AP — The budding entrepreneurs wear blue sweat pants labeled "prisoner" and huge, flapping blue shirts. Their doors are triple locked, and lunch is a stale peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Complicating matters, participants in this growing Silicon Valley startup incubator are barred from the Internet.
Nonetheless, the program, launched by successful tech entrepreneurs for inmates north of San Francisco in the decaying San Quentin State Prison, has expanded, and a new session began this month in the gritty, downtown Los Angeles Twin Towers Correctional Facility.
The reason they're growing is simple: Graduates, now trickling out of the penal system, are landing real jobs at real dot-coms.
The rigorous, six-month training teaches carefully selected inmates the ins and outs of designing and launching technology firms, using local experts as volunteer instructors.
"We believe that when incarcerated people are released into the world, they need the tools to function in today's high-tech, wired world," says co-founder Beverly Parenti, who with her husband, Chris Redlitz, has launched thriving companies, including AdAuction, the first online media exchange.
The pair were Silicon Valley pioneers in the 1990s, and they tap their many high-level connections to help with the prison program they started the program after Redlitz was invited into San Quentin in 2011 for a guest lecture and was overwhelmed by the inmates' desire to learn. continue reading...
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