By Emma Lacey-Bordeaux, CNN
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.
Whitelisted sites, limited computer time
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.
Saunders boasts students can employ the skills they learn here to eventually earn six-figure jobs. That is, of course, dependent on two things: that they get out, and once they do, that someone will hire them. The class is one of the many available to students in the lower security of DC’s two jail facilities. Administrators and detainees alike are grateful for the opportunities.
Study after study shows incarcerated education helps do what citizens and policymakers alike say they want: keep people from committing more crimes. However, getting education for many people behind bars remains a challenge.
Thirty years ago, the 1994 crime bill drastically cut funding for prisoner education. And while lawmakers restored this money in 2020, across the country the gap between what kind of education prisoners would like and what they can access remains vast.
This is doubly true because 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 DC 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 to continue providing what education he could for those students.
Technology education efforts got a boost during the pandemic, as visits and in-person services got further curtailed, and jails and prisons incorporated more digital communication tools. In the DC jail, this meant secure tablets. These devices greatly expanded the opportunities those awaiting trial would have for education and communication.
At the same time, facilities have put guardrails in place. Communications, much like those over the phone, can be monitored. The functionality is limited. The students in the coding class have even more access to technology but unlike their peers on the outside, they only get limited hours each day on the laptops they use to code and they can only visit a limited number of sites pre-approved by the jail.
For Gaetz, and her students, jumping through the hoops is worth it.
Not taking education for granted
The United States, put plainly, locks up a lot of people. But the people behind bars aren’t evenly distributed across society. This means that many people in the United States don’t have a personal connection to a system that detains and monitors nearly five million people, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Justice. This lack of connection, activists say, is one of the stumbling blocks to reform.
For Gaetz, her connection to the correction system began in 2016. Her undergrad philosophy professor, Lee Perlman, taught a course at a local prison and so Gaetz tagged along.
“Within minutes of sitting in that class my perception of incarcerated people was transformed,” she recalls. “Someone in that class told me that before he had taken classes while incarcerated no one had believed in him. And this one time a week not only is he treated like a human being but a student and someone whose opinion matters.”
She immediately understood the power of education in an entirely different paradigm than her own.
“MIT has some of the smartest students in the world,” she says. “We all kind of feel like we’d do well and here I was with these students who had never had the encouragement that many of us take for granted.”
She signed up to assist in that philosophy class.
The years went on, she finished up her undergrad degree in math and philosophy and started a PhD program in theoretical math. She’d dabbled in computer science courses and taught herself to code as a kind of hobby. When the pandemic struck, and jails and prisons began experimenting with more connectivity, Gaetz—along with Emily Harberg and Martin Nisser—launched a coding boot camp in 2021, first starting with women’s correctional facilities in New England.
The program is straightforward. The trio aided by an ever-expanding group of expert mentors teach the students the basics of how to write code, with a bespoke website serving as their final project. But as with any education, along the way, the students pick up additional skills. Coding requires patience and confidence, but also collaboration.
Opportunity outside of prison
Although there are already rumblings of AI taking away coding jobs, Gaetz says today AI gets used mostly to assist in coding while most software engineering jobs still require an actual person. Besides, some of the students who come to class have little experience with computers, so the course builds literacy, confidence, and problem-solving skills alongside the basic coding. All skills that most employers expect their new hires to have.
Which leads to the next obvious question: Can these students use these skills to earn a living?
In the DC classroom, the students put together websites speaking to their passions or interests. Their topics varied: One student with scotch tape holding his glasses together created a site to explain the high sociological toll of poverty. Another made a site as a tribute to the positive power of music. The class’s sole female student, Iesha Marks, who goes by Tazz, built a website to help women, like her, who suffer domestic violence.
Like so many behind bars, Tazz’s story contains elements of trauma. Her defense team wrote in court documents of her PTSD from a stabbing. And she, in turn, stands accused of causing grave harm. In 2021 she pleaded guilty to attempted assault with a gun. And though she’s professed her innocence, she’s been held on charges that she shot and killed a man, Donald Childs, on a busy DC street in July of 2023—an offense to which she has pleaded not guilty.
For Johnson, the question is a pragmatic one. “Do you want your neighbor to re-offend?” he muses. The data on this point is clear: better education and job opportunities make that prospect less likely. And here again, Johnson has adeptly identified the problem, but unlike writing a code, this problem lacks a tidy solution. Changing minds takes more time and patience even than fixing buggy code.