Inmates are learning to code in prison. Jobs may be hard to come by

(CNN) — Graduation day dawns sunny and warm for the first day of November, but the weather hardly matters for the joint MIT-Georgetown coding class, which takes place at the Correctional Treatment Facility, one of the two facilities that make up the DC jail complex.

For twelve weeks, the students worked hard, hunched over laptops, squinting at characters and lines of code. Their work culminated in this: websites built from scratch and a certificate acknowledging their participation in college-accredited courses from these prestigious institutions. Today, they join over 200 other students at correctional facilities across the country who have completed the Brave Behind Bars program since the group’s founding in 2021.

A graduation celebration looks different behind bars. Yellow and blue frosted cupcakes lined up next to lemonade and iced tea and chicken sandwiches sit waiting while the students proudly pose for photos with Marisa Gaetz, Brave Behind Bar’s co-founder. The food arrived much later than the students but no one seemed to mind; here you get used to waiting — especially for the rare celebratory occasion.

Gaetz made the trek down from Massachusetts, taking a break from her PhD work to be here. She said she didn’t want to miss the chance to shake the students’ hands and tell them face to face all the things she enjoyed about working with each one of them. Her slow, precise way of speaking mirrors the painstaking work that these students have done in writing code to power websites.

One by one, the students come up, take their certificate and pose for a photo with the people who made this program possible. The photos will have to do as a keepsake of this moment: the students can’t keep the physical copy – a precaution so no one else duplicates the certificate trying to pass it off as their own, an attempt to demonstrate good behavior to a judge without actually taking the class. These certificates will have to go to the students’ lawyers for safekeeping. It’s just one of the many precautions put in place for this course, one of the newest additions to prison and jail education. Here, safety questions always dominate.

Whitelisted sites, limited computer time

In a classroom next door, Taylor Swift plays over computer speakers as teams of two hunch over metal boxes and wiring. These students have chosen to learn about another piece of our information economy: repairing telecom equipment. The same tools these students wield to learn this lucrative craft could pose a real danger to their fellow detainees or jail staff outside this classroom. Their teacher, Timothy Saunders, painstakingly checks in and out the tools each class. He proudly tells me they’ve not had any issues on the safety front.

Saunders boasts students can employ the skills they learn here to eventually earn six figure jobs. That is, of course, dependent on two things: that they get out, and once they do, that someone will hire them. The class is one of the many available to students in the lower security of DC’s two jail facilities. Administrators and detainees alike are grateful for the opportunities.

Study after study shows incarcerated education helps do what citizens and policymakers alike say they want: keep people from committing more crimes. However, getting education for many people behind bars remains a challenge.

Thirty years ago, the 1994 crime bill drastically cut funding for prisoner education. And while lawmakers restored this money in 2020, across the country the gap between what kind of education prisoners would like and what they can access remains vast.

This is doubly true because many of those behind bars lack even high school education – to say nothing of college or post-secondary training.

The team responsible for education at the DC jail includes Jason McCrady, a former public-school counselor who noticed that so many of his students ended up behind bars that he got hired by the jail system to continue providing what education he could for those students.

Technology education efforts got a boost during the pandemic, as visits and in-person services got further curtailed, and jails and prisons incorporated more digital communication tools. In the DC jail, this meant secure tablets. These devices greatly expanded the opportunities those awaiting trial would have for education and communication.

At the same time, facilities have put guardrails in place. Communications, much like those over the phone, can be monitored. The functionality is limited. The students in the coding class have even more access to technology but unlike their peers on the outside, they only get limited hours each day on the laptops they use to code and they can only visit a limited number of sites pre-approved by the jail.

For Gaetz, and her students, jumping through the hoops is worth it.

Not taking education for granted

The United States, put plainly, locks up a lot of people. But the people behind bars aren’t evenly distributed across society. This means that many people in the United States don’t have a personal connection to a system that detains and monitors nearly five million people, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Justice. This lack of connection, activists say, is one of the stumbling blocks to reform.

For Gaetz, her connection to the correction system began in 2016. Her undergrad philosophy professor, Lee Perlman, taught a course at a local prison and so Gaetz tagged along.

“Within minutes of sitting in that class my perception of incarcerated people was transformed,” she recalls. “Someone in that class told me that before he had taken classes while incarcerated no one had believed in him. And this one time a week not only is he treated like a human being but a student and someone whose opinion matters.”

She immediately understood the power of education in an entirely different paradigm than her own.

“MIT has some of the smartest students in the world,” she says “we all kind of feel like we’d do well and here I was with these students who had never had the encouragement that many of us take for granted.”

She signed up to assist in that philosophy class.

The years went on, she finished up her undergrad degree in math and philosophy and started a PhD program in theoretical math. She’d dabbled in computer science courses and taught herself to code as a kind of hobby. When the pandemic struck, and jails and prisons began experimenting with more connectivity, Gaetz – along with Emily Harberg and Martin Nisser – launched a coding boot camp in 2021, first starting with women’s correctional facilities in New England.

The program is straightforward. The trio aided by an ever-expanding group of expert mentors teach the students the basics of how to write code, with a bespoke website serving as their final project. But as with any education, along the way, the students pick up additional skills. Coding requires patience and confidence, but also collaboration.

“A lot of people on Day One are honest and say they don’t think they can do it,” Gaetz says. ”Seeing that they’re able to do it can be really empowering.”

Gaetz understands that some might feel uneasy about teaching even basic coding to people who’ve committed or are accused of committing crimes. But she maintains students graduate with the ability only to build a website, not hack or commit other cybercrimes.

Opportunity outside of prison

Although there are already rumblings of AI taking away coding jobs, Gaetz says today AI gets used mostly to assist in coding while most software engineering jobs still require an actual person. Besides, some of the students who come to class have little experience with computers, so the course builds literacy, confidence and problem-solving skills alongside the basic coding. All skills that most employers expect their new hires to have.

Which leads to the next obvious question: Can these students use these skills to earn a living?

In the DC classroom, the students put together websites speaking to their passions or interests. Their topics varied: One student with scotch tape holding his glasses together, created a site to explain the high sociological toll of poverty. Another made a site as a tribute to the positive power of music. The class’s sole female student, Iesha Marks, who goes by Tazz, built a website to help women, like her, who suffer domestic violence.

Like so many behind bars, Tazz’s story contains elements of trauma. Her defense team wrote in court documents of her PTSD from a stabbing. And she, in turn, stands accused of causing grave harm. In 2021 she pleaded guilty to attempted assault with a gun. And though she’s professed her innocence, she’s been held on charges of that she shot and killed a man, Donald Childs, on a busy DC street in July of 2023 an offense to which she has pleaded not guilty. Her defense holds up her good record during the year plus of her detention, including her participation in the coding class, as evidence she’s demonstrating stability and should be released with supervision so she can care for her children ahead of the trial. A judge disagreed and ordered her held until her trial date, May of 2026.

In between bites of her lunch, Tazz recalled that at the beginning, she wasn’t sure she could tackle this topic. Now scrolling through her site, full of resources for other survivors, she lights up with the possibility: maybe she created space for other women to find help and hope.

It’s not just Tazz in DC. Gaetz explains that some of their earliest successes involved working with women behind bars. Some of the coding program’s first students were female inmates in New England. Some of the alumni from this group created and maintain a site called Reentry Sisters devoted to helping women in Maine rebuild their lives when they return to society from long prison stints. The well-designed site has hopeful stories and helpful tips. It also serves as a reminder of the perilous period that awaits even the most diligent student of this program.

‘I have gray hair because of coding’

Steve Johnson, an early graduate of the program, recalls that fear well. Released from prison during 2021 he remembers the fear when his parole officer demanded he get work within two weeks. With a conviction for armed robbery, despite time served, he struggled to land a job.

He turned to the internet, searching for someone who could help him find a job or get the education he’d need for this new economy. The search yielded a familiar name: Lee Perlman, Gaetz’s undergraduate professor. “I cold called him,” Johnson recalled and within a day they’d connected, made a plan and got Johnson into the coding program. Johnson loved Brave Behind Bars so much he stayed on after graduation as a teaching assistant. “That role has been very helpful being on the other end, when you’re teaching something to someone you have to know it inside out,” he says. “The thing that I like the most is being able to help someone who is not very proficient and making their life easier by integrating some sort of tech-based solution for them.”

Johnson’s story, by many measures, represents a best-case scenario. In the years since his release he learned a top digital skill, is teaching others, and has done numerous contract coding jobs. He loves it because although it’s hard and coding “has given me gray hair” you can work “anywhere with Wi-Fi.” His experience has also led to an appointment on a board that advises governments on how to think about education behind bars – something he evangelizes and deeply hopes to improve. Put simply: Johnson loves finding a problem and working to identify solutions.

Yet even with this experience, Johnson worries that his past still holds him back. His jobs have all thus far been with organizations interested in rehabilitation and prison reform. He wonders if they hire him to get some kind of credibility in the space. He longs to be judged, for good or for ill, for his current skill not his criminal record.

So now he’s trying for yet another reinvention, a 17-week tech incubator program with Defy Ventures, an organization that teaches formerly incarcerated people business chops. He figures if he can’t convince the boss of his bonafides, maybe he could become the boss himself. Then he could hire whomever he wanted based on what they bring to the job today and not get hung up on anyone’s past.

This is what some refer to as a double sentence: the steep hill people returning from prison have to face in order to get jobs or rent apartments. Once you’ve done the time, how do you convince people they can trust you? For Johnson the question is a pragmatic one. “Do you want your neighbor to re-offend?” he muses. The data on this point is clear: better education and job opportunities make that prospect less likely. And here again, Johnson has adeptly identified the problem, but unlike writing a code, this problem lacks a tidy solution. Changing minds takes more time and patience even than fixing buggy code.

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