Венчурний стартап зі США взяв на віддалену роботу програміста, який перебуває у в'язниці / Depositphotos
The venture capital startup Turso had been working with a remote developer for about six months when it discovered that he was in prison.
Preston Thorpe, an American, is currently serving a sentence for drug trafficking in Mountain View Prison, but he is also working remotely in IT. One of his latest projects was a collaboration with the Turso ops project, where the developer proved himself so well that CEO Glauber Costa offered him a full-time job.
However, there is one interesting point — Costa did not know that Thorpe was behind bars until now.
«I checked his GitHub profile and found a mention of him being in prison,» Costa says. «I had never come across stories like this before… Since then, I have had deep conversations with him about the change of heart that led him to the position he is in today… Knowing his story has increased our respect for him personally».
This is just one of the successful examples of a pilot program introduced in the Maine prison system that allows remote work in custody. Despite the fact that these tools are unconventional, they are already showing good rehabilitation results.
Thorpe was kicked out of his home as a teenager, and he started selling drugs on the darknet to make extra money. At the age of 20, he was imprisoned for the first time, and when he was released, he had no money and no shelter, so he was periodically sent back to prison.
«I was a complete idiot», Thorpe says now. «I gave up on my life, wrote it off completely, and just accepted that it was what it was and that I had no hope».
Thorpe got a second chance when he was transferred from a prison in New Hampshire to Mountain View — there he was able to enroll in distance learning at the University of Maine at Augusta and later found his first job.
Currently, about 30 inmates work remotely at the correctional facility, but they also contribute 10% of their earnings to the state or to other payments that may be required for damages, legal fees, or child support.
«Our staff is a true innovator in the industry,» says Haley Schoaf, Co-CEO of Unlocked Labs.
Unlocked Labs, where Thorpe worked before Turso, hires inmates and former engineers to create educational software for use in prisons.
«They created all this infrastructure during COVID to provide distance education, and then once that infrastructure was in place, it suddenly expanded the list of opportunities that these people could take advantage of».
Thorpe himself says that over the past three years, he has spent most of his time on the Internet, learning everything he could about programming.
«He did it partly because he enjoyed it, but also because he saw it as an opportunity to be noticed. And he was right», — Costa adds.
When Thorpe signed up for Discord or GitHub, for the first time in over 10 years, he felt that he was treated like any other member — an engineer passionate about programming, not a criminal.
Source: TechCrunch
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