All my ranting today about lowered barriers to entry and what have you are almost totally confirmed by thia article in Wired about a company that digitally places prisoners in better surroundings. So the general idea is that prisoners, many of whom have families or loved ones, would prefer that not all of the pictures taken of them show their incarceration. To quote the article:

“Family members have dozens of photos taken over many years in the visiting room, which have the same cement or lackluster background,” says site staff member Casey Maxwell. “Children of incarcerated people would go to school and want to show photos of their family, but were embarrassed at having nothing but visiting room photos to show their friends.”

So someone had this idea to take those photos taken in the prison waiting rooms and place those in the picture in new surroundings – say, in a home-like setting or in a hotel or on a resort beach. Aside from preventing embarrassment and marginalization for those whose loved ones are incarcerated, the article, quoting Joan Petersilia, a visiting professor of law at Stanford University, points out a secondary benefit:

“It allows inmates to see themselves differently…. Why not give them something pleasant to aspire to?”

All this for about $19 a photo! And how much does it cost the folks doing it? Well, let’s assume the following:

• They have a legally purchased copy of Photoshop, which currently sells for about $560 at Amazon. If they download The GIMP this cost goes to $0.
• They are good enough using their image program that each image requires about 20 minutes of time to edit
• They use a service like oFoto to print out the images, costing roughly $1.50 a photo, depending on size. If they have enough volume, they can probably cut costs by purchasing an in-house printer.
• They own a decent flat top scanner to get the image on their computer in the first place, like the Canon CanoScan 4200F, about $80 at Amazon

Now, they charge $10 per photo to be scanned and edited, then about $9.00 per photo print (a sheet of wallets is $9, a single 5×7 is $9, etc.). If the average order is for a single photo and a single print, for a total of $19, they’ll have to sell about 35-40 such packages just to break even on their initial costs (and only about four or five if they use The Gimp). After that, they’re making at least $10 on every image edit and $7.50 on every print, not including labor charges. If they’re able to edit one image every 20 minutes, that’s $30 an hour right there. If that means three prints sold per hour, you’re looking at a total of $52.50 per hour, all pure profit. Hosting the web site shouldn;t cost more than $15/mo, making it virtually negligable, and the cost of building and maintaining it, assuming they did it themsevles, is just labor.

According to the article, they have about 500 customers so far. If each one got the basic package for $19 a piece, that means the company has grossed $9,500 on this project. Minus startup costs (about $640 for the scanner and Photoshop) and cost of prints ($750) they’ve netted $8110 for about 166 hours of work, or about $50 an hour. Not bad at all! While they aren’t ready to compete head-to-head with the likes of Kodak or JC Penny’s, for that matter, that simply doesn’t matter. They have an underserved market of approximately 2,131,180 potential customers according to the US Department of Justice. If even only 1/3 of those prisoners have families, and of them only one percent use this photo service, they’re still looking at 7,103 potential customers – which translates into about $118,398 (three pictures done in an hour at about $50 an hour). They’ve only just scratched the surface!

All that for a total initial outlay of probably $640. And, truth be told, their site seems to indicate that, while the money is certainly nice, they feel they are providing a valued and important service that actually helps improve the lives of their customers. How in the world can you beat that?