At 7:30, the students came to the computer room on time and continued to learn the course according to their progress of the previous day. Including web design, APP development and so on, when you don’t understand the question, you can ask the tutor.
There is a half-hour lunch break at 11:00.
At 15:00, students walk back to the nearby “dormitory” to rest.
Five days a week, until they have mastered the skill and passed the exam.
Looking at this schedule, would you think it was some kind of computer training facility, or a closed-door programming boot camp?
In fact, this is the SAN Quentin State Prison in California.
SAN Quentin State Prison
Yes, you heard me right. These hard-working cadets, they’re prisoners in prison.
The Last Mile was launched in 2011 to provide inmates with The opportunity to learn computer programming.
How did the plan come about? Why are us prisons imaginatively taking a coding class?
It starts with the state of America’s prisons.
01 Prisons are full
How crowded are American prisons?
It is estimated that one in 32 people in the United States has had “contact” with the criminal justice system (including detention, probation, imprisonment, etc.).
Compare that with other Western countries. The graph below shows the change in incarceration rates for each country from 1983 to 2001.
It is clear that the INCARCERation rate of the United States has been far higher than that of other developed countries in the West. Even in the 1980s, when America’s overall crime rate was falling, incarceration rates continued to climb.
The backlog of so many criminals has become a very serious social problem.
In 2011, there were nearly 2.27 million people incarcerated in the United States, most of them young men. Locking up so many productive forces not only creates no value for the society, but also feeds them, which is charged to the government. As a result, the U.S. government urgently needs ways to reduce the incarceration rate.
Such results have to do with the CRIMINAL justice system in the United States, which I won’t go into here. In short, decades of criminological research have been devoted to the question of why it has come to this, and what can be done about it.
02 From imprisonment to reinvention
The rise of prison education, in addition to the economic factors mentioned above, is also related to changes in the perception of prison brought about by the academic community.
Past data reveal a big problem: incarceration and punishment alone do not have much real effect. Huge budgets and judicial resources have been expended, and the prison population continues to explode year after year. And one of the most important reasons is that the recurrence rate is too high.
In New York state, for example, half of all prisoners are serving less than eight years in prison, and about 67 percent of those who leave prison return to prison for various reasons.
This is a slap in the face for the criminal establishment. Citizens pay taxes so that prisons can educate criminals and no longer cause harm to society. Now the “rework rate” is so high, I’m afraid these are not fake prisons.
Before, it was widely believed that prison was a punishment + security system. However, such a reality has gradually made people realize that the previous positioning of prison seems not to be right. This brings us to the thinking from “imprisonment” to “remould”.
Reshaping the prisoner means that we think his behavior is wrong, and through education he will be rehabilitated and reintegrated into society.
To lock the prisoner up in isolation means that we consider the prisoner’s existence as a person problematic and that he should be punished for it.
Past perceptions directly lead to social discrimination against prisoners released from prison, believing that they are the problem. That makes it harder for ex-convicts to find jobs, start families and become more likely to commit crimes again, a vicious cycle.
For a prisoner returning to society, there is a high probability that he or she will commit another crime depending on the following three conditions:
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Good mental state
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Stable family and relationships
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Educational background and job skills
Prison education largely helps with point 3.
A 2011 study by the University of Missouri found that prisoners who found a job after being released were half as likely to return to prison as those who did not. And according to a 2013 analysis by the Rand Institute, every $1 spent on prison higher education saves the state $4-5.
All this suggests that prison education is a method worth trying.
03 “It’s worse out there than in prison”
In the movie “Shawshank Redemption,” many people are unable to adapt to the world outside prison because they have been in prison for so long. There are even people who deliberately commit a second crime to get back in prison.
In the movie, Brook, the hero’s cellmate, loses his temper when he learns that he will be released in old age. After his release, he chose to take his own life to refuse to touch the strange world outside of prison.
Brook’s bird flew away, but he could not fly out of his inner cage
This may seem hard to understand, but it reflects the reality of many prisoners.
As a result, many countries offer help to ex-prisoners to find jobs. For example, China attaches great importance to protecting the civil rights of those released after serving their sentences to return to society.
The Chinese government has stipulated that people released after serving their sentences will not be discriminated against or disdainful of, and that they will be provided with employment and resettlement, so as to encourage them to take the right path.
Because from long-term practical experience, we find that if the necessary conditions are not created to help ex-prisoners settle down and avoid falling into the same rut, then the protection of their individual rights will remain negative and have no real positive social significance.
In addition, from the prisoners’ own perspective, the realization that they have a better chance of getting a job and better integration into society can greatly help their performance in prison and their psychological state after release.
Developer in prison
In the United States, many prisons offer different levels and types of education, and about 5 percent of prisons also offer college courses for inmates.
The prison’s education center will interview applicants individually to provide them with a suitable direction of study according to their actual situation.
However, compared with cooking, gardening and other ordinary courses, the emergence of advanced computer courses, many friends feel confused and uneasy.
“Aren’t you afraid of criminals hacking into the prison system and escaping?”
“What if the prisoner gets out and uses it for bad?”
The combination of bad guys and computers is indeed reminiscent of computer crime
There’s nothing to worry about.
First, applications to the course are not open to death row prisoners, offenders of crimes against children and other serious offenders. Inmates who want to apply for the program are subjected to a rigorous interview, which requires them to be motivated to cooperate, read and write, subjective and personal goals.
In addition, the prisoners’ computers were not connected to the Internet, and they used pre-downloaded software or completed the exercises by writing code (yes, you read that right, by hand).
The school curriculum needs to evolve, as does the prison curriculum. If prisoners are trained to learn basic skills, they will not be able to compete in society, and prison education will be meaningless.
Remember that quote:
One more school, one less prison.
As we can see from James Cavitt’s TED talk “Why I’m Teaching Prisoners to Code,” prison coding is working well so far
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Frankly, I wondered if I was in the wrong place.
I was taken to a small classroom where I was supposed to talk to the inmates about business and entrepreneurship. When I started speaking, I found the audience hanging on every word without distraction.
Oh, yeah, probably because they don’t have cell phones in prison. (smile)
When I finished, the prisoners raised their hands. The 20-minute speech led to two hours of heated discussion, and it was clear that they had come prepared and committed to learning the skills that would help them lead a new life after serving time. I never thought I’d be in a situation like this.
In 2010, I collaborated with the California Department of Criminal Justice and the California Department of Prisons on a six-month business and entrepreneurship program called “The Last Mile,” which introduced some of the principles and principles of our investment practices. Many of our students are multiple offenders, and some are serious offenders.
In 2014, we launched “Code.7370 SAN Quentin, “the first computer programming course in the history of a U.S. prison, and the results have been fruitful.
This year, some of our graduates will be released from prison. They work hard, are determined and have overcome serious obstacles. We are confident that they can become software engineers in the future.
Code.7370 will be rolled out to five more California prisons this year, including two women’s prisons. We also plan to start rolling this out nationwide within five years.
We are proud of our graduates, none of whom have returned to prison for reoffending, and they are on the right track.
It can be seen that programming education in prisons is not a whim, but a serious attempt with research and practice.
Admittedly, there may be other risk factors that have not been taken into account. But the question is, is trying to improve it better than doing nothing at all?
Just because someone makes a mistake doesn’t mean they should be dropped. After all, if we were the ones who made mistakes, we would want forgiveness and a chance to make amends.
Punishment and humiliation, is their own mistakes brought; Rewards and self-esteem, but also rely on their own efforts to earn.
That, perhaps, is what every prisoner in prison should learn, beyond programming or any other skill, and that is why the law and prisons exist more profoundly.
A skin
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As an experienced person, I want to tell you that it is really important to consult the elder Daniel, can let you take a lot of detours, do not be afraid of losing face, face value how much money? The most important thing is to learn the real skill. No skill is really no face.