A joint MIT-Georgetown University coding class for inmates is held at Washington, D.C.'s Correctional Treatment Facility, one of two facilities in a jail complex. For twelve weeks, the students hunch over laptops, squinting at characters and lines of code, CNN reports. Their work culminates in websites built from scratch and a certificate acknowledging their participation in college-accredited courses from these prestigious institutions. They joined over 200 other students at correctional facilities across the U.S. who have completed the Brave Behind Bars program since the group’s founding in 2021. In a graduation celebration, students proudly posed for photos with Marisa Gaetz, Brave Behind Bar’s co-founder. Gaetz made the trek down from Massachusetts, taking a break from her PhD work. She didn’t want to miss the chance to shake the students’ hands and tell them all the things she enjoyed about working with each one of them. Her slow, precise way of speaking mirrors the painstaking work that these students have done in writing code to power websites.
Study after study shows that incarcerated education helps do what citizens and policymakers alike say they want: keep people from committing more crimes. Getting education for many people behind bars remains a challenge. Thirty years ago, the 1994 crime law drastically cut funding for prisoner education. While lawmakers restored this money in 2020, the gap between what kind of education prisoners would like and what they can access remains vast. Many of those behind bars lack even high school education - to say nothing of college or post-secondary training. The team responsible for education at the D.C. jail includes Jason McCrady, a former public-school counselor who noticed that so many of his students ended up behind bars that he got hired by the jail system. Technology education efforts got a boost during the pandemic, as visits and in-person services were further curtailed, and jails and prisons incorporated more digital communication tools. In the D.C. jail, this meant secure tablets. These devices greatly expanded the opportunities those awaiting trial would have for education and communication. Many people don’t have a personal connection to a system that detains and monitors nearly five million people. This lack of connection, activists say, is one of the stumbling blocks to reform. Although there are already rumblings of AI taking away coding jobs, Gaetz says AI gets used mostly to assist in coding while most software engineering jobs still require an actual person. Some students who come to class have little experience with computers, so the course builds literacy, confidence and problem-solving skills alongside the basic coding.
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