On the morning of Feb. 3, I walked into the second-floor atrium of Farmington Correctional Center’s Reentry Center. The large, sunlit space has become a catchall for FCC’s innovative rehabilitation efforts here in Missouri. A plant nursery adorned the back of the room. Bags of yarn and knitting gear sat in the corners. A workstation, topped with two computer monitors, was adjacent to the doorway. The rest of the space was furnished with large folding tables and plastic chairs.
The atrium houses one of the prison’s newest reentry initiatives, the Coding Education Program. The program is designed and run by a Missouri-based nonprofit called Unlocked Labs, which provides technology education and training for incarcerated learners.
When I arrived that morning, the only movement in the atrium came from Waheed, one of the lab’s incarcerated teaching assistants, who was busy booting up programs at the dual-monitor hub and running tests.
System-level change
Educational and employment training programs, like the Coding Education Program, aim to help incarcerated people develop the skills necessary to land jobs after release, reducing recidivism rates.
According to the organization’s website, Unlocked Labs cofounders Jessica Hicklin and Chris Santillan met while incarcerated at Potosi Correctional Center, about 80 miles southwest of St. Louis. At the time, both Hicklin and Santillan were younger than 18 and had been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Facing a lifetime of incarceration, Hicklin and Santillan were determined to support the education and growth of their community. They spent years tutoring students for the GED tests and organizing courses on victim empathy and anger management. Eventually, the two taught themselves how to code by reading coding books. They dreamed of using their skills to track their students’ progress and strengthen the impact of their programs.
In 2022, after a Supreme Court ruling declared life without parole sentences for minors unconstitutional, the pair got the opportunity to charter Unlocked Labs. Their first project made open-source reentry tracking software accessible to state agencies nationwide.
Now the nonprofit is designing reentry programs themselves. The Coding Education Program is their first and consists of both four- and 12-month pilot programs at four correctional facilities in Missouri.
‘As far as our dreams can go’
At 8 a.m., students began to shuffle into the classroom, each carrying a laptop cased in thick, translucent plastic. The laptops, called Securebooks, come preloaded with software and learning materials for the class.
While Waheed continued setting up, I introduced myself to the education program’s coordinator, Danielle Jones, who supervises the program at Farmington and was greeting everyone at the door.
On the day I visited, the class consisted of a quiz, a guest speaker, a review session and an afternoon study hall. Waheed and Cooper, who manage the programming, doled out the curriculum, built and graded assignments, gave presentations and shaped the culture of the classroom. Both men are experienced coders with longstanding ties to Unlocked Labs, where 70% of staff have a justice-involved background.
Cooper said students are encouraged to work together on quizzes loaded on a single Securebook. On this day, they worked on an internet safety quiz using CSS and HTML. “Out in the free world, a lot of times you have dev teams,” he said. “We try to mirror that.”
All coding students are expected to build a website by the end of the course. In the four-month program, students build the client side of a website. The 12-month program teaches “server side” skills such as database management and JavaScript.
Currently, FCC residents looking to enroll in the program must have three years or fewer left on their sentence. This poses a challenge because in Missouri, release dates can change by months or years. Those eligible for parole might only serve a fraction of their sentence before release.
One of Jones’ students had planned to finish the course, but then his release date moved up unexpectedly. Another two of Jones’ students, who will go home before the course ends, have been working feverishly to get ahead.
I asked Waheed how they manage such a diverse group of learners, goals and timelines.
”Everyone completes the same curriculum,” he said, “but we expect different people to get different things out of it.”
One student nearby weighed in. “I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “The curriculum allows us to take it as far as our dreams can go.”
Students in the course went on to build an origami tutorial site, a personal finance calculator and a Dungeons & Dragons character builder.
In the afternoon, Cooper showed me a website he created for his brother’s tattoo shop. The website featured glowing purple text on a black background, an online scheduling tool and an age verification mechanism. Cooper said he learned everything he knows about programming from Unlocked Labs.
As we scrolled through the site, Cooper said it’s an empowering feeling of “going from nothing to being able to create something.”
