Inmates learn tech sector from entrepreneurs

Associated Press

SAN QUENTIN, Calif.

The budding entrepreneurs wear blue sweat pants labeled “prisoner” and huge, flapping, blue shirts. Their doors are triple locked, and lunch is a stale peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Complicating matters, participants in this growing Silicon Valley startup incubator are barred from the Internet.

Nonetheless, the program, launched by successful tech entrepreneurs for inmates north of San Francisco in the decaying San Quentin State Prison, has expanded, and a new session began this month in the gritty, downtown Los Angeles Twin Towers Correctional Facility.

The reason they’re growing is simple: Graduates, now trickling out of the penal system, are landing real jobs at real dot-coms.

The rigorous, six-month training teaches carefully selected inmates the ins and outs of designing and launching technology firms, using local experts as volunteer instructors.

“We believe that when incarcerated people are released into the world, they need the tools to function in today’s high-tech, wired world,” says co-founder Beverly Parenti, who with her husband, Chris Redlitz, has launched thriving companies, including AdAuction, the first online media exchange.

The pair were Silicon Valley pioneers in the 1990s, and they tap their many high-level connections to help with the prison program they started after Redlitz was invited into San Quentin in 2011 for a guest lecture and was overwhelmed by the inmates’ desire to learn.

“I figured, ‘We work with young entrepreneurs every day. Why not here?’” he recalled.

After discussions with prison administrators, Parenti and Redlitz decided to add a prison-based firm to their portfolio, naming it for the precarious journey from prison to home: The Last Mile.

Now, during twice-a-week evening lessons, students — many locked up before smartphones or Google — practice tweeting, brainstorm new companies and discuss business books assigned as homework. Banned from the Internet to prevent networking with other criminals, they take notes on keyboardlike word processors or with pencil on paper.

The program still is “bootstrapping,” as its organizers say, with just 12 graduates in its first two years and now a few dozen in classes in San Quentin and Twin Towers. But the five graduates released so far are working in the tech sector.

They are guaranteed paid internships if they can finish the rigorous training program, which requires prerequisite courses, proven social skills and a lifetime oath to lead by positive example.