Preston Thorpe is a software engineer in a San Francisco Startup – he is also serving his 11th year in jail

If you leave some major details, all Preston Thorpe has to do to become a senior software engineer in a promising technique company that is running through the door.

For about six months, the threaded database company led a hostile volunteer for an open source project led by the company. TursoHis work was quite impressive that the CEO of Turso, Globber costaQuickly offered him a job. This was also when Costa came to know that Thorpe is anything but a simple programmer.

Costa told Techcrunch, “I checked his github profile, and he mentioned the fact that he is disorganized.” “This is a story that I have never seen before.”

This is true: Thorpe is serving its 11th year jail sentence for drug related crimes. Still, he has Was full -time work An enterprise-funded from May, from his cell in a startup in San Francisco.

“I approached him in January, just to understand her and know her,” Costa said. “Since then, I have held a deep conversation with him about his heart change, inspiring him to live in a situation where he is today … After knowing his story, his story enhances him personally respect for him.”

Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Main State Jail System that allows people to work remote from custody. Although unconventional, these occasions have proved extreme rehabilitation.

As a teenager came out of his house, Thorpe resorted to selling drugs, which he bought from the dark web and ended in jail until he was 20 years old. He exited after a few years, but there was no money for his name and was not safe to live anywhere, he was arrested again after 14 months.

“I was a full stupid,” Thorpe told Techcrunch on a video call from jail. “I left my life, wrote it completely, and just admitted that it was my life and there was no hope.”

second chances

Thorpe gave up, but there were different plans of chance. He was shifted from a prison in New Hampshire to Mountain View Correctional Facility to Mountaineic in Monnic, which was just before the epidemic, allowing him to re -awakened Hope AnU.

“When I came to the main, it was completely different,” he reminded. “I recovered after coming here, and it gave me just a chance – there was no one around me that I had to act or prove myself. It was just me. I really felt that maybe it’s not over; maybe I could really live a normal life. I had such an epiphyne: ‘I am going to make myself.”

In Mountain View Jail, Thorpe enrolled from a distance to the Main University in Augusta. Around the same time, Kolby College wanted to appoint one of his rude graduate students to become an assistant professor. This was an unconventional proposal, but the main department of the Main’s Reform Commissioner, Randel Liberty, felt like taking a risk.

“After the idea, I allowed this to happen, and over time, it has been very successful,” Commissioner Liberty told Tekkranch. “Their students are capable of visiting him in jail, and they can tour around them. It provides a real variety of real variety, ideas and backgrounds. It creates a rich atmosphere to learn.”

Now, about 30 prisoners, while counting the thorpe, are working in the earned living unit, a low restrictive gel facility for prisoners, who have displayed a long track record of good behavior. All prisoners with distance jobs surrender 10% of their salary to the state, as well as any other payment may be required to restore, legal fee or child support.

“Men has been a real groundbreaker in the region,” Haley edema, co-executive director Unlocked labsTold Techcrunch. Unlocked laboratories, where Thorpe worked before Tarso, is hired to make educational software for use in prisons and hired disorganized engineers in the east.

“(Main) placed all this infrastructure during Kovid to allow for distance education, and then once when there was a infrastructure, suddenly, it expanded the amount of opportunities that could take advantage of, which could take advantage of,” the edema said.

Rehabilitation corrected

Commissioner Liberty has worked in law enforcement for 43 years, but only after serving in Iraq, he said that his approach to rehabilitation began to move.

Commissioner Liberty told Tekkachchan, “When I came back, it gave me a high sense of post-tractic stress and trauma, and all plays in improvement,” the Commissioner Liberty told Tekkranch. “I began looking at the harmful effects of trauma of dislocation of isolation.”

While he was the warden of the main state jail – the same jail where he went to meet his father when he was a child – Commissioner Liberty began to implement the programs that address the root causes of the crime: the use of matter, disorder, untreated mental health issues, educational deficits and thus.

Commissioner Liberty said, “I should be able to convince people to the right and left.” “When they hear that Preston is earning the kind of money he makes, their jaw falls. And I say to them,” If you really care about making the community safe, if you care about being seriously responsible, if you care about the victims and the remaining people in the community, it is a way to fulfill them. “

The United States Criminal Justice System suffers from the records, or the former prisoners have returned to custody after their release. Repeating creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But commissioner Liberty has data to show the effort to expand and invest to the treatment of education and addiction.

“It is very short -sighted, ridiculous to lock them and leave them more painful when they arrive, right?” Commissioner Liberty said. “Many states have a 60% return to detention rates. In the main, we hover between 21% to 23% for men; women return to the rate of 9%. And if you participate in college classes in the main, you return at a rate of 0.05% – you don’t return.”

Commissioner Liberty has also found that under his purview, the main gel has become less violent. Last year, the maximum security jail in the main saw only seven attacks on jail employees, dramatic improvements from 87 attacks in 2017.

“When you behave like guys, they become the best version of their own,” said the edema.

Thorpe itself is proof that the toilets of Commissioner Liberty are proving to be successful. The software engineer takes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he feels like a changed man.

“It is like waking up from a dream, from me five years ago,” Thorp said. “All memories that I are on the streets and why I came to jail do not even think it happened to me. It seems that it has happened to someone else.”

In the last three years, Thorpe says that he has spent most of his awake hours online, which he can learn everything about programming.

Costa said, “He was partially doing this because he likes it, but also because he saw the opportunity. And he was right.”

In the open source community, where developers could not put a face for a bickering or gytab profile, Thornar was considered like any other contributor. This was the first time in a decade when he was able to attack a first impression as himself-a Linux-Junctional Engineer who is interested in the relationship database-and not as a criminal.

“The worst part about the prison is that you believe this identity (of a criminal),” Thorp said. “Let someone make someone a career gives you the purpose.”