Prior to Justice Through Code, I had very little income to get the bills paid, no sense of real direction. “There’s such a negative stigma attached to incarceration. “When I came home from prison in 2009, like most people who have been to prison, I spent a lot of time trying to hide the fact that I was incarcerated,” Antwan said. His job prospects are bright, and he has confidence. He’s now a teaching assistant with the program and a paid apprentice in the Columbia University IT department, where he works as a DevOps engineer. But he’s beaming on his end of the video call as he explains how, just 12 months ago, he was a rookie software developer and student at Justice Through Code. Like everyone, Antwan’s mostly confined to his home by the pandemic. It’s a snowy day outside Antwan’s home in Jersey City when he sat down to chat with the AWS Big Idea video team. The single most important predictor of recidivism is unemployment, but yet people can’t get jobs.” “About four years after release from incarceration 75% of people will be re-arrested. “It’s really telling to think about the statistics,” said Aedan. The program has since become more than just a months-long course in Python and computer science theory: It offers hope, in addition to in-demand professional skills. That shared experience removes stigma from the classroom and creates bonds that extend into the wider IT community, he said.Īedan zeroed in on computer science because of the huge number of jobs available in IT. Justice Through Code was founded by Aedan Macdonald, who like all of the program’s students and some of its teachers was formerly incarcerated. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is among the program’s sponsors. The program, which is free for students, is a joint initiative from the Center for Justice at Columbia University and Columbia Business School’s Tamer Center for Social Enterprise. All it cares about is, can you write the code?”Īntwan found his calling thanks to Justice Through Code, a program that helps formerly incarcerated people train for a career in tech. “The code doesn't care about your race, your religion, your age, your education, or whether you have been to prison. “Software doesn’t judge, it just wants to work,” said Antwan, who devoted himself about a year ago to learning how to code and now has a prestigious apprenticeship at Columbia University. He smiles warmly while discussing his work and his passion for teaching computer science-it’s a lifetime away from when he was described as a series of numbers by the U.S. Antwan hovers over his computer in his New Jersey apartment, scanning through lines of code that ultimately correspond to ones and zeros, speaking the language of the most powerful classical computers.
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