San Quentin’s 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 year’s 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 can’t use the internet, the dev shop’s 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 résumés, Redlitz says. “It’s about the quality of your work, not your background.” Inmates can’t go online, but coding connects them to the 21st-century economy they’ll enter when they’re free.