Preston Thorpe is a software engineer in a San Francisco startup – he also purges his 11th year in prison

If you omit certain key details, everything Preston Thorpe must do to become a senior software engineer in a promising technological company crosses the door.

For about six months, Thorpe was a prolific voluntary contributor to an open source project led by the Turso database company. His work was impressive enough for the CEO of Turso, Glauber Costa, quickly offered him a job. It was also then that Costa realized that Thorpe is anything but an ordinary programmer.

“I checked his Github profile and he mentions the fact that he is incarcerated,” Costa told Techcrunch. “It’s a story that I have never seen before.”

It’s true: Thorpe purges his 11th year in prison for drug -related crimes. However, he has worked full time since his cell in a startup based in San Francisco funded by San Francisco since May.

“I contacted him in January, just to understand and get to know him,” said Costa. “Since then, I had deep conversations with him about his change of heart which led him to be in the position he is today … Knowing that his story has increased our respect for him personally.”

Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine’s prison penitentiary system which allows imprisoned people to work on jobs far from the guard. Although unconventional, these opportunities proved to be extremely rehabilitating.

Launched from his home in adolescence, Thorpe used the sale of drugs he bought at Dark Web and ended up in prison at the age of 20. He was released a few years later, but without money in his name and nowhere because of living, he was arrested again 14 months later.

“I was a full idiot,” Thorpe Techcrunch told a video call from the prison. “I had abandoned my life, I completely described it, and I just agreed that it was my life and that I had no hope.”

Second chances

Thorpe had abandoned, but luck had different plans. He was transferred from a New Hampshire prison at the Mountain View Correctional Center in Maine just before the pandemic strikes, allowing him to revive hope again.

“When I arrived in Maine, it was completely different,” he said. “Covid occurred just after my arrival here, and that just gave me a chance – there was no one around what I had the impression of having to act or prove myself. It was just me. I really felt like it was not over;

In Mountain View prison, Thorpe signed up at the University of Maine in Augusta. Above the same time, Colby College wanted to hire one of his graduate students imprisoned to become auxiliary professor. It was an unconventional proposal, but the commissioner of the Maine’s Correctional Services Ministry, Randall Liberty, wanted to take a risk.

“After consideration, I allowed it to happen, and over time, it was very successful,” said Commissioner Liberty in Techcrunch. “His students are able to visit him in the prison, and he can visit them. This allows a real diversity of opinions, thoughts and horizons. This gives a rich environment to learn. “

Now, around thirty detainees, including Thorpe, are employed while living in the deserved life unit, a less restrictive penitentiary establishment for prisoners who have presented a long experience of good conduct. All detainees with distant jobs make 10% of their state wages, as well as all other payments that may be necessary for restitution, legal costs or child alimony.

“Maine was a real trigger in this area,” said Haley Shoaf, co-director of unlocking laboratories. The unlocked laboratories, where Thorpe worked before Turso, hiring incarcerated engineers and formerly incarcerated to make educational software to be used in prisons.

“”[Maine] Put all these infrastructure in place during COVID to allow a distance education, then once this infrastructure was in place, suddenly, it has widened the amount of opportunities that people could benefit, “said Shoaf.

Well -made rehabilitation

Commissioner Liberty works in the application of laws for 43 years, but it was only after having served in Iraq that his approach to rehabilitation began to change.

“When I came back, it gave me an increased feeling to understand the stress and post-traumatic trauma, and all of this plays in corrections,” he told Techcrunch. “I started to see the harmful effects of the only trauma of incarceration, segregation.”

While he was the director of the prison of the state of Maine – the same prison where he visited his father when he was a child – the Liberty Commissioner began to implement programs which deal with the profound causes of the crime: disorders of the consumption of substances, non -treated mental health problems, educational deficits, etc.

“I must be able to explain this to people on the right and on the left,” he said. “When they hear that Preston earns the kind of money he earns, their jaw falls. And I say to them:” If you really care to make the community safer, if you care to be taxually responsible, if you care about the victims and survivors of the community, it is the way to make them entirely. “”

The United States Criminal Justice system is prey to recurrence, or a return of prisoners in police custody after their release. The repair of the release creates a financial burden on the State and its taxpayers. But the Liberty Commissioner has the data to show that it is well worth the effort and investment to extend access to education and the treatment of drug addiction.

“It’s very short, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” He said. “Many states have 60% return to childcare rates. In Maine, we oscillate between 21% and 23% for men; Women return to a rate of 9%. And if you attend university courses in Maine, you return to a rate of 0.05% – you are not coming back at all. ”

Commissioner Liberty also found that, according to his field, Maine’s prisons have become less violent. Last year, a maximum security prison in Maine only experienced seven assaults against prison personnel, a spectacular improvement compared to 87 assaults in 2017.

“When you treat people like people, they become the best version of themselves,” said Shoaf.

Thorpe himself is proof that the work of the Liberty Commissioner prove to be successful. The software engineer assumes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he feels like a changed man.

“It’s like waking up a dream five years ago,” said Thorpe. “All the memories I have of the streets and why I came to prison, I even have the impression that it happened to me. I have the impression that it happened to someone else.”

Over the past three years, Thorpe says that he has spent most of his online watch hours, learning everything he can on programming.

“He did this in part because he loves him, but also because he saw an opportunity in this opportunity to be seen. And he was right,” said Costa.

In the open source community, where developers can often not put a face to a Discord or Github profile, Thorpe has been treated like any other contributor. It was the first time in addition to a decade that he could make a first impression as himself – an engineer obsessed with Linux interested in relational databases – and not as a criminal.

“The worst part of the prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal]”Said Thorpe.” Let someone have a career gives you a goal. »»