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jelizondo [soylentnews.org] writes:

TechCrunch has an interesting report [techcrunch.com] on an initiative to rehabilitate inmates in Maine:

If you omit some key details, all Preston Thorpe has to do to become a senior software engineer at a promising tech company is walk through the door.

For about six months, Thorpe was a prolific volunteer contributor to an open source project led by database company Turso [turso.tech]. His work was impressive enough that Turso’s CEO, Glauber Costa, quickly offered him a job. That was also when Costa realized that Thorpe is anything but an ordinary programmer.

“I checked his GitHub profile, and he mentions the fact that he is incarcerated,” Costa told TechCrunch. “It’s a story I’ve never seen before.”

It’s true: Thorpe is serving his 11th year in prison for drug-related crimes. Still, he has worked full-time [turso.tech] from his cell at a venture-funded, San Francisco-based startup since May.

Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody. Though unconventional, these opportunities have proven immensely rehabilitative.

Kicked out of his home as a teenager, Thorpe resorted to selling drugs that he bought from the dark web and ended up in prison by the time he was 20. He got out a few years later, but with no money to his name and nowhere safe to live, he was arrested again 14 months later.

“I was a complete idiot,” Thorpe told TechCrunch over a video call from prison. “I had given up on my life, completely written it off, and just accepted that this was my life and just had no hope.”

Thorpe had given up, but chance had different plans. He was transferred from a prison in New Hampshire to the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine just before the pandemic struck, allowing him to rekindle hope anew.

At the Mountain View prison, Thorpe enrolled remotely at the University of Maine at Augusta. Around the same time, Colby College wanted to hire one of its incarcerated graduate students to be an adjunct professor. It was an unconventional proposal, but the Maine Department of Corrections commissioner, Randall Liberty, felt like taking a risk.

“After consideration, I allowed that to happen, and over time, it’s been very successful,” Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. “His students are able to come visit him at the prison, and he can tour them around. It provides for a real diversity of opinions, thoughts, and backgrounds. It makes for a rich environment to learn.”

“Maine has been a real groundbreaker in this area,” Haley Shoaf, co-executive director of Unlocked Labs [unlockedlabs.org], told TechCrunch. Unlocked Labs, where Thorpe worked prior to Turso, hires incarcerated and formerly incarcerated engineers to make educational software for use in prisons.

“[Maine] put all this infrastructure in place during COVID to allow for remote education, and then once that infrastructure was in place, all of a sudden, it expanded the amount of opportunities people could take advantage of,” Shoaf said.

Commissioner Liberty has worked in law enforcement for 43 years, but it was only after he served in Iraq that his approach to rehabilitation began to shift.

“When I came back, it gave me a heightened sense of understanding post-traumatic stress and trauma, and all of that plays into corrections,” Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. “I began to see the detrimental effects of just the trauma of incarceration, of segregation.”

“I have to be able to explain this to people on the right and the left,” Commissioner Liberty said. “When they hear that Preston is making the kind of money he makes, their jaw drops. And I say to them, ‘If you truly care about making the community safer, if you care about being fiscally responsible, if you care about victims and survivors in the community, this is the way to make them whole.’”

The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners’ return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it’s well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment.

“It’s very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” Commissioner Liberty said. “Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don’t come back at all.”

In the open source community, where developers often can’t put a face to a Discord or GitHub profile, Thorpe was treated like any other contributor. It was the first time in over a decade that he was able to strike a first impression as himself — a Linux-obsessed engineer who’s interested in relational databases — and not as a criminal.

“The worst part about prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal],” Thorpe said. “Letting someone have a career gives you purpose.”

Is remote education and work a better way to rehabilitate people in prison? Are second chances worth the expense? Is the commissioner's last name a fateful omen?

Original Submission