California prisoners to get jobs as programmers

SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — California inmates can earn cash making license plates for state residents. Soon they'll be able to get paid for writing code.

In a first for the country, prisoners at San Quentin State Prison are being considered for jobs as computer programmers. If everything goes as planned, they will work on projects for private businesses, all from inside the prison's walls.

Officials at San Quentin, located just miles but a world away from the heart of San Francisco's technology industry, made the announcement as the first group of inmates graduated from Code.7370, a new course that teaches the basics of coding.

Five private companies have expressed interest in hiring inmates as programmers and are being vetted, said Chuck Pattillo, general manager of the California Prison Industry Authority.

Inmates will be paid a wage comparable to entry-level programmers in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pattillo said. Deductions will be taken from that pay for room and board at the prison, support for inmates' families, compensation for victims and a mandatory savings account that inmates can tap after they are released, Pattillo said.

Employing prisoners as programmers gives inmates valuable skills that are in hot demand in Silicon Valley and could repatriate some programming jobs that have flowed overseas, said Chris Redlitz, co-founder of Code.7370.

"This is a pivotal point in our program and hopefully a template for programs in the future," Redlitz said. "We are really excited about how this thing can grow."

If the program is successful at San Quentin, it could expand to other correctional facilities in California and around the country.

Brant Choate, California's superintendent of correctional education, said he has been contacted by 14 states. Code.7370 is "catching national attention and probably worldwide attention," he said.

Code.7370 is one of a growing number of initiatives to ease overcrowding in California prisons and reduce high rates of recidivism, but it's the first to prepare inmates for the growing opportunities in the technology world.

Prison officials say these kinds of apprenticeship programs have a 7.1% recidivism rate vs. 61% for the general prison population. Code.7370 costs the state about $60,000 a year.

It's the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti. Redlitz, a venture capitalist, and Parenti, a business consultant, started out teaching entrepreneurship in 2010 to inmates through a non-profit program called The Last Mile.

Last fall, they launched Code.7370, which got its name from the Standard Industrial Classification Code for computer programming.

Over the course of six months, the program prepares prisoners, especially those serving long sentences, for a digital world that is largely foreign to them. Many of these prisoners have never sent an email, used a smartphone, searched for something on Google or logged into Facebook.

Four days a week, inmates dressed in prison blues hunch over keyboards at long wooden tables in an old industrial building at San Quentin that used to be a print shop.

They learn to build websites for 35 cents an hour, but they can't access the Internet. Prison rules bar inmates from having Internet access. So class material is uploaded to computers and instructors from San Francisco coding school Hack Reactor are beamed onto a large screen through an administrator's personal computer.

Four in the class did not graduate and will undergo additional training.

Chris Schuhmacher, who is eligible for parole in June after serving a long stretch for second-degree murder, was one of 16 inmates who graduated from Code.7370 on Monday to big cheers and broad smiles.

At the beginning of the coding course, Schuhmacher says he was at "ground zero" with "nothing but hunger and a willingness to learn" how to code. Now he has logged 679 hours coding and that, he says, has changed "the trajectory of my life."

Schuhmacher says his goal is to build apps that "change people's lives for the better." Code.7370 has already changed his for the better. To pay that forward, he plans to volunteer 679 hours at Hack Reactor after he's released from San Quentin.