This discussion is a LinkedIn LIVE recording of the Data Binge Podcast featuring Chris Redlitz and Jason Jones, of The Last Mile, a non-profit breaking the mass incarceration cycle by combating recidivism through in-person education and post-release mentorship focused on coding and software engineering. (for those pondering what this means, recidivism is the tendency for a convicted criminal to reoffend).

The Last Mile's returned citizen alumni, maintain 0% recidivism.

Chris Redlitz is a general partner of Transmedia Capital, one of the best performing micro funds in Silicon Valley, and co-founder of The Last Mile. Through The Last Mile, Chris, along with his wife and co-founder Beverly Parenti, launched the first-ever full stack coding program inside US prisons. Previously, Chris co-founded KickLabs, which Forbes ranked as a top technology accelerator and incubated Wish, AngelList and other influential companies. He received Ad Age’s prestigious i20 award for his contributions to the development of interactive marketing and advertising. Earlier in his career, Chris was part of Reebok’s explosive growth where he held positions in sales and marketing and also owned one of the first specialty sports retail chains in Southern California. 

Jason Jones is a full-time disruptor, activist, educator, and software engineer. Jason is the Remote Instructor Manager for The Last Mile, and leads a team of educators that remotes into classrooms across the US to deliver virtual lessons in computer coding. On September 25th, 2018, Jason was released after 13 ½ years incarcerated, during which time he graduated from The Last Mile’s inaugural coding class. Three weeks before his release, Jason became the first person from his cohort to sign a work agreement with a tech company as a software engineer. Jason was also the first justice-involved person to be accepted into the Lightspeed fellowship with a team from Stanford, and today he is a participant in the Koch Associate Program.

We talk across a broad range of topics in our time together today, from the very problem that The Last Mile is committed to help solve, to the systemic impact that incarceration creates within different communities, and the importance of solving the challenges facing the formerly incarcerated and system impacted individuals in our country.

If you'd like to find out more about The Last Mile, or you are looking for ways to contribute, you can navigate to thelastmile.org/, or you can send an email to [email protected]

Thank you for listening, and for being a part of this very important conversation.

Key Takeaways:

 [07:28] The context of The Last Mile (TLM) and why is it created

[09:30] What TLM means and the importance of Jason’s story

[11:31] The gap between hope and transparency for the justice impacted

[13:41] What came into Chris’s mind in creating TLM and the vision for hope and transparency

[17:12] How TLM integrated into the prison system, and the importance of story telling

[19:36] The big problems that The Last Mile is trying to solve

[20:54] The challenge of developing a support system and creating opportunities for the justice impacted

[24:39] How Chris and Jason think providing coding skills disrupts the very lineage of the problem

[30:18] The process of admitting and providing education within the prison system

[34:55] The obstacles that Chris and Jason have to overcome at the student level as part of the process and how this is navigated

[38:46] Perceived challenges at the hiring organization level, when hiring justice impacted graduates

[41:49] What Jason sees as potential challenges in working with companies as a TLM graduate

[44:55] The big vision for TLM

[48:58] What direction Jason seeks from the program, its listeners, and its communities

[51:05] What support TLM needs and ways to get involved

[55:55] What causes would they focus efforts on, if allocated unlimited resources and seven days to execute

Memorable Quotes:

[12:30] “When you talk about where the problem lies, not only control the narratives but also be able to see more than what your current situation is.” - Jason Jones 

[19:42] “I think that is one of the leverages we have been able to have is make our participants more visible by doing interviews or having media coms, stuff like that, putting the story to the name and not just the crime to a person. That’s where it is really easy to dehumanize people, when all you have to go off of is just a crime or the narratives that are out there.” - Jason Jones

[20:55] “The most vulnerable time for someone who’s coming out is the first 120 days, and it's having a job, having a place to live, and a support system. So, we have worked really hard at developing that. We started inside as education, now we have a full-blown re-entry effort.” - Chris Ridlitz

[22:14] “It is really important for us to sort of break that mental ceiling. There are people in prison who are living in a box and many think in the box, and you have to think literally sort of not to go trampled out of the box and blow away that perceived ceiling and we’ve done that now.” - Chris Ridlitz

[32:38] “In our classroom we have every ethnicity, we have all folks working together that may not have ever interacted in their facilities or in the yard. I think it’s important that it’s not only the coding but it is also learning how to interact and work in teams and be collaborative and that’s a big big part of it.” - Chris Ridlitz

[34:03] “That was like the big challenge for all of us is just breaking down the barriers of politics inside. Once that happens and all those areas get broken down it makes it so much easier to learn because everyone’s goal is to learn as much as they can so that it can get them close to getting a job in tech.” - Jason Jones

[37:20] “When you think about the experience of each one of our learners and the different types of ways that they learn, one thing that helps is the fact that our company’s built in a diverse way where so many different experiences on business, venture capitalists, corporate world, and then lived experience of incarceration, and learning in the program, you add that in the pot and you create a human-centered design and it makes a lot easier to build the system support for each individual.” - Jason Jones

[49:49] “You shift from being system impacted to impacting systems. That is where I really want everything to start shifting towards. No one else is doing it. What we are doing is revolutionary. It’s all about disruption.” - Jason Jones

Resources:

The Last Mile – thelastmile.org/  

Learning to Code in Prison - https://youtu.be/7P4klAfyiG8

A Look Inside An Oklahoma Prison | Women Learning to Code - https://youtu.be/XjCpEKF_K6o

Prevalence of Imprisonment in the US Population, 1974-2001 - https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/piusp01.pdf

Prison Policy Initiative: Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2020 - https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html

Just Mercy Movie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4916630/

Thank you for listening!  

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