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San Quentin Inmates Learn Technology From Silicon Valley Pros
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The Washington Post reports that a rigorous, six-month training program launched by successful tech entrepreneurs for inmates in the decaying San Quentin State Prison is teaching carefully selected inmates the ins and outs of designing and launching technology firms, using local experts as volunteer instructors and the graduates, now trickling out of the penal system, are landing real jobs at real dot-coms. 'We believe that when incarcerated people are released into the world, they need the tools to function in today's high-tech, wired world,' says co-founder Beverly Parenti, who with her husband, Chris Redlitz, has launched thriving companies, including AdAuction, the first online media exchange. During twice-a-week evening lessons, students — many locked up before smartphones or Google— practice tweeting, brainstorm new companies and discuss business books assigned as homework. Banned from the Internet to prevent networking with other criminals, they take notes on keyboard-like word processors or with pencil on paper. The program is still 'bootstrapping,' as its organizers say, with just 12 graduates in its first two years and now a few dozen in classes in San Quentin and Twin Towers. But the five graduates released so far are working in the tech sector. 'This program will go a long way to not only providing these guys with jobs, but it is my hope that they hire people like them who have changed their lives and are now ready to contribute to society, pay taxes, follow the law, support their families,' says former California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation director Matthew Cate who adds he made the right decision to approve the training course. 'All those things contribute to the economy.'"
On one hand, we should be concentrating our resources on people who has not broken the law to the extent that we need to imprison them in order to protect society.
On the other hand, most of the people we put in prison are not a danger to society at all and have simply run afoul of our Jerusalem Jesuit Judicial system.
... that wants a job? GO PAY FOR EDUCATION!... oh you are not law abiding... let me pay for all the needed so you can get the job.
This applies for most European countries aswell
These incarcerated felons will stand a much better chance of becoming productive members of society if they have job opportunities immediately upon release. These same extraordinary gentlemen are more likely by an order of magnitude to f*ck up than another applicant with no such resume.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
"it is my hope that they hire people like them who have changed their lives and are now ready to contribute to society, pay taxes, follow the law, support their families..." Maybe the companies themselves could use a bit of rehabilitation
Isn't it slightly scary? Remember what happened a century ago, when criminals invested in the movie industry? Now we have MAFIAA.
In few years internet might be economically dominated by criminals, not only from Russia or Nigeria, but also US home-grown.
There are millions of poor people who had enough sense not to commit crime who would do ten times more with similar help languish, every politician lectures them to pull themselves up by the boot strap while continuing to cut investment in social programs, every pundit talks about how "poor people don't have ambition" or "poor are the takers and the rich are the makers".
Wish there are charities dedicated to helping the working poor. The government spends billions of dollars in helping middle class people get to and from work in their cars, public transport, traffic management, highway etc etc. But helping an inner city poor person to get to work in the suburbs? Hardly any help. They all live just one blown tire, one alternator going on the blink, one fender bender away from being sucked into the vicious vortex of inability to get to work, inability to earn their way into the work force ...
And all these felons, with newly minted tech skills thrown into the internet where nothing could be regulated or enforced... What can go wrong?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
No, I'm neither giving such firms any seed financing, nor buying their IPOs, when (and if) they ever go public. The probability of being swindled is just too high.
Maybe, the "careful selection" filters out only those, who got a few months in the lock-up for a bar-fight, or a marijuana smoke, or some other minor offense. But even though, people, who avoided the fight and the smoking altogether, seem more deserving.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
sans felons less dangerous than corepirate nazi beltway gunrunners & WMD on credit genociders?
extreme unction does not work spend more time here helping to free the innocent stem cells
Maybe they will get some Cash.
Time to move on to the prison system.
I didn't know you need a PhD for that, or that this would help with technology jobs.
On the other hand, the logic of the Twitter interface has always eluded me to such a degree that perhaps you do. If you can figure out that, a Millennium Prize can't be far away for you!
Ezekiel 23:20
The inmates doing time for theft and fraud related offences might just be the same ones who are stealing the computers at your office.
I guess when H1B workers just weren't cheap fucking enough, no, they need to use prison labor now too? Oh and good luck on getting a job with a felony record paying anything more than minimum wage, but I guess that is the point.
'now i spy on my neighbors using advanced training from prison. they (my neighbors) are the dullest population ever, mostly hobbyist whiners.' no wonder we fly the coup.
Because, y'know, America has always been "land of the outraged, home of the vengeance" since before I was a child. If you didn't want to be treated as a sub-human piece of filth, maybe you shouldn't have broken the law! Or so the paranoid helicopter moms who refuse to prepare their children to become adults continue to parrot on iVillage.com all the time. PROTIP: people who have a decent job, a home in decent repair, food on their plate, and some semblance of a social life with other law-abiding people are way less likely to break in and steal your Xbox for fencing than the guy who can't get a job because felony automatically equals "human trash forever" and there's really no other way to survive out there.
The truth is that "criminals" are still people. You have to treat them as such. Give someone good reasons not to break the law...you know, like all that stuff I just said. They won't be so inclined to break it. Or, to put it another way, the most dangerous person is the one that has nothing left to lose.
I think they're going to remake Con-Air now. And Cyrus "the Virus" will be a grad of the program.
Why don't they just grow programmers and IT techs in Axlotl tanks? They want prisoners, school children, etc to all glut the market with disposable talent. So why not just grow your own? Why doesn't Gates, Zuckerberg, and the rest just create their own army of disposable clones? Put Darth Sidious in charge of the software development industry. Solve the cheap labor problem once and for all.
Bring in nerds to try and turn cons into high tech entrepreneurs? Why not bring in Itzhak Perlman to teach them all how to be first-chair violinists? These guys need anger management, substance abuse counseling, and a job. They don't need angel financing.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
While I expected this barrage of "wait: you're gonna TEACH all those CRIMINALS things? What if they become SMARTER CRIMINALS?" or "what about the INNOCENT PEOPLE who don't get any help?" it's still an eerie feeling.
This is the intellectual elite? Sheesh.
If I had to single it out, I'd say this is the thing most wrong with USA society. It makes me sad.
'This program will go a long way to not only providing these guys with jobs, but it is my hope that they hire people like them who have changed their lives and are now ready to contribute to society, pay taxes, follow the law, support their families,'
Why didn't the milktoast suburbanites of san jose (silicon valley) and surrounding cities do this earlier, say before any of these candidate hires were charged or convicted with a crime? We're forgetting this and many other communities in california were the same ones who decided 3 strikes was a great idea to curb crime. that building prison repositories for nonviolent drug offenders was an easy way to pocket some private prison cash and rid the streets of low income minorities who were supporting their families and paying their taxes as best they could, until you criminalized their very existence. The program fails to take into account the lack of unskilled employment for people who certainly arent going to qualify for a position at google, but perhaps they used to be a good welder or carpenter. the program exists largely as an exercise in the psychology of guilt. the job education also doesnt take into account what being an inmate means in California or other states. It means you emerge with your housing and apartment applications categorically denied because you served time. It also means those nice companies that taught you cobol on your worst days, wouldnt so much as talk to you on the street on your best. you are a branded felon. no matter how much Java you learned you're faced with a system that endorses and accepts the wholesale shunning of an entire class of people from the employment system.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Goodness forbid we try to better ourselves by bettering our society. You guys have no problem letting these people rot in revolving door jails rather than letting them right their wrongs and contribute.
BUT DERP, GIVE NON CONVICTS A CHANCE!!
They have a chance! FFS, making one mistake should not doom you to a life of menial living. I swear being in such a capitalistic society creates some of the most selfish people.
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Honest technical question here. What exactly do the words
keyboard-like word processors
refer to ? typewriters ?
i guess these inmates are older than 30? just asking i guess most of the inmates are 40 or 50? just asking
In the society, the curve with "standard of living" on y axis and effort by the individual on the x axis must be monotonic and increasing. You can mess with the slopes all you want. But if you make the curve non monotonic you will have hiccups.
Anyone not committing a crime must have a better standard of living than anyone who committed a crime.
Anyone working must have a higher standard of living, than anyone welfare.
Violate this principle, you would create incentives to commit crime, incentives to stay on welfare.
But, it is in the larger interest of the society to provide enough avenues and opportunities for people to help themselves. We need strong government incentives and investments for poorer people to see tangibly people working their way out of poverty.
Government must be seen like a private venture capital firm or a large mutual fund. It does not know who among the next generation is going to win who is going to struggle to make a living. But it will invest on everyone. Whoever wins, should return a portion of the winnings back to the government as dividend, you would call it tax. You might argue with the percentage and levels of dividend/taxation. But if you say, "all taxation is theft by the government" you would be a selfish ignorant unpatriotic unAmerican idiot. Government should invest the dividend back on the next generation of people.
The guideline should always be, "working poor doing better than welfare recipients, welfare recipients doing better than criminals".
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
San Quentin, you've been livin' hell to me
You've blistered me since nineteen sixty three
I've seem 'em come and go and I've seen them die
And long ago I stopped askin' why
San Quentin, I hate every inch of you.
You've cut me and you scarred me thru an' thru.
And I'll walk out a wiser weaker man.
Mister Congressman you can't understand.
San Quentin, what good do you think you do?
Do you think I'll be different when you're through?
You bent my heart and mind and you warped my soul,
And your stone walls turn my blood a little cold.
San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell.
May your walls fall and may I live to tell.
May all the world forget you ever stood.
And may all the world regret you did no good.
San Quentin, I hate every inch of you.
What could possibly go wrong?
More "business men" opening tech firms intended to run the actual developers ragged for 5 years before selling out not-so-big-because-the-latest-tech-startup-boom-was-years-ago-already.
At least this proves that all business men are criminals. Why else would they choose criminals to make into new business men?
Are they lying on their job applications ?
I was charged with a felony once and my applications go to the rejected pile.
I have a good job record/education.
Spanking a 12 year old boy for stealing should not end a career.
But being charged with a felony made a normally 4 month job search, 4+ years with no job in sight.
Currently trying to get government health care help,
I am having problems that are looking like I may have MS.
Need a MRI to tell.
Blood tests all ok.
Currently working 7 days a week running a marginal business, so I don't starve.
Smart, honest, hardworking, what kind of monster have I become ?
This is a great idea. And the results are *expected* to be:
a) vastly lower recidivism
b) people *paying* taxes, rather than us paying taxes to keep them incarcerated.*
* The US has had more people in jail since '04 than the Soviet Union did at its worst under Stalin. Enjoy paying taxes for that?
The questions are:
a) is this the actual result, or do they wind up trying a new class of crime?
b) one of the major factors that results in crime is... gosh, NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND A JOB.
c) and now that they've done that, what about all the other prisons and jails in the country - say, two-three million people?
For example, there's the county jail in Brevard, Co, FL, where Cape Canaveral resides. Many of the women there
are in for prostitution, because find a job? They can't do simple math, know how to write a letter, get an
apartment, or open a checking account. (I have inside information on this, as you might guess.)
d) what about the large number of regular criminals, who turned to crime because they were just too stupid to
be able to find a job?
And before any of you libertarians start up, telling people to leave where they're grown up, to move somewhere that they have *zero* contacts, resources, or support system is an idiotic idea - please leave that in your video games; that's not real world.option.
mark
Kinda seems like hiring somebody straight out of rehab to tend bar. Maybe that's the idea, though; channel those criminal impulses into "socially useful" activities?
Sorry if that seems harsh. No offense, guys, but is there really *that* much difference between Sanford Wallace and what most search engines do these days?
Would you rather have them learning to be a better criminal?
My understanding is that's the alternative education opportunity that prisons provide.