How a Prison Program Is Encouraging Lifelong Learning

The Last Mile trains incarcerated folks to become web developers and coders, so they are better equipped to leave prison and enter the workforce.

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When Jason Jones entered San Quentin State Prison in 2013, he did not know anything about computer coding. But thanks to an innovative program called The Last Mile, an eleven-year-old group that trains incarcerated people to become web developers and coders, he was able to leave prison in 2018 with marketable skills.

“A massive number of people were returning to prison as recidivists. We realized that having a marketable skill was the key to successful re-entry for those going home.”

Although joining the workforce was not without challenges—among them being the sole Black professional at his first job—Jones is now using his experience to mentor others as the senior manager of partnerships at The Last Mile. Jones had previously been The Last Mile’s remote instruction manager.

Since the program’s founding in 2010, it has established paid training programs in five states—California, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Michigan—and expects to open new classrooms in Montana and North Dakota within the next few months. To date, approximately 750 students have received instruction in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL, Node.js, and other computer languages, and graduates have found post-prison work with companies including Square, Fandom, Checkr, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Pilot, Slack, Dropbox, and Zoom.

Not surprisingly, the group has attracted broad public support--financial, in-kind, and technical. 

And it is growing fast.

ProPublica.org lists The Last Mile’s 2019 receipts at more than $3.5 million, with a $2 million grant from Google and $850,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

But as essential as outreach and fundraising are to The Last Mile’s success and anticipated expansion, co-founder Beverly Parenti says that the ability to attract support pales in comparison to what she sees as the program’s greatest achievement: Not a single graduate of The Last Mile has returned to prison.

Statistics demonstrate how anomalous this is. According to Working Nation, while 650,000  people leave prison each year, nearly two-thirds are reincarcerated within thirty-six months. 

“When my husband, businessman Chris Redlitz, and I started The Last Mile, the state of California was spending more than $60,000 a year to incarcerate each individual but it was not leading to justice,” Parenti tells The Progressive. “A massive number of people were returning to prison as recidivists. We realized that having a marketable skill was the key to successful re-entry for those going home.”

Not everyone, of course, is interested in either coding or web development, so the program is currently in the throes of expanding its training options. “We are currently developing curriculum tracks that will appeal to a broader audience,” Parenti explains, “but everything will be technology-related and teach digital skills.” The goal, she continues, is to set up fifty classrooms in fourteen states by 2025.

Parenti sounds both enthusiastic and proud as she ticks off the program’s achievements and lists its future goals. At the same time, she is clear that she attributes The Last Mile’s success to its careful vetting of participants.

“The students we admit can have no behavioral infractions for a minimum of eighteen months before starting classes,” she says. “We look for men and women who have used the time they’ve been incarcerated wisely. We want people who have shown a commitment to self betterment. They need to have confidence in themselves and hope for the future. Furthermore, they need to be resilient, determined, and have the drive to study hard because learning to code without Internet access is difficult.”

Jason Jones agrees, underscoring the importance of personal resilience as crucial for both students and instructors.  

“Teachers, many of them Last Mile alumni, have to figure out how to simulate the Internet to fill the gap, since the Internet is not allowed in prison,” he explains. “When I was enrolled in the program, four of us built our own version of Google so people had a model that could be used to download a sample PDF or a video, but it did not have to go through an Internet portal.” 

Despite this and other creative hacks, Jones understands that these measures will likely be insufficient to fully prepare people for workforce entry. 

In addition to technical skills, Jones says the program also must prepare graduates for a range of real-life situations, from how to pick a benefits package to understanding the difference between salaried and hourly wages, to answering questions about where they learned to code, to how to find affordable housing and childcare.

“I had to learn a lot of soft skills,” Jones says. This is why he is hoping that a large-scale, paid apprenticeship program can be established as a middle ground between incarceration and full-time employment. “There are so many things people need to get used to, including making the transition to using the actual Internet, that they may never have experienced before,” Jones says. This can include how to navigate and integrate parole into a work schedule.

“There’s a lot more than technical capabilities involved in being job ready,” Jones says, which is why The Last Mile has implemented a twice-weekly “morning coffee hour” to give program graduates a chance to talk amongst themselves, catch up with one another, and ask Jones and other alumni about anything that is troubling them. “It gives them someone to lean on,” Jones says.

“Everything is live, but is done remotely,” Jones explains. This allowed classes to continue throughout the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, albeit with periodic glitches, lock-downs, and other obstacles in some of the prisons. 

COVID-19 notwithstanding, Parenti concedes that despite the program’s best efforts, not every student who enrolls in The Last Mile’s two six-month modules finishes them. Those who do, however, typically sing their praises.

“The Last Mile has given me the hope and foundation to have a new life once released, and I intend to be part of The Last Mile and justice reform for the rest of my life,” Alexa Whedon wrote in a letter to The Progressive. (Whedon, a prisoner in Indiana, was profiled in an article in the magazine’s June/July issue about a program that works to undo wrongful convictions, as she maintains is true for her.) 

This affirmation thrills Parenti and Jones, and they are eager to see where Whedon ends up once she is released in mid-2023.

Meanwhile, The Last Mile is working to make sure that Whedon returns home with the skills she needs to get a well-paying job to support herself and her family. They’re also making sure that she—like every other program graduate—is given both a laptop and a lifetime subscription to UDEMY.com, an online educational platform that offers classes in everything from video production, to iPhone photography, to beginning guitar.

“We want to encourage everyone to be a lifelong learner,” Jones says.