If you omit some key details, all Preston Thorpe has to do to become a senior software engineer at a promising tech company is walk through the door.
For about six months, Thorpe was a prolific volunteer contributor to an open source project led by database company Turso. His work was impressive enough that Turso’s CEO, Glauber Costa, quickly offered him a job. That was also when Costa realized that Thorpe is anything but an ordinary programmer.
“I checked his GitHub profile, and he mentions the fact that he is incarcerated,” Costa told TechCrunch. “It’s a story I’ve never seen before.”It’s true: Thorpe is serving his 11th year in prison for drug-related crimes. Still, he has worked full-time from his cell at a venture-funded, San Francisco-based startup since May.
“I reached out to him in January, just to understand and get to know him,” Costa said. “Since then, I’ve had deep conversations with him about his change of heart that led him to be in the position where he is today …Knowing his story increased our respect for him personally.”
Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody. Though unconventional, these opportunities have proven immensely rehabilitative.
Kicked out of his home as a teenager, Thorpe resorted to selling drugs that he bought from the dark web and ended up in prison by the time he was 20. He got out a few years later, but with no money to his name and nowhere safe to live, he was arrested again 14 months later.
“I was a complete idiot,” Thorpe told TechCrunch over a video call from prison. “I had given up on my life, completely written it off, and just accepted that this was my life and just had no hope.”
Second chances
Thorpe had given up, but chance had different plans. He was transferred from a prison in New Hampshire to the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine just before the pandemic struck, allowing him to rekindle hope anew.
“When I came to Maine, it was completely different,” he reminisced. “COVID happened right after I came up here, and it just gave me a chance — there was no one around that I felt like I had to act or prove myself to. It was just me. I actually felt like maybe it’s not over; maybe I could actually end up having a normal life. I had this kind of epiphany: ‘I’m going to make something of myself.’”
At the Mountain View prison, Thorpe enrolled remotely at the University of Maine at Augusta. Around the same time, Colby College wanted to hire one of its incarcerated graduate students to be an adjunct professor. It was an unconventional proposal, but the Maine Department of Corrections commissioner, Randall Liberty, felt like taking a risk.
“After consideration, I allowed that to happen, and over time, it’s been very successful,” Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. “His students are able to come visit him at the prison, and he can tour them around. It provides for a real diversity of opinions, thoughts, and backgrounds. It makes for a rich environment to learn.”
Now, about 30 inmates, counting Thorpe, are employed while living in the Earned Living Unit, a less restrictive prison facility for inmates who have exhibited a long track record of good behavior. All inmates with remote jobs surrender 10% of their pay to the state, plus any other payments that may be required for restitution, legal fees, or child support.
“Maine has been a real groundbreaker in this area,” Haley Shoaf, co-executive director of Unlocked Labs, told TechCrunch. Unlocked Labs, where Thorpe worked prior to Turso, hires incarcerated and formerly incarcerated engineers to make educational software for use in prisons.
“[Maine] put all this infrastructure in place during COVID to allow for remote education, and then once that infrastructure was in place, all of a sudden, it expanded the amount of opportunities people could take advantage of,” Shoaf said.
Rehabilitation done right
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 shift.
“When I came back, it gave me a heightened sense of understanding post-traumatic stress and trauma, and all of that plays into corrections,” he told TechCrunch. “I began to see the detrimental effects of just the trauma of incarceration, of segregation.”
While he was the warden of the Maine State Prison — the same prison where he visited his father when he was a child — Commissioner Liberty began implementing programs that address the root causes of crime: substance use disorders, untreated mental health issues, educational deficits, and the like.
“I have to be able to explain this to people on the right and the left,” he said. “When they hear that Preston is making the kind of money he makes, their jaw drops. And I say to them, ‘If you truly care about making the community safer, if you care about being fiscally responsible, if you care about victims and survivors in the community, this is the way to make them whole.’”
The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners’ return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it’s well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment.
“It’s very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” he said. “Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don’t come back at all.”
Commissioner Liberty has also found that under his purview, Maine prisons have become less violent. Last year, a maximum-security prison in Maine saw only seven assaults on prison staff, a dramatic improvement from 87 assaults in 2017.
“When you treat people like people, they become the best version of themselves,” Shoaf said.
Thorpe himself is evidence that Commissioner Liberty’s toils are proving successful. The software engineer takes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he feels like a changed man.
“It’s like waking up from a dream, me from five years ago,” Thorpe said. “All the memories I have of the streets and why I came to prison, it doesn’t even feel like it happened to me. It feels like it happened to someone else.”
Over the last three years, Thorpe says he has spent most of his waking hours online, learning everything he can about programming.
“He was doing this partially because he likes it, but also because he saw in this an opportunity to be seen. And he was right,” Costa said.
In the open source community, where developers often can’t put a face to a Discord or GitHub profile, Thorpe was treated like any other contributor. It was the first time in over a decade that he was able to strike a first impression as himself — a Linux-obsessed engineer who’s interested in relational databases — and not as a criminal.
“The worst part about prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal],” Thorpe said. “Letting someone have a career gives you purpose.”