Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup — he’s also serving his 11th year in prison

In an extraordinary testament to rehabilitation and second chances, Preston Thorpe, a software engineer, is contributing full-time to a San Francisco-based startup, Turso, all while serving his 11th year in prison. His journey from incarceration to a pivotal role in the tech world highlights an innovative program within the Maine state prison system that offers remote work opportunities to inmates.

Thorpe’s exceptional coding skills first caught the attention of Glauber Costa, CEO of the database company Turso. Thorpe had been a prolific volunteer contributor to one of Turso’s open-source projects for about six months. Impressed by his work, Costa extended a job offer, only to discover a unique detail on Thorpe’s GitHub profile: his incarceration. “I checked his GitHub profile, and he mentions the fact that he is incarcerated,” Costa told TechCrunch. “It’s a story I’ve never seen before.”

Despite the unconventional circumstances, Thorpe has been working full-time from his cell since May. Costa expressed deep respect for Thorpe’s personal transformation. “I reached out to him in January, just to understand and get to know him,” Costa said. “Since then, I’ve had deep conversations with him about his change of heart that led him to be in the position where he is today… Knowing his story increased our respect for him personally.”

Thorpe’s current role is facilitated by an experimental program in Maine that allows incarcerated individuals to hold remote jobs. This initiative has proven to be profoundly rehabilitative. Thorpe, who was in prison by age 20 for drug-related offenses after being kicked out of his home as a teenager, found a turning point after being transferred to the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine just before the pandemic. “I was a complete idiot,” Thorpe admitted to TechCrunch. “I had given up on my life, completely written it off, and just accepted that this was my life and just had no hope.”

However, the new environment sparked a change. “When I came to Maine, it was completely different,” Thorpe recounted. “COVID happened right after I came up here, and it just gave me a chance — there was no one around that I felt like I had to act or prove myself to. It was just me. I actually felt like maybe it’s not over; maybe I could actually end up having a normal life. I had this kind of epiphany: ‘I’m going to make something of myself.’”

At Mountain View, Thorpe enrolled remotely at the University of Maine at Augusta. This aligns with the vision of Maine Department of Corrections Commissioner Randall Liberty, who took a risk by allowing an incarcerated graduate student from Colby College to be an adjunct professor. Commissioner Liberty explained, “After consideration, I allowed that to happen, and over time, it’s been very successful.”

Currently, approximately 30 inmates, including Thorpe, are employed while residing in the Earned Living Unit, a less restrictive prison facility designated for inmates with a consistent record of good behavior. These inmates contribute 10% of their earnings to the state, in addition to any required payments for restitution, legal fees, or child support. Haley Shoaf, co-executive director of Unlocked Labs, an organization that hires incarcerated engineers (where Thorpe previously worked), praised Maine’s pioneering efforts: “[Maine] put all this infrastructure in place during COVID to allow for remote education, and then once that infrastructure was in place, all of a sudden, it expanded the amount of opportunities people could take advantage of.”

Commissioner Liberty, with 43 years in law enforcement, recalibrated his approach to rehabilitation after serving in Iraq, gaining a deeper understanding of trauma’s role in incarceration. He began implementing programs that tackle the root causes of crime, such as substance use disorders, untreated mental health issues, and educational deficits. He argues that such investments are fiscally responsible and crucial for community safety and victim compensation. “When they hear that Preston is making the kind of money he makes, their jaw drops. And I say to them, ‘If you truly care about making the community safer, if you care about being fiscally responsible, if you care about victims and survivors in the community, this is the way to make them whole,’” he stated.

Maine’s proactive approach contrasts sharply with national recidivism rates. While many states report return-to-custody rates as high as 60%, Maine’s figures hover between 21% to 23% for males and a remarkable 9% for women. For inmates who attend college classes in Maine, the recidivism rate plummets to 0.05% – virtually zero. Furthermore, the initiative has contributed to a safer prison environment, with a maximum-security prison in Maine reporting only seven assaults on staff last year, a significant drop from 87 in 2017. “When you treat people like people, they become the best version of themselves,” Shoaf observed.

Preston Thorpe is a living testament to this success. He fully acknowledges his past but feels profoundly changed. “It’s like waking up from a dream, me from five years ago,” Thorpe shared. “All the memories I have of the streets and why I came to prison, it doesn’t even feel like it happened to me. It feels like it happened to someone else.” Over the past three years, Thorpe dedicated countless hours to self-learning programming, driven by a desire to gain purpose and be seen for his abilities rather than his past. In the open-source community, where identities are often veiled, Thorpe was judged solely on his code, allowing him to forge a new identity as a skilled engineer. “The worst part about prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal],” Thorpe concluded. “Letting someone have a career gives you purpose.”