Marcellino Ornelas had been in and out of juvenile hall seven times by the time he finally went to prison at the age of 19 for assault with a firearm. He'd already been kicked out of high school and was working, he says, as the "local drug dealer," with a side gig at a Ross department store. In the past, every time he got out, he'd start dealing soon after.
"It was like, this is how I make money. This is who my friends are," Ornelas says. "That always brought me back to the same situation."
Now 22, Ornelas believes that pattern easily could have continued if it hadn't been for a program he joined at San Quentin State Prison that taught inmates to code. Since 2014, a nonprofit called The Last Mile has taught coding and entrepreneurship classes inside San Quentin[1] and other prisons in hopes of helping incarcerated people develop marketable skills for when they get out. It's had plenty of success, graduating nearly 400 students over the last four years. It also recently launched a for-profit web development shop[2], where advanced students get paid about $16 an hour to work on real-world projects for paying clients.
But while the classes were fulfilling for students like Ornelas, they were also painstaking. Nearly every state across the country strictly prohibits internet usage. That means that Ornelas and his fellow students had no way to access the site that's like oxygen for coders around the world: Google.
So last year, armed with their newfound skills, Ornelas and three of his classmates decided to build their own search engine for the inside. They called it JOLT, an acronym for the first letter of each of their last names. Now, The Last Mile has deployed