If you skip a few key details, every little thing Preston Thorpe must do to develop into a senior software engineer in a promising technology company, he will go through the door.
For about six months, Thorpe was a fertile volunteer of the Open Source project run by the database Cortex. His work was so impressive that CEO Turso, Glauber CostaHe quickly offered him a job. At that point, Costa also realized that Thorpe is nothing but an peculiar programmer.
“I checked his GitHub profile and mentions that he was imprisoned,” said Costa Techcrunch. “This is a story I have never seen before.”
It’s true: Thorpe is taking his 11th year in prison for drug -related crimes. Nevertheless he he worked full -time From your cell in a startup from San Francisco from May financed by the undertaking.
“I got to him in January to understand and meet him,” said Costa. “Since then, I talked to him deep conversations about his change of heart, which led him to being in a position in which he is today … Knowing his story, she increased our respect for him personally.”
Thorpe is a part of the experimental program in the Maine prison system, which allows trapped people to work distant work from custody. Although unconventional possibilities were extremely rehabilitation.
Those thrown out of the house as a teenager, Thorpe resorted to the sale of medication he bought from the dark network and finished in prison before he was 20 years old. He seemed a few years later, but without money in his name and there is no secure life, he was arrested again 14 months later.
“I was a complete idiot,” said Thorpe Techcrunch during a video conversation from prison. “I gave up my life, completely wrote it down and just accepted that it was my life and I just had no hope.”
TechCrunch event
San Francisco
|.
October 27-29 2025
Second likelihood
Thorpe gave up, but Chance had various plans. He was moved from the prison in New Hampshire to the Mountain View corrective plant in Maine just before the pandemic hit, allowing him to refute his hope again.
“When I arrived in Maine, it was completely different,” he recalled. “Covid happened just after I came here, and it just gave me a chance – there was no one who felt that I had to act or prove. It’s just me. I felt that it was not over; maybe I could have a normal life. I had this kind of revelation:” I’d do something of myself. “
In the Mountain View prison, Thorpe was remotely at the University of Maine in August. Around the same time, Colby College desired to hire one of the imprisoned graduates to develop into an adjunct. It was an unconventional proposal, but the commissioner of the Maine correction department, Randall Liberty, felt like risk.
“After considering, I let it happen that it was very successful sometimes,” said Liberty Techcrunch. “His students can visit him in prison, and he can visit them. He provides a real variety of opinions, thoughts and origin. This makes learning a rich environment.”
Now about 30 prisoners counting Thorpe are employed in Living Living Unit, a less restrictive prison for prisoners who showed long achievements of fine behavior. All prisoners with distant work undergo 10% of remuneration to you and any other payments that could be required for restitution, legal fees or child support.
“Maine was a real blast on earth,” Haley Shoaf, executive director Unlocked laboratoriesTechcrunch said. Unlocked laboratories, in which Thorpe worked before the Turs, employs imprisoned and previously imprisoned engineers to create educational software for use in prison.
“[Maine] Place all this infrastructure during Covid to allow remote education, and then, when the infrastructure was on the spot, suddenly expanded the possibilities that people can use, “said Shoaf.
Rehabilitation done well
Commissioner Liberty has been working in law enforcement agencies for 43 years, but only after he served in Iraq, his approach to rehabilitation began to vary.
“When I came back, it gave me an increased sense of understanding of stress and post -traumatic trauma, and all this plays in corrections,” said Liberty Techcrunch Commissioner. “I began to see the harmful effects of imprisonment and segregation.”
While he was a guardian of a state prison in Maine – in the same prison in which he visited his father when he was a child – Commissioner Liberty began to implement programs that check with the basic reasons for the crime: disorders related to the use of gear, untreated mental health problems, educational deficits and the like.
“I have to be able to explain it to people on the right and left,” said Liberty Commissioner. “When they hear that Preston earns the money he earns, their jaw drops. And I tell them:” If you actually need the community to be safer, if you care about being responsible in terms of tax, if you care about victims and survivors in the community, this is a solution to make them a whole. “
The justice system in criminal matters in the United States is harassed by a recidivist or the return of former prisoners to detention after their release. The repetition of the crime creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But the Liberty Commissioner has a data to point out that it is price effort and investments to expand access to education and addiction treatment.
“It’s very short -sighted, funny to block them and free more traumatized than when they came, right?” Commissioner Liberty said. “Many states have 60% return to care rates. In Maine we float between 21% to 23% for men; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend College classes in Maine, you return at a rate of 0.05% – you don’t come back at all.”
Commissioner Liberty also stated that under his goals Maine prisons became less violent. Last year, only seven assaults on prison staff took place in the maximum safety prison in Maine, which is a dramatic improvement of 87 seizures in 2017.
“When you treat people like people, they become the best version of themselves,” said Shoaf.
Thorpe himself is proof that the difficulties of Commissioner Liberty proved to be effective. The software engineer takes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he appears like a modified man.
“It’s like waking up from sleep, me five years ago,” said Thorpe. “All memories that I have in the streets and why I came to prison, it doesn’t even seem to make it happen to me. It seems that it happened to someone else.”
Over the past three years, Thorpe says that he has spent most of the hours of awakening online, learning every little thing he can about programming.
“He did it partly because he liked it, but also because he saw the opportunity to see it in it. And he was right,” said Costa.
In the Open Source community, in which programmers can often not put their face on the profile of disagreement or github, Thorpe was treated like any other collaborator. For the first time in over a decade, he was able to present the first impression as himself-a deviase from Linux, who is interested in relational databases-not as a criminal.
“The worst thing about prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal]Thorpe said. “Permission for someone’s profession gives you a goal.”