Inmates are learning to code in prison. Jobs may be hard to come by

Graduation day dawns sunny and warm for the first day of November, but the weather hardly matters for the joint MIT-Georgetown coding class, which takes place at the Correctional Treatment Facility, one of the two facilities that make up the DC jail complex.

Graduation day dawns sunny and warm for the first day of November, but the weather hardly matters for the joint MIT-Georgetown coding class, which takes place at the Correctional Treatment Facility, one of the two facilities that make up the DC jail complex. For twelve weeks, the students worked hard, hunched over laptops, squinting at characters and lines of code. Their work culminated in this: websites built from scratch and a certificate acknowledging their participation in college-accredited courses from these prestigious institutions. Today, they join over 200 other students at correctional facilities across the country who have completed the Brave Behind Bars program since the group’s founding in 2021. A graduation celebration looks different behind bars. Yellow and blue frosted cupcakes lined up next to lemonade and iced tea and chicken sandwiches sit waiting while the students proudly pose for photos with Marisa Gaetz, Brave Behind Bar’s co-founder. The food arrived much later than the students but no one seemed to mind; here you get used to waiting — especially for the rare celebratory occasion. Gaetz made the trek down from Massachusetts, taking a break from her PhD work to be here. She said she didn’t want to miss the chance to shake the students’ hands and tell them face to face 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. One by one, the students come up, take their certificate and pose for a photo with the people who made this program possible. The photos will have to do as a keepsake of this moment: the students can’t keep the physical copy – a precaution so no one else duplicates the certificate trying to pass it off as their own, an attempt to demonstrate good behavior to a judge without actually taking the class. These certificates will have to go to the students’ lawyers for safekeeping. It’s just one of the many precautions put in place for this course, one of the newest additions to prison and jail education. Here, safety questions always dominate. In a classroom next door, Taylor Swift plays over computer speakers as teams of two hunch over metal boxes and wiring. These students have chosen to learn about another piece of our information economy: repairing telecom equipment. The same tools these students wield to learn this lucrative craft could pose a real danger to their fellow detainees or jail staff outside this classroom. Their teacher, Timothy Saunders, painstakingly checks in and out the tools each class. He proudly tells me they’ve not had any issues on the safety front.