front of a black hoodie. Around it run 8,094 tiny locks, one for every day he was incarcerated, arranged in 22 patches of 368, one patch for each year.

The donation is $8,094. Because each lock also funds a month of education for someone in prison today, one hoodie stands for 8,094 months of learning. His time inside becomes someone else’s time in class.

Halim’s path made him the right partner. After he came home he turned to painting, and the art world noticed fast: fellowships from the Halcyon Arts Lab and Echoing Green, and later a place among the Obama Foundation’s USA Leaders.² His canvases are loud, layered and full of words. On a hoodie they turn a donation into something you’d actually want to wear.

They also give a big gift a life after the check clears. Large donations usually disappear into a spreadsheet. This one comes with a story the donor gets to tell every time someone asks about the hoodie, and the answer is always the same: 8,094 days, 8,094 months.

The number on the tag and the good it does are the same number.

Made to be seen

Clothes only work as a message if someone wears them where people are looking. So for Unlock Day we shipped 86 pieces to more than 60 actors, comedians, chefs and advocates. The list included Morgan Freeman, Chelsea Handler, Rosie O’Donnell, Amy Schumer, Alyssa Milano, Dulé Hill and Tom Colicchio.

Then they posted. Amy Schumer wore a hoodie carrying Halim’s art. Rosie O’Donnell wore the scribbled lock across her chest. Chelsea Handler posted in a tee and a wall of lock emojis, captioned with Edovo’s line, A mind is a terrible thing to jail.

Each post did two jobs. It asked followers for the 🔓, which was free to give. And it showed, on a real person at home, what the campaign was about. The gear put faces to the emoji.

The receipt you wear

The gear was one part of a bigger week. Unlock Day drew 5.8 million unlock emojis from 81,410 people and reached 53 million, each emoji another day of education funded by Edovo’s donors.¹ The clothes carried that campaign off the feed and into the street.

Starting today, the pieces go out to the donors who chose them, each a thank-you with its own math printed right on it. Somewhere, someone is pulling on a hoodie and counting.