When you hear about a criminal being involved in a business plan, do you feel your tax dollars are be properly used?
Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti walked into San Quentin State Prison in 2010 to speak with a group of inmates. In turn they were so surprised by how engaged they were. The men then decided it would be beneficial for the inmates to get their creative juices flowing, being that a majority of them will be locked away for a while. To Redlitz & Parenti they felt they could make a difference to the inmates and be the modal for prison education.
“[The inmates] have no sort of attachment or information or exposure to the people from the outside. They don’t have a conduit to it,” Redlitz said. “I figured we could leverage the relationships we have in Silicon Valley and be that conduit to others, for them to be educated and get involved.”
One of the top topics they work on is the overwhelming recidivism rate for inmates.”In the United States, according to the most recent data from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 68 percent of state prisoners released in 2005 were re-arrested within three years. Given that 2.3 million people are currently incarcerated nationwide — and that it costs taxpayers an average of $31,286 a year to incarcerate just one inmate — the price of recidivism is huge for cash-strapped states and devastating for those who end up, again, behind bars.”
They want these men to learn these skills so they can get their life together in the prison and have a plan of how to make it outside the prison without being a sterotype and coming back.
One graduate of the program is Chrisfino Kenyatta Leal, who was released from prison in July 2013 and began an internship at the San Francisco tech campus RocketSpace the same month. He now works there as campus services manager and has helped bring two other TLM graduates on board, Leal said in a HuffPost blog article published March 30.
As the saying goes “one should never judge by a cover of the book, rather take a moment to read the book”
To learn more about this article click here
