Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
No need. There are plenty of lucrative job opportunities awaiting a released convict with outdated education.
Mugger, burgler, car thief, drug dealer, extortionist...
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
Were you not a child born into the world...
... naked, screaming, unknowing? To grow up into the adult you are now, did not YOUR PARENTS pay for your clothes, shelter, food, education, safety? Oh no, because you already had all that and you never needed help from anybody. And it's obvious everybody in jail also had those same advantages, they just chose to squander all that and it's not possible that they may have been backed into it at all.
Sure, law abiding people deserve better. They deserve education, healthcare, housing and food. The fact that prisons provide these free of charge to prisoners is irrelevant.
They also deserve lower crime rates, and hopefully schemes of this kind will mean these offenders are less likely to re-offend. It's going to depend on the numbers. It's an unfortunate reality that justice isn't necessarily fair for people who do the right thing.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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.
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.
The point of my post was not that recidivism rates are 60% or 80% or any specific value - making an estimate just helps to establish the threshold for cost savings. (If recidivism was zero, we wouldn't need this.) The point is that if this program reduces recidivism by any measurable amount then it is a net economic gain instead of some kind of "free government handouts for felons" as the OP was claiming.
And yes, I think we're far better off providing free educations to people before they become criminals. But because we live in the real world, that doesn't always happen. If we simply ignore the damaged parts of society, they won't heal themselves.
John