Made in Carcere introduced TWEET FROM A PRISON project.

To convince women in prison to join Made in Carcere for a paid job, we offer them the opportunity to communicate with the outside world using one social network in an unconventional way: Twitter. A prisoner can sew her tweet on a bracelet made of remnant fabrics and submit it to the outside world – thanks to the Made in Carcere e-commerce website. A special sewing machine is connected directly to the Made In Carcere Twitter page and women can receive automatically tweet replies, instantly sewn by the machine inside the prison. In this way women can overcome the limitation to use Internet in prison.

The product is a colourful bracelet with a tweet sewed. All the tweets are messages of hopes and they generate tweets in answer. They are all unique peaces because the fabrics used and the tweets are different for each bracelets. The user interaction is quite intuitive and the production has already started, the first orders received but the distribution is going to start in the next few days.

Orders increased by 43% compared with the sales of the previous bracelets with no tweets. The prisoners are still sewing many bracelets while the orders overwhelmed the production. The tweet replies will start soon, once that the first batch of bracelets is delivered to the people who purchased them, in the next few days.

The project reached around 500 women in prison. Before the project, 95 of them (20%) were working for Made in Carcere. Today the number increased to 267 (+180%). Most importantly, 80% of 267 prisoners would hopefully not commit crimes after their release.