BURST“I am not smart enough for this.”
That thought kept popping into Molly Kelly’s head during her first coding class. She glanced at her three classmates, who looked nervous, too. They weren’t sitting in a high school or college classroom. They were adults learning Web development in a six-month course offered behind the walls of the maximum-security Indiana Women’s Prison, where they were all serving time.
Kelly, who entered prison in 2019 after a years-long struggle with addiction that led to multiple felony charges, spent hours reading about programming in her cell after each class. “There was a moment halfway through—I had a lightbulb experience where all of a sudden JavaScript just clicked, and at that moment, I was like, ‘Oh, I get it’,” Kelly said.
She learned another lesson, too, that she had potential beyond lockup. “Sitting in that classroom, it gave me a lot of hope, and it gave me a lot of like, ‘I think I can move forward’, and I have,” said Kelly.
Since her release in 2021, Kelly has worked for The Last Mile, the nonprofit organization that helped her learn coding in prison.
Computer science classes can help incarcerated people build self-efficacy and succeed in life after prison. These programs also offer opportunities to broaden participation and close skills gaps in computer science. Instructors in these programs can also learn valuable lessons from teaching computing to non-traditional students.
Bringing computing from the outside in.
About 0.7% of the U.S. population is incarcerated, according to the non-profit Prison Policy Initiative. Computing programs in prisons can broaden participation in computer science and reach many people who haven’t yet had an opportunity to learn it.
In a world powered by computers, everyone needs computer science education, said Jake Baskin, the executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). “At CSTA, we believe and have seen the profound impact of everyone learning a foundational computer science education, and believe strongly that that truly means everyone, and think it’s important to extend that into supporting folks who are learning this in prison as well.”
Computer science presents an opportunity to leverage a tool and technique for creating and making a profound impact.
“Right now, the set of people who have access to that is really limited and does not reflect the overall population of the U.S. or the world,” Baskin said. “I think we have an obligation to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to learn these skills, to be engaged in this field, because of the immense creative potential of what that could bring.”
At the 2024 Conference on Research in Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT), a team from the University of California San Diego, Swarthmore College, Bucknell University, and Bennington College shared a call to action advocating for policy and research on computer science (CS) education in prisons.
They noted that Pell Grant eligibility was reinstated for incarcerated individuals in 2023. Efforts such as increasing recruitment of CS faculty to teach in prisons and supporting the expansion of technical infrastructure to do so could “help create a new synergistic relationship between HEP [higher education in prison] and STEM diversification,” the team wrote.
“More computing educators can reach incarcerated students with digital literacy skills, core computing content, and critical analyses of the impacts of computing on society,” they said. “CS education researchers can also support the growth of CS education in prisons, and influence policies restricting technology infrastructure.”
Building confidence through computer science
In 2020, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Educational Justice Institute launched Brave Behind Bars, a 12-week program that teaches HTML, CSS, and JavaScript fundamentals, along with career-readiness skills, to incarcerated people. About 200 students in Massachusetts, Maine, Washington DC, and Arizona have participated.
“The kinds of classes that we are teaching are not typically something that the students have had access to before,” said co-founder Martin Nisser, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Washington. “Seeing the students be able to take on that challenge and see that they can overcome it with all the help provided by the many instructors and teaching assistants we have has been a really, really great experience.”
For the course’s capstone project, students create websites addressing key social challenges, such as domestic violence, food insecurity, or gun violence. Some students have experienced these challenges firsthand, making the experience of publishing a resource rewarding, said Nisser.
At the CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2024, Nisser and his colleagues shared research suggesting Brave Behind Bars boosts participants’ self-efficacy.
Brave Behind Bars is unique among prison coding programs. It’s accredited with the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology in Massachusetts, Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Washington County Community College in Maine, so students can directly apply these credits if pursuing a degree upon release.
“I think it’s wonderful to see that it is a program with accreditation at the end of it, and that that is the type of thing that can bring sort of additional opportunities to build on the introductory content,” said Baskin.
Nisser stays in touch with some Brave Behind Bars graduates who have gotten jobs in tech or gone on to continue their education at universities.
Lowering recidivism through computer science.
For many people, release from prison isn’t the end of their journey with the justice system. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 82% of prisoners released across 24 states in 2008 were arrested again within 10 years.
Educational programs in prison, especially vocational or college programs, can help reduce recidivism and boost employment and wages for formerly incarcerated individuals, according to research published in the American Journal of Criminal Justice.
“People who go to prison aren’t all bad people,” said Kelly. “They’ve just made bad decisions, and it depends on what kind of community, what kind of support they have, what kind of education they can do inside so that when they come home, they can be successful members of society.”
Studying computing might be particularly beneficial. “Specifically with computer coding and things, there’s something that happens, and I really can’t put a finger on what it is, but it gives you this ‘Wow, I’m learning something. I’m actually doing this. I’m completing things, and I’m getting decent grades, and I’m understanding’,” said Kelly.
She said students can also directly apply the computing and problem-solving skills learned in computing classes to challenges they encounter upon release.
The Last Mile has served more than 1,400 students in eight states. The recidivism rate for graduates is 4.5%.
The organization’s Web development course is a six-month program that teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and Bootstrap. Students can follow up with a six-month MERN development course that includes Node.js, React, Express, MongoDB, Mongoose, and API Testing.
“A format that introduces foundational computer science topics is a wonderful introduction, and those sound like the types of programs that would be able to provide a broad base of understanding and algorithms and programming while also touching on thinking broadly about what computing is and how can it impact on the world,” said Baskin. “And so those both sound like good starts and I would hope that they could be built upon to continue supporting participants in receiving degrees or credentials that would enable easily communicating to future employers of the types of skills that they’ve developed through the programs.”
The Last Mile offers alumni support services such as a scholarship program for continued education and assistance with grant and scholarship applications.
Some graduates now work in tech for companies like Chekr, Asana, and Slack, or they do freelance coding. Others have found work in other fields. “We don’t define success on whether or not someone’s a coder,” said Kelly. “We define it on what they decide they want to do with their life.”
What instructors can learn.
Both Brave Behind Bars and The Last Mile plan to expand to more correctional facilities soon.
“There’s a tremendous demand for programs like this that teach computer science in facilities,” said Nisser.
Existing programs are always looking for more collaborators. Anyone who wants to start their own program can begin by contacting the educational coordinators at their local correctional facilities and asking whether they have the interest and capacity to run computing classes.
“In principle, anyone who’s teaching computer science in a university has the ability to teach that program in a facility as well,” said Nisser.
Baskin said the key elements of any strong computing program, which begins with the foundations, would apply to a prison computer science program. The CSTA K-12 Standards are a good place to start.
“I would encourage folks to think about building a program that meets that content and thinks about pathways that can extend into sort of different specific focus areas that are of interest,” he said. Pathways like programming, artificial intelligence, data science, cybersecurity, physical computing, game and interactive media design, or other fields combined with computer science can help learners understand computer science and engage with industries that provide meaningful economic opportunities.
At the 2024 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS) organized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, UC San Diego researchers outlined lessons learned from teaching an introductory computer science course in prison.
They suggested leveraging the student community, making students resources for each other, allowing code resubmission policies, mixing live coding with long examples on the board, using relevant examples related to life experiences, making use of students’ high engagement in lectures, recognizing that students are often skilled independent learners, and creating opportunities for self-expression.
Some content must be delivered offline due to security restrictions. “I would encourage folks to think about ways that they can leverage what we call ‘CS unplugged activities’ that engage in computing concepts in a way that is not even using a computer and focusing on other manipulatives or materials that might introduce the same content,” said Baskin.
Whether it requires thinking creatively about curriculum delivery or reimagining assumptions about how students learn, teaching computer science in prison can also be a profound experience for educators.
“The students who we’ve taught inside correctional facilities are some of the most engaged and motivated students that I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with,” said Nisser.
Julie Stewart is a writer, editor, and content strategist who reports on science and medicine. Her work has been published by Medscape, the University of Delaware, Penn State Health, and more.