US tech company hiring and decarceration

April 8, 2021 7:25 AM

"What I learned going from prison to Python" by Shadeed "Sha" Wallace-Stepter: "Total strangers with a very different background and life from my own had connected the dots in a way that led to me learning to code." One of those strangers was engineering leader Jessica McKellar, who speaks at tech conferences to ask: "Mass Decarceration: If We Don’t Hire People With Felony Convictions, Who Will?"

While still an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, Wallace-Stepter presented a TEDxSanQuentin talk about hustle, entrepreneurship, and prisoner re-entry:

Now being incarcerated gave me time to reflect. I realized that I had become a virus that infected and corrupted virtually everything that I came into contact with.

This was a sobering realization, and would be the motivating force behind me wanting to do something positive with my life. And I would commit to this.

But even though I knew I was finished with the street life, I still was very ambitious. And I could not find any occupation that I could actually see myself doing when I got out of prison that would allow me to satisfy this ambition.

Here at San Quentin, a program called "The Last Mile" teaches prisoners to transform ideas into viable businesses using entrepreneurship. To date, graduates from this program who have been released back into society have a zero per cent recidivism rate.

McKellar recommends and has worked with The Last Mile, which "prepares incarcerated individuals for successful reentry through business and technology training", and mentors with UnderdogDevs, "a group of software engineers supporting the formerly incarcerated & disadvantaged in their transition into the software industry".

Wallace-Stepter discusses "employment realities for the formerly incarcerated" by gathering data from 49 people paroled from San Quentin: "I think it’s really important to emphasize that 90% of this group was able to find employment because they were either lucky enough to connect with the right people during their incarceration, or they were accepted into transitional housing programs that had direct links to employers." McKellar hits a similar note in her Twitter thread on what it takes to help a specific person get a programming job post-prison (compiled on Threadreader).

Growing Up Behind Bars, Wallace-Stepter's "documentary film following four 'juvenile lifers' at San Quentin State Prison", is in progress, having been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has also interrupted crucial prison education programs, as of mid-2020:

By far, the most sought after program in the prison is the Prison University Project, or PUP, which offers men the opportunity to pursue an Associate’s Degree free of charge. Every semester, hundreds of incarcerated men head down to the recreational yard and pile into portable trailers with horrible air circulation to take a variety of classes, including Biology, Physics, Ethics, and Communications. PUP is accredited, and the classes are taught by instructors who also teach at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and even UC Hastings. It’s a legitimate college program.

....

What a degree shows the parole board is that you have the discipline and perseverance to sit in one place for multiple years (it took me 4 years) and apply yourself towards something that can improve your chances for success post-release. Keep in mind that most men in prison dropped out of high school prior to their incarcerations. It is very rare for the parole board to not be impressed by an Associate’s Degree. If you bring them a degree with a relatively clean disciplinary record, you are almost guaranteeing your chances of going home....

Unfortunately, all rehabilitative programs at San Quentin, including PUP, have been suspended until further notice due to COVID.

McKellar has written some Twitter threads with specific tips advising technologists how they can work on decarceration, as voters, employers, and volunteers:

• "A Twitter summary of my Foo Camp lightning talk 'Mass decarceration: if you don’t hire people with felony convictions, who will?' .... We need to hire people with records. Especially felonies, and especially felonies for violent crimes, which is the majority of people in prison. If you support large-scale prison reform and decarceration, by the numbers you have to support this."
• "I’m a mentor with @UnderdogDevs and have hired someone from this talented group of formerly-incarcerated software engineers through that experience. The group has a lot of support! But, real talk: we need more companies to give people a shot at interviewing.....I've hired folks with records into many roles, including engineering, ops, and support. Executives and DE&I leaders ask me all the time how they can do it too. The honest answer: you know what to do (see steps above). You just need to make it a priority and put in the work."

McKellar is the CTO and cofounder of a technology company, and hires decarcerated people onto its staff. In a 2019 panel, she said, "At Pilot, I'm allowed to control what recruiting channels we're focusing on to promote a diverse top of the funnel. Even if that means not paying attention to inbound interest, or growing slower." McKellar tweeted that year: "I live to build something well, that people love and value so much they want to pay for it, at a company that actively uses its privilege to increase justice in the world."

In a 2016 keynote, McKellar argued that teaching people to program helps teach people learn that systems are changeable, and that programmers should not assume that our systems-thinking and systems-changing skills are inapplicable to big hard problems like poverty and climate change. A 2016 interview with McKellar for the Techies project (previously) further discussed her motivations:

I am not strongly motivated by being in an engineering leadership position at a tech company. I appear to be pretty good at it, which is why I keep doing it, and then keep getting into increasingly large levels of responsibility for it..... There are other things that I actually care about in life and I would expect that in the arc of my adult life and I will move into a pretty different role over time.

....Things that I care about include the democratic machine, like democracy as an institution mostly in the United States. I care about education. I care about journalism. And then I care about the power of media more broadly to educate and influence people. These things are all related. You need an aware and educated population that is able to work together in a democratic society to move each other forward. That’s how it’s all related.

.... It’s finding the impact at scale in these fields that I’m pretty passionate about in a way that parallels the opportunities scale that you can have in software. Those are things I actually care about.

posted by brainwane (9 comments total)

I saw McKellar, followed by Wallace-Stephar at PyCon 2019. It's incredible stuff, and I'm in awe of McKellar's work, one of the few examples of addressing prisoner education and rehabilitation head on. She is an absolute powerhouse.
posted by mcstayinskool at 7:37 AM on April 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Wow. This is great, great stuff. Wallace-Stepter's article is terrific, and this bit especially resonated for me:

What I learned is that, on a fundamental level, open source is about fellowship and collaboration. It works so well because no one is excluded.

And for me, someone who struggled to see where they fit, what I saw was a very basic form of love—love by way of collaboration and acceptance, love by way of access, love by way of inclusion. And my spirit yearned to be a part of it.

Things like this always make me wish I had a thousand jobs I could hire people for. There are so many people who want to contribute and collaborate and participate - and be recognized for their contribution - and the world I want to live in is a world that tries to make that a reality for everyone.

I'm so glad Wallace-Stepter found that program at San Quentin (and was able to get his hands on more Python resources than just that one tablet). I wonder what other kinds of collaborative, welcoming communities could connect with inmates who aren't drawn to programming.

This is a fantastic post. I am so glad to know about both Wallace-Stepter and McKellar. Thank you so much for sharing this, brainwane!
posted by kristi at 8:05 AM on April 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

Thank you. I saw Sha's talk at North Bay Python 2019 and Jessica McKellar's immediately following talk, and both were fantastic, and their message definitely needs wider audience.
posted by straw at 12:14 PM on April 8, 2021

I hung out with her at MIT's computer club, and I'm pretty chuffed to learn this is what she's up to.
posted by ocschwar at 3:22 PM on April 8, 2021

Was Wallace-Stepter able to find employment within the field?
posted by Selena777 at 7:15 PM on April 8, 2021

From the bio at the end of the article: "Sha is also a Computer Science student at Berkeley City College." I conclude therefore that the answer to your question is "no, not yet, now getting that useful piece of paper."
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:41 PM on April 8, 2021

Thanks for posting. I've been looking for resources on this topic and this helps me a lot with my homework. :)
posted by simra at 10:34 PM on April 9, 2021

McKellar just tweeted:

"We have many formerly-incarcerated friends who need safe, long-term housing and are unable to secure it on the market or through government or non-profit programs.

To make a dent in this need, we bought a house: https://oaklandside.org/2021/04/01/a-freedom-house-formerly-incarcerated-east-bay-area-freedom-collective/.

Support us here: [GoFundMe link]

This house wouldn't exist without @simon96632391 .

Simon was sentenced to 26 years in prison and was, at 18, the youngest person at supermax Pelican Bay. He's now a software engineer at @PilotHQ and a dear friend.

Hear more of Simon's story: https://soundcloud.com/sam-lew-sf/simon."
posted by brainwane at 1:28 PM on April 23, 2021

(I haven't listened yet but the project was profiled on GoFundMe's podcast.)
posted by brainwane at 1:33 PM on April 23, 2021