San Quentin coding courses offer incarcerated new opportunities

Jester is currently incarcerated in San Quentin Rehabilitation Center — known as San Quentin State Prison until last year — for felony murder and is 32 years into a life sentence. He is one of around 45 graduates from the latest cohort of The Last Mile, a nonprofit and job-training program specializing in coding and web development.

At a ceremony at San Quentin’s Chapel B on Thursday morning, Jester and his fellow graduates were recognized for their dedication and skill in learning several coding languages, including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

“Coding is very hard,” Latice Collins, a graduate of the program who is serving a life sentence for murder, told The Examiner. “But we have a saying here — ‘Trust the process.’”

The Last Mile was founded in 2010 and came to San Quentin the same year with an entrepreneurship course that has since been discontinued. The coding courses were introduced in 2014. Chris Schuhmacher, one of the members of that first class, spoke at Thursday’s ceremony.

“There were often times when I questioned whether my skills would ever find use outside of prison walls and whether employers would be willing to look past my history,” he said. “Yet I continued to believe in the process, as I hope you do as well.”

Schuhmacher is now a software engineer employed by Checkr, a background-check service used by companies such as Uber. Other graduates who have been released have gone on to work at Bay Area tech companies such as Slack, Zoom and Asana.

Around 2,000 incarcerated people have graduated from the program so far in prisons throughout the country, four of which are in California: Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California Institution for Women in Chino, Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, and San Quentin.

San Quentin, the state’s oldest and most notorious prison, has long been home to the vast majority of California’s condemned prisoners. They will be transferred away by the summer, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as the state closes the facility’s death row.

San Quentin has also long been known for its rehabilitative programming. Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed renaming it last year as part of a $380 million plan to transform it into a rehabilitative center. Currently incarcerated people and their advocates told The Examiner correctional officers were resisting those plans, and the prison has a long history of abuse and mistreatment of its incarcerated population.

The Last Mile operates under the California Prison Industry Authority, which runs apprenticeship and certification programs in facilities throughout the state.

The nonprofit specifically runs three programs at San Quentin: two coding classes — one in web-development fundamentals, another in a collection of software systems for building websites known as the MERN stack — and audio-visual production, said Kevin McCracken, the organization’s chief growth officer.

McCracken said that while the entrepreneurship program was discontinued, it’s coming back in collaboration with GoDaddy, an internet domain-registry company.

The two coding classes go hand-in-hand. Web-development fundamentals is the first one students start with before opting to go on to MERN, McCracken said.

There are around 60 people on average in every cohort, he said, which can change as people get released. Classes are run almost entirely online, with a couple of teaching assistants on site to help show students the basics of operating computers before moving on to the tougher work.

The Last Mile instructors — many of whom have been incarcerated themselves — call into the coding classes once a week and the audio-visual classes twice a week, but the rest is entirely student-driven, said Katy Gilbert, The Last Mile’s classroom facilitator at San Quentin.

“Learning in prison is hard,” she said. “There are a lot of barriers.”

But the students in the cohort are given Chromebooks to work on, and are even able to take them back to their cells. There’s no Wi-Fi, but they’re able to continue their coursework.

Collins, who described himself as a lifelong gamer and fan of puzzle games such as Tetris, said learning through these courses has felt like a natural progression.

“It’s been life-changing,” he said. “It’s really opened my eyes to the technology side and the business side of coding.”

Collins said that while he’s not sure whether he’ll ever be released, he hopes that one day these skills could be used outside of prison.

Willie Johnson, a graduate of the program currently serving a lengthy sentence for murder, said he already has a “substantial” job offer in business development on the table based on the skills he has learned through the program.

“This is considered a web-development program,” he said. Most other programs in other prisons just teach students to use prepackaged software such as Microsoft Excel, he said, setting this one apart.

“It took me 1,340 lines of code to do a five-page website,” said Johnson, whose website — an employment-preparation program — isn’t accessible to the public because San Quentin operates on a closed network.

Johnson said he had a background in technology before his incarceration, even working at IBM in the past. But circumstances changed.

“I took the life of someone I loved,” he said. He was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 15 years to life, with 10 years added for a gun enhancement.

Now, he said, he hopes his job offer will provide a new path. He has been working on making his case to either go before the parole board or get released sooner than his tentatively scheduled parole hearing in February 2027.

Unlike Johnson, Blake Hansen had no experience with technology until he joined The Last Mile program while serving 5½ years of an eight-year sentence at San Quentin. He was released just two years ago after completing the first coding course and starting the second one.

Since then, he landed an apprenticeship at San Francisco-based Asana, he said, and was hired as a full-time software engineer in January.

While he’s grateful for the opportunity to educate himself and the opportunity it’s provided, he said, the best thing about the program was actually the environment it created.

“It didn’t feel like you were in prison,” he said. “The attitude and the way people treat each other is different. There’s more joy than there is in actual prison.”