Coding “challenges my mind, it challenges me to be creative, and it has a real future in it,” Antwan, a Justice Through Code program graduate, told SDxCentral.

“The greatest thing about coding is that it doesn’t discriminate, coding itself doesn’t discriminate and there’s no feelings,” he said. “What matters in coding is that you can write code, and the better you are at writing code, the better thinker that you are, the more opportunities are going to come to you.”

That optimistic outlook is relatively new for Antwan, a former electrical engineering student who was incarcerated from 2004 to 2009. Antwan requested that SDxCentral only use his first name for privacy reasons. Upon release he thought employers would be moved by his story and motivated to hire him, but that wasn’t the case.

He spent a decade weaving in and out of different jobs trying to make ends meet, and struggling with overwhelming bouts of depression and regrets about his decision. After representing himself in two trials that resulted in hung juries, he decided to take a plea for a felony that effectively freed him for time served. 

“I didn’t want to be that statistic or that guy that you see on the news who’s finally been declared innocent after you spent 20 or 30 years in prison. That was part of the reason why I took the plea and as time went on — many ups and downs over the years,” Antwan said. 

Happenstance Leads to New Beginnings

That all changed when he saw a flyer for Justice Through Code, a coding skills training program at Columbia University for formerly incarcerated individuals. After some self doubt, Antwan convinced himself to apply, made it through the first round, and he regained a sense of normalcy and determination to succeed as a programmer or software developer. 

He entered the pilot program during the spring semester of 2020, completed an internship, and returned to the program as a teacher’s assistant and paid apprentice in the university’s IT department in September 2020. “What’s unique about Justice Through Code is we all come from that same set. Most of us are used to being — anywhere we go, we’re the only person who’s been incarcerated so we feel like the outsider and now here we are in a group of people who all have the same shared experiences, the same doors have been slammed in our faces for the same reasons,” Antwan said. 

Aedan Macdonald, Justice Through Code’s founder and program manager, devised the training program after he recognized first-hand the roadblocks and extremely limited job opportunities people face after incarceration. After being incarcerated in federal prison for four years for a marijuana-related offense, Macdonald said he realized many people don’t have the opportunity or resources to complete a formal four-year academic program so he decided to approach the problem in a different way.

“We have to examine non-traditional ways of getting people into jobs" and acknowledge why there continues to be a shameful lack of diversity in the tech industry at large, he told SDxcentral. Macdonald said he is committed to “address the issue in a novel way so that we can really increase representation, support people in the process, and build more inclusive communities both within the educational space and also in the corporate space.”

He’s encouraged by the support and feedback he’s received, and notes that many U.S. companies are making similar commitments after recognizing and reckoning with the tech industry’s collective failings. “The conversations that we’re able to have with corporations that we don’t currently have a partnership with are far different than they would have been even a year ago. I think there is progress there,” Macdonald said.

Academic-Enterprise Collaboration Fuels ‘Lasting Change’

“My fundamental belief is that this has to be a partnership between academic institutions and enterprise,” he said. “There’s no way to do this without that collaboration because the companies like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and many other companies in our industry are shaping the future direction of our world, and so I think it’s really important to focus on that.”

AWS is supporting the program with financial resources, volunteer mentors, and devices, and intends to help the program grow.

“This is the first time that the AWS Social Impact team has collaborated with an organization that is supporting returning citizens, and the response from everyone I’ve talked to has been universally positive,” Maggie Carter, global lead for social impact at AWS, wrote in response to questions. “Diversity and inclusion is not a project that can ever be marked complete, it’s a mindset that must show up in everything we do — and our intention is it will have a ripple effect for other communities.”

Achieving equitable access to opportunity and education is, in many ways, local and high-touch work, Macdonald explained. “There is a way to scale it, but you need to have those local partners that have boots on the ground, so to speak.”

Replicating and scaling programs like Justice Through Code requires a national consortium of higher-education institutions that are committed to collaborating with enterprises on this vision, according to Macdonald.

“We look at this as really the foundation for widespread systemic change as a result of the work that we’re doing,” he said, adding that there’s always more work to be done. “We don’t just say we want people to get a career, but we want them to be the future leaders in tech.”

Justice Through Code Confronts Challenges With Empathy

The process of designing these programs must also be thoughtful and empathetic, Macdonald said. “When you’re dealing with people that have never had that opportunity before for the most part and are used to getting shut down, it's a process to get to the point where you feel comfortable to continually put yourself out there and share a piece of a story that is oftentimes very traumatic, and it can take an emotional toll.”

Antwan said he is focusing on what’s in front of him right now, but he acknowledges that “there are great possibilities out there” once he completes his apprenticeship. “I come from a community and I check many boxes when it comes to being a Black man that’s been formerly incarcerated,” he said. “There’s not a lot of diversity in the tech industry and that’s one of my goals, to work on that, to be a voice on that.”

More tech companies need to connect with programs that support underrepresented or disadvantaged communities, particularly people of color, he said. “They have to broaden their way of thinking. They can’t just do what they’ve normally been doing because if you keep doing what you’ve normally been doing you’re going to keep producing the same results,” Antwan said.

“It’s an inherent psychological norm. If a white person only has white friends or a Black person only has Black friends, then that’s normal to them. And it’s not until they step outside of their normal circle and they say ‘wait a minute, there’s an entire world outside of my circle,’” he said. 

“Technology is not race based,” Antwan said. “People tend to just bring whatever inherent biases they have into whatever industry that they’re in, but when it comes to technology, and especially coding, it doesn’t care about what you look like. It cares about how you write the code.”

Photo: Antwan, a Justice Through Code graduate. Credit: Amazon Web Services