Gallery: Inside the Classroom Where San Quentin Inmates Learn to Code
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At San Quentin State Prison in California, inmates are barred from using the internet, but a new project offers a chance for them to take part in the tech tranformations they might otherwise have missed.
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The Last Mile Works is a full-fledged web development shop where inmates help build apps and other software for everyone from tiny startups to established companies like Airbnb.
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The men in the program make $16.77 an hour—not much by Silicon Valley standards. But the real goal is to help them land jobs once they’re out.
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San Quentin’s dev shop is the brainchild of Chris Redlitz, a venture capitalist who founded the Last Mile as a nonprofit in 2010 to offer inmates entrepreneurial training.
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Working with the coding school Hack Reactor, Redlitz spun up a tech incubator inside the prison called Code.7370 (after the government classification number for software companies).
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Inmates learn JavaScript, Python, and WordPress before presenting their portfolios at a Demo Day. By year’s end, the program will be active in three additional prisons.
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The Last Mile Works gives Code.7370 grads a way to get real-world experience on the inside.
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Because they can’t use the Internet, the dev shop’s coders work on a closed network, and a manager pushes the results to the outside. Any money the shop makes is funneled back into the nonprofit.
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The door leading to the classroom where inmates learn to code.
