It's been 11 years now,
March 4th 2009.
The date you go in and the date you come
home, you'll never forget those days.
The day I was arrested was the day I
found out I was like four weeks pregnant.
You think your life's over and then
someone tells you you're pregnant and
it's just kind of,
it's a lot, but it's the best thing that
could have ever happened to me.
All of it.
[Music]
Coming home, it's
just a crazy reality.
You've been constricted to this small
area for such a long time
constantly kind of being told and
through the messaging
of the system that you're less than, and
it's really difficult to separate from
that. I'm Aedan Macdonald and I'm the
founder
and program manager of Justice Through
Code. Justice Through Code
is the semester-long coding and
interpersonal skills intensive
for the formerly incarcerated. I think
it's really telling
to think about the statistics. About four
years after release from incarceration
75 percent of people will be re-arrested.
The single most important predictor
of recidivism is unemployment, but yet
people can't get jobs.
It's very difficult just completely
starting over.
The excitement of being free,
but then the reality of
not being prepared.
That things had changed rapidly in
just the few short years that I was away
and
when you're incarcerated everything is
stripped from you, like
you're no longer who you are and then
when you come home
you're trying to be just, even just be a
person again.
I mean, I can speak to my personal
experience. I was incarcerated
in federal prison for close to four
years. When I returned
home I went to a halfway house in
Connecticut.
And for me it was very difficult
to get a job. A year after release from
incarceration
75 percent of people will be unemployed.
When you look at that and think about
the statistics,
that for the bottom 10 percent
of earners in this country their
children
are approximately 20 times more likely
to end up incarcerated
in their lifetimes than the top 10
percent of earners.
Not only is it impossible to get a job,
in many ways because of the way that we
treat people that have returned home
from prison
these young children don't have a chance
as well.
There's definitely a fear, like all right
so now I'm coming out of prison who's
gonna hire me?
I remember looking up different careers
and
all of these requirements like how am I
going to take care of this
little girl that I fought for, like how
am I going to be able to provide her the
life that she deserves?
Someone told me about the Justice
Through Code coding program and I didn't
have experience, but I always wanted to
learn it, but it was just kind of like
a big overwhelming thing like where do
you even start?
Now we're going to have fun with this one
though.
Sharpen your skills. Why coding?
Technology and coding is this great
equalizer.
The industry cares more about your
skills
than your specific background.
So ___ ____ is going to be equal to an empty
list.
Excellent. I really enjoy figuring out
the problem.
The feeling of getting something right. This
time was a lot smoother.
We went through that pretty quickly. It
was, it was, you guys breezed right through it.
You write a few lines of code, you test
it out, and something breaks and then you
got to kind of figure out how to like
solve it and then do this and do that
and you have like a picture in your head
of what you want something to look like.
It's just an amazing feeling of
accomplishment.
It's kind of hard to describe, because
unless you code,
it's almost like you can't really
understand the feeling.
What's up? It's Thursday man.
Last day of class for the week, you know.
Heyyy. Trying to get everybody hyped man, you
know?
Well, let's say I get stuck, you know, like
what would be your next
step? Look your computer is not going to
explode if you make an
error, and it's good to make an error
so you can understand how to fix the
error,
because since you're going to have so
many errors,
why not know how to fix them? The code
doesn't know I've been to prison.
The code just knows I'm a software
engineer
and that I am going to use it to create
something. You want to play the game I
made with me? Yes.
See look, I programmed it so you type
your name here.
Now, if I'm faced with the problem, I know
how to break it down into small pieces.
It's just kind of like rewired my whole
brain and how I look at everything in
life.
Which square do you want? This one. You
won!
The tech industry has a responsibility
to build inclusive technology
and in order to do that you need to have
people from all walks of life. At least
where
a person who's formerly incarcerated can
apply without having to worry.
Can I have a hug please? I want her to
look at me one day and
see all that I've accomplished. Where I
came from
and what I'm doing in my life, and how
successful I
am, and that's what's behind everything I
do every day.
I'm definitely going to teach her early
though. It's really exciting to see
that our students will be a part of
that work to shape our future
and that they'll be able to contribute
to us living in a more
equitable world. We're rewriting the code.
We're rewriting the code.