For nearly 20 years, incarcerated individuals in Maine have been taking college classes for credit. Hundreds have graduated with associate, baccalaureate and even advanced degrees.
It all started with an endowment from philanthropist Doris Buffet and her Sunshine Lady Foundation. Additional grants paved the way for the supervised use of laptops. And Maine is now the first state to offer remote work from prison.
Forty-five prisoners have been hired by outside companies to do remote jobs from their cells. A few are earning more than corrections officers.
As part of this trend, a group of women are taking a coding class in the Maine Correctional Center. It's a pilot project that administrators want to continue because of the way its changing prisoners' expectations for their own success.
The day she was released from prison, Christie Thetonia knew she'd be back. She had a job lined up at Dunkin' making about $17 an hour. But she had no transportation, no place to live and barely any savings.
"I think I had like $1,000," she says. "I had only been able to work for seven weeks so I didn't have a lot. And no clothing. I was in tears when I left. I was just like, 'I'm gonna return,' you know? And that's just how it is for a lot of the women."
A sponsor helped Thetonia find a room and a car but she says that wasn't enough to keep her life on track.
"You can't afford things and, you know, you turn right back to doing and selling drugs or you start selling them and it leads to your relapsing," she says.
Convicted of drug charges, Thetonia has another two-and-a-half years on her sentence and she's back at the Maine Correctional Center for a third time. It's a pattern, says Maine Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty, for people who have experienced years of trauma, substance use disorder or mental health issues. That's why the Maine DOC is undertaking a new approach.
"Putting someone in a correctional setting, locking them up for 23 hours a day, releasing them five years later and having a high likelihood that they'll return, you know that system doesn't work," he says. "It's broken."
In Maine, the rate of return to prison after three years is about 25%. But Liberty says there is a way to stop the revolving prison door.
"What we found is if you received a college degree at the Maine Department of Corrections, you come back at about a rate of .05%, and it bounces a little bit back and forth, but it's always less than 1% come back," he says. "And that compares with the national average of 60% coming back."
A study by the Prison Policy Initiative finds that about half of formerly incarcerated people hold a high school diploma. Many are considered functionally illiterate. They may have limited computer and other skills. So Liberty says meaningful educational programming and a vocation are essential along with drug treatment and counseling.
Erica King, a senior manager with the Center for Effective Public Policy, works with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, including the first 11 women selected for a pilot coding class. It's week five of a 22-week program and the students are getting college credit for it. King says despite their diverse backgrounds, the women are handling the work well.
"We have a whole range of, I would say, tech literacy and even emotional literacy around being in a classroom and what it means to be called on and whether you raise your hand and, you know, preparing homework," she says. "But they're learning so quickly that it puts me to shame."
Class instructor Shanice Brown makes it a point to take lessons slowly.
"It's like in the Army when they say 'no man left behind.' Like, we literally just do not move forward if everyone is not caught up," she says.
Brown is with Unlocked Labs, a St. Louis Missouri-based nonprofit working to break the cycle of re-incarceration through education and employment in software development and other technology fields. She says she has previously taught Black and brown youth in Chicago. But this was her first time teaching inside a prison. And on the first day she was overwhelmed.
"I'm in there introducing myself and in the first three minutes I burst into tears," she says. "My grandmother had ten kids, and all of my uncles went to prison. And so ... I know what these ladies' families are feeling. And so, I was like, 'Guys, I'm sorry. I'm about to cry.'"
A few of the women have college degrees. A few are still working on their GEDs. Christie Thetonia says she'd taken computer classes before but nothing as challenging as this.
"Initially, when you first get into it, it's just overwhelming," she says. "Literally, you want to throw the laptop sometimes but you just have to talk yourself through it."
Hillary Goding says it's been a chance to push herself out of her comfort zone and prove that she's capable of doing something completely different.
Goding is serving a 19-year sentence. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter after her three-year-old daughter died of a fentanyl exposure. She says she lives with the sadness and weight of her mistakes every day. And she says she resigned herself to thinking she was doomed to a lifetime of despair.
"But this opportunity has made me feel intelligent and valuable and even hopeful," she says. "It reminded me that I'm more than my past and my mistakes and that I still have something meaningful to offer."
As part of the course, each woman must use the skills they've learned to design a website or an app to help those involved with the criminal justice system.
"I'm just super excited, super stoked to see what these women are gonna come up [with]," says instructor Shanice Brown. "We got some things up our sleeve, like for real, we really do."
Ashley Mackie, for example, is creating an app to calculate and keep track of earned good time. She has another two years to serve for a drug conviction. Every month, residents can earn seven days credited toward their sentence for good behavior. And if they take classes or work in the community, Mackie says they can earn an additional two. The problem, she says, is that the days are calculated by hand. And sometimes there are errors.
"I know plenty of women who got a release date," she says, "and then a month before they've been told, 'Oh no, sorry. That was wrong."
Jackie Smollett is working on a website to prevent recidivism.
"The site I want to build is pretty much an interactive platform that will be a resource center for people looking to reintegrate back into society and have resources to help them," she says.
Smollett expects to be released in another year. She says she lost her home and her auto detailing business after being convicted for drug charges. So, she'll be starting from scratch. But she and others have applied for remote work and they're hoping the coding class will give them a leg up while they're in prison and after they get out.
Learning to code is one thing but Brown says getting women to change their minds about themselves and what they can achieve, that's rehabilitation.
"I think that they're very tenacious. I think that they're very brave. I think that they have initiative which is something you can't teach, especially nowadays," she says.
