Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup.

If you omit some important details, Preston Thorpe all have to do to become a senior software engineer for a promising high-tech company.

For about six months, Thorpe has been a prolific volunteer contributor to an open source project led by database company Turso. His work was very impressive, but CEO Glauber Costa quickly offered him the job. That was also when Costa realized that Soap wasn’t a normal programmer.

“I checked his github profile and he’s referring to the fact that he’s in jail,” Costa told Techcrunch. “It’s a story I’ve never seen before.”

That’s true. Thorpe serves 11 years in prison for drug-related crimes. Still, he has been working full-time from his mobile since May at a venture-funded San Francisco-based startup.

“I reached out to him in January, I just got to understand and get to know him,” Costa said. “Since then, I have had a deep conversation with him about him and his change in his heart, and he is where he is today… Knowing his story has personally increased our respect for him.”

Thorpe is part of the Maine Prison System’s experimental program, allowing incarcerated people to do work far from detention. Although unconventional, these opportunities prove highly rehabilitative.

Thorpe, who was kicked out of his home as a teenager, relied on selling drugs he purchased from the Dark Web and was placed in prison by the time he was 20 years old.

“I was a complete idiot,” Thorpe told TechCrunch about the video call from prison. “I gave up on my life, I wrote it down completely and accepted that this was my life and that there was no hope.”

Second chance

Thorpe had given up, but Opportunity had different plans. He was transported from a New Hampshire prison to Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine just before the pandemic hit, allowing Hope to rekindle.

“When I came to Maine, it was completely different,” he recalled. “Covid happened right after I came here and it gave me a chance — no one felt like I had to act or prove myself, it was just me.

At Mountain View Prison, Thorpe registered remotely at the University of Maine’s Augusta university. Around the same time, Colby College wanted to hire one of the incarcerated graduate students to become an adjunct professor. It was an unconventional proposal, but Randall Liberty, a commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, felt like he was taking a risk.

“After consideration, I allowed it to happen and it was very successful over time,” Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. “His students can visit him in prison and he can patrol them. It offers a true diversity of opinions, thoughts and backgrounds. It allows you to learn a rich environment.”

Around 30 inmates who currently count the soap are employed while living in the Acquired Living Unit, a prison facility for prisoners who have shown a long track record of good behavior. All inmates with remote jobs will waive 10% of their wages plus 10% to the state, plus any compensation, legal costs, or other payments required for child support.

“Maine was a true groundbreaker in the area,” Haley Schoef, co-executive director of the unlocked lab, told TechCrunch. The unlocked lab where Thorpe worked before Turso hires an imprisoned and once-incarcerated engineer to create educational software for use in prison.

“[Maine] We put all this infrastructure during Covid to allow distance education and when that infrastructure was introduced, we suddenly expanded the amount of opportunities available to people,” Shoaf said.

The rehabilitation was done correctly

Commissioner Liberty has worked in law enforcement for 43 years, but it was only after he served in Iraq that his approach to rehabilitation began to change.

“When I came back, it gave me an elevated sense of understanding post-traumatic stress and trauma, and it all challenges the correction,” Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. “I have begun to see the harmful effects of imprisonment, separation, and solely the trauma of separation.”

While he was a Maine prison guard, the same prison where he visited his father as a child, Liberty Commissioner began implementing programs that address the root causes of crime: substance use disorders, untreated mental health issues, educational disorders, and more.

“We need to be able to explain this to people on the right and left,” Commissioner Liberty said. “When I hear Preston is making the kind of money he’s making, their jaws fall. And I say to them, “If you really care about making your community safer, if you’re financially responsible, if you care about the victims and survivors of the community, this is how you make them all.” ”

The US criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism or the fact that former prisoners are detained after being released. Repeated violations create financial burdens for the state and its taxpayers. However, Commissioners Liberty have data showing that efforts and investments are worthwhile to expand access to education and addiction treatment.

“It’s ridiculous to be very nearsighted and lock them in and release the trauma more than it did when they arrived, right?” Commissioner Liberty said. “Many states have a custody rate of 60%. In Maine, they hover between 21% and 23% of men. Women come back at 9%. If you attend a Maine university class, they come back at 0.05%.

Commissioner Liberty also found that under his range, the Maine prisons are no longer violent. Last year, Maine’s largest security prisons had only seven attacks on prison staff, with dramatic improvements from 87 attacks in 2017.

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

Thorpe himself is evidence that the struggles of the Liberty Commissioner are successful. The software engineer takes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he feels like a strange man.

“It’s like waking up from a dream five years ago,” Thorpe said. “The reason I came to prison is that I don’t even feel that it happened to me. It feels like it happened to someone else.”

Over the past three years, Thorpe says he has spent most of his awakening time online and has learned everything he can about programming.

“He was doing this in part, and not only did he like it, but he saw the opportunity to see it.

In open source communities where developers often can’t make a face on their inconsistencies or github profiles, soaps were treated the same as other contributors. For the first time in over a decade, it is not a criminal, but a Linux-obsessed engineer who is interested in relational databases, that he has been able to make his first impression as himself.

“The worst part about prisons is that you assume this identity. [of a criminal]Thorpe said. “Giving someone a career gives you a purpose.”