At San Quentin State Prison in California, inmates are barred from using the internet, and many have been serving time since before smartphones existed. But a new project offers a chance to take part in the tech transformations they might otherwise have missed. 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. The men in the program make $16.77 an hournot much by Silicon Valley standards. But the real goal is to help them land jobs once theyre out.
San Quentins 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. 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). Inmates learn JavaScript, Python, and WordPress before presenting their portfolios at a Demo Day. By years end, the program will be active in three additional prisons.
The Last Mile Works gives Code.7370 grads a way to get real-world experience on the inside. Because they cant use the internet, the dev shops 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. The tech industry is the perfect fit for job seekers with unusual rsums, Redlitz says. Its about the quality of your work, not your background. Inmates cant go online, but coding connects them to the 21st-century economy theyll enter when theyre free.
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