Refactored in prison

Today we are joined by Preston Thorpe, who’s currently incarcerated at Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine. How are you doing, Preston?

Doing alright. How are you guys?

Did you just dox him, Jerod?

I don’t think so. This is right there on his website.

[laughs] I’m just kidding. You were very specific. I liked it. It was good.

Well, I didn’t want to just say Preston’s in the clink, but that’s what I was gonna say. Do people still call it that? Is it the clink? I think that sounds cool.

I don’t know what they call it these days, man.

Preston, what do people call where you are?

It’s certainly not called that here… It’s just kind of – yeah, locked up, or they’re put away. I don’t know.

Yeah.

I think the clink is a little outdated.

Yeah, I think it’s from the ’50s, probably.

It’s definitely ’80s slang, ’90s slang, which is our era, Jerod.

“If you do that, you’ll end up in the clink.” Yeah. I think it sounds cool.

I’m cool with it. I mean, as a term…

Certainly not cool from the inside. Maybe cooler from the outside if you’re older… Regardless of what you call it, you’re in a unique place. At least first time for us, right, Adam? …we’ve interviewed somebody from inside.

Yeah, this is definitely a first.

And maybe you’re surprised that it’s possible, you know? Like, I wouldn’t even expect – like, you can podcast from inside a correctional facility? How did this all come together for you? How are you able to do this from where you are?

Yeah, so there are, I think, a few podcasts that are put on from correctional facilities, but the content is obviously a little bit more niche. I think California has an ongoing one… But certainly, nothing this, appearing on a normal podcast. At least none that are sanctioned anyway, right? It’s like, you might see it where someone’s interviewed from a phone that they’re definitely not supposed to have, but…

Right.

Yeah, it’s certainly a unique situation. There’s definitely all kinds of backstory to that. So first, I guess I would want to put a disclaimer there that this is not a common situation, not a common occurrence. There is internet access and laptops at Main facilities, but this is a very special, special occasion/circumstance with the access that I’ve been given in particular.

Yeah, we had to ask permission, sign paperwork etc. This has been in the works ever since we had a conversation with Glauber Costa from Turso, and he told us about you and how you have been contributing from inside on open source, and such a cool story. Tell us a little bit of the story, how you ended up where you are. You’re serving 10 years, or you’re on your 10th year…? Tell us the terms and kind of where you are in your term.

Yeah, so I’m currently on my 11th year, and definitely my last. I am approximately a couple months, roughly, away from release…

Nice.

…to home confinement. So I have to spend some amount of time with a curfew and an ankle monitor and all that. Yeah, so I came about being here in high school. I was just young and made stupid decisions, and chose to get into drugs, just being rebellious… And ended up getting kind of thrown out of my parents’ house, but in a manner that they definitely didn’t expect. The results that happened, it was a really unfortunate kind of circumstance.

[08:15] I was quite a computer geek, you’d say, in high school, and I was really deep into the ware scene, the torrent scene type deal… And at the at the time - it was kind of before what everyone probably knows as the dark web, and the kind of underground, internet black market that exists today. There was a version of that that was around in the pre 2010 era, and I had some proximity to that, because I was involved in the torrent scene and the ware scene; there’s some general kind of – it’s adjacent. And that kind of access, unfortunately – I think what would have occurred in any other circumstance was I would have picked out/ran away. I probably would have learned my lesson fairly quickly, and been super-broke, and it wouldn’t have worked out, and then I would have ended up coming home, and apologizing, and turning my life around. That was definitely their intention, you know. But unfortunately, I became very involved in – you know, I was using drugs and had essentially ended up getting real deep into that particular scene. Large amounts of money and 17-18 year old mentality is just the worst possible combination. So I pretty much thought I was untouchable, and the man… And yeah, I ended up getting in real deep, into drug addiction, and eventually into trouble. And I went to prison for the first time at 20 years old, in 2013.

So you were using, you said there’s lots of money running around, so you’re distributing as well… I mean, you had easy access to basically cheap drugs via the dark web, and whatever scene you were a part of there. And were you distributing? I assume you were, because you’ve got to get the money somehow, right?

[10:48] Yeah. Unfortunately, that was the case. These things were available right from source countries in ridiculous low wholesale prices. And it felt the movies, if you ever seen Blow… It certainly felt a version of that. It was a very unique time, when certain things hadn’t been scheduled yet… Like, the DEA hadn’t scheduled certain things, so they were just freely available on the clear web, from distributors. And they weren’t illegal. Obviously, some of these things are; I was certainly not not breaking the law, right? But it definitely made the price and availability pretty low. And yeah, it kind of just got – it took a life of its own, and… Yeah, the ego, the money, the feeling of the fact that I didn’t come home and apologize… I kind of felt it was “Hah! I’ve figured it out.” I had some kind of cheat code to life, and the whole time I’m just consuming tons of drugs, and not feeling a drug addict, because I’m obviously not the kind of typical, what you see, broken and struggling for their next hit… It was a never ending supply of everything. So it just all contributed to just making it worse and worse, because I wasn’t self-aware of it. It was a bad, bad deal. And surprise, surprise, 20 years old, I ended up getting caught with a pretty substantial package of Ecstasy in the mail from Vancouver, and got a 4 to 10 year prison sentence.

It would just ship to your house, basically, from a different country? Like, how did they actually – is this common? It just goes through the postal system that, or what?

Yeah, so at the time it was not common, and that’s kind of what I said, it was a very unique time in history. Now there’s rap songs about it. It’s frequently mentioned in hip hop, and it’s pretty widely known that this is a thing. Back then it wasn’t. It certainly happened, but it was not something that anyone was aware of, or at least not nearly to the degree that it is now. And that just kind of further enhanced the feeling that I was just going to get away with this forever… And it was just – it was a bad, bad scene.

I think it’s wild how much – I think even today, Jerod, a lot of drugs flow through the U.S. postal system, because… I don’t know firsthand, so I can’t say that, but I know people who boast about things, even to this day. And it might not be a large quantity of what you described, Preston, but it’s something similar, and smaller, or whatever. But I’ve heard of people talk about moving these things, just to friends. That kind of thing. In passing, let’s just say. Do not interrogate my friend group. I’m just kidding… I’m not even around these people anymore. I keep my distance.

It’s so wild, because I think that – and you probably can share some of this, Jerod, maybe not so much in detail, but… I think in adolescence, in that timeframe in our lives, it’s already natural to feel some version of superhuman, some version of invincible, immortal… the end and death and suffering and loss will never come, “This is somebody else’s life”, “I will never get caught, because this is just not what happens. I’m untouchable in some way, shape or form”, just because you’re in that adolescence spectrum. And you couple that with somehow being able to find access to this stuff… And I imagine – like, we know that drugs alter your chemical state in your brain. We understand that even before this age group that you’re in, your frontal lobe isn’t fully formed. They say it’s not fully cooked until 25, roughly, so you don’t even have a lot of your frontal lobe rationale kicking in it would later in life, to say “Oh hey, Preston, this is a bad choice.” Or “Hey, this is a dangerous situation.” In those scenarios, it’s almost as if your brain can’t tell you there’s danger, or can’t tell you these things.

[16:04] Now, that’s not the truth for everybody. There’s varying degrees of spectrums to that. But man, what a situation to be in, to be in that era and have that kind of access, and then go down the road you’ve gone. But in the end, though, you’re in a place where – I don’t want to glorify your story in any way, and you don’t want to glorify your story… So I don’t know the full amount of it, but there has been an ability for you to recover in some way, shape or form and to give back. And I think that’s the uniquely wild, free thing that is called open source software, and even software development. Free in the fact that if you have a text editor, or a terminal, or access to a computer in some way, shape or form, you could probably find a way to hack around, and poke around, and get curious, and discover things. And the fact that open source is available to you to make that connection - Jerod, you mentioned Glauber Costa from Turso and the things they’re doing there… Being able to contribute to, I would say, a high-value open source project. That to me is wild. To go down the road you’ve gone, but then also to come back in a way to be able to contribute. How does that make you – knowing your story, and you live this every day, and this is your reality, not ours… How does that make you feel, that fact? How does it make you feel?

Yeah, it’s honestly amazing, and I feel there’s this kind of – I go back and forth between feeling this isn’t real, this day that I live now, and the career that I have, and the things I’m able to do, the access that I have. Half the time I feel “Wow, this is unreal”, because compared to two years ago, let alone five years ago, it’s just a completely different life. Never in a million years would I ever have guessed that this would be possible from a medium security facility.

And then the other half of the time I look at my past life and I remember things the things that we’re talking about, and I think “That isn’t real. That happened to someone else.” I was kind of recollecting about some stories with it… This kid has been pretty much my best friend for 15 years, and thinking about these actual vivid memories was the craziest. It doesn’t feel like it happened to me, because it’s so far away from the person I am now, and honestly, the person I was raised. I grew up in a good household, I’ve got a sister and three brothers, and my parents are together, still together to this day… Great people. And I grew up a good kid, and so it gives me even less excuse. I knew what I was doing was wrong, so… First of all, yeah, I was young and stupid, but I also was super-aware of the consequences of my actions. But the person that I was for those years is so far from who I am now that it doesn’t – there’s no sane reality where the person I am today is making any… It’s unbelievable that I just didn’t care about anything. I don’t know, I created this messed up kind of identity and world for myself, and just went with it, accepted it completely. And yeah, it got – it was out of control.

[20:16] So you said you got 4 to 10 years and you’re on year 11. Was there a second thing, or was it extended, or…?

Yeah, no, there’s certainly quite a bit more there. So I get out after serving three of the four. So when I say four to 10, and the way that [unintelligible 00:20:32.02] system works is you have a minimum and a maximum. You serve every day of your minimum, pretty much. So I had a 4 to 10, got a year suspended… There’s a clause for doing drug treatment and not having dirty urine, disciplinary tickets. So yeah, so released after age 23, after three years. And my parents had moved back to Michigan, where they’re originally from. So this prison sentence I did was in the state of New Hampshire, and the time that I spent in prison - this was my first time in prison, it was my first time ever getting arrested. And honestly, when you’re young and you’re really impressionable, and the people that I was surrounded with in prison were very different from the people that I was surrounded by on the street… And there’s a certain kind of novelty to prison, especially when you’re in that lifestyle… Pretty much everyone you know has pretty much been to prison. Prison is like a rite of passion passage type thing… And I just continued making all the wrong decisions, and just seeking out and surrounding myself with just the wrong kind of people, and continued to do the same stuff, and just in a different environment.

Right. Got busted again and went back in.

Yeah. So even still in prison. And when I was released, I had the opportunity to move to Michigan with my family. So I was released with – I had no identification, I had no social security card, birth certificate… I had nothing. No money. And one of my old friends gave me an old iPhone, and it was just like a rough, rough situation. And I had a two-week stay at a rooming house in the city of Manchester… This particular rooming house is notorious, to this day. There’s overdoses every day. There was parole officers and cops walking around this rooming house. And that was my first – I was released and went there to get my room… You know, you need an address to make parole, right? So just to get out, I had to – one of my buddies got me that room, and… Yeah, it was just like a major – it was not a good scene. So I didn’t transfer my parole to Michigan. Maybe I told myself it was because it takes a couple of months for the transfer to go through, and I wanted to get out immediately. In reality, I think it was me in the back of my mind just giving myself an out.

[24:11] Because going back home would have been a guarantee that I have to abide by the rules, and do the right thing, and try to get a job… And when you’re used to the kinds of money that I experienced at a young age, the thought of making minimum wage, or 10 bucks an hour, or even 50 bucks an hour, it was just not… So I was just making excuses for myself, and… Yeah, I very easily justified getting involved in the same stuff.

The time that I spent out in 2016, I was out from – I was released in March, and by Christmas Eve I was arrested again. That is the case that I just finished. And yeah, and then was on bail, and was arrested again in May of 2017. And I’ve been in since May 5th of 2017.

As you tell that story, it breaks my heart, because my oldest son was born in March of the year that you were arrested, 2016… And he’s nine, and I see his life, and I just think like “Gosh, man… These choices that people make.” And I don’t want to downplay, because this is your story and I’m not trying to be negative, but… It’s just super-sad to hear, because I see the life my son has, and obviously he’s born, so he’s not your age, but… I see all the new. I see all the new goodness, I see all the things we’ve done in our lives as a father and as a son for him, and I just think what you’ve been doing since that same timeframe. I know what we did for Christmas that year. It was his first Christmas, kind of thing. So these are like dates burned in my brain because of my relationship, and it just breaks my heart for you.

Yeah, no, it’s definitely no joke. I think these things are very commonly portrayed in media, music, television as being like - yeah, very different from the reality that I’ve seen personally. I’ve seen quite, quite a bit of it. Yeah, I haven’t had a Christmas on the street since 2012. It was the last Christmas that I was free. This life will get you nowhere. Yeah, and I don’t think I – I haven’t seen a single person succeed… I haven’t met one person that – I met a lot of very, very successful people in that life, but none of them got to enjoy any… Like, you might get a few years here or there, but it never works out. Never.

But yeah, so… After I came in on, on this sentence, I got – I was originally sentenced to 15 to 30 years, and receiving a sentence like that was super-devastating. And I was particularly bad into the drugs before I came in on this sentence. I had – kind of prior to this last 2016, my drug use was not… Like, it was bad, but it wasn’t as bad as it was this previous time.

[28:06] So my head was just not in the right place. Any hope I did have for a life was now just completely over. I didn’t have much hope to begin with, so there wasn’t a lot there to lose, but… Yeah, I pretty much gave up and had really accepted the identity of who I was at that time. I really believed that “These are the decisions I made, and I’m paying for them now, and this is the person I am, and I’m going to–” It’s just something that – I accepted that identity, and that’s something that really bothers me today, being a completely different person… Going back and thinking “Man, when was it that I decided that I was okay with being someone that I clearly wasn’t, and doing things that–” And that’s what ended up happening.

So I came in in 2017, was in the [unintelligible 00:29:22.10] system for a couple of years, and the case that I came in on was a very high profile case, and I had already been to that prison system before, so I knew everyone… You know, it’s a very small system, and my name was a frequently brought up name in the system. And the things that I was involved with – I was making some poor decisions; I don’t want to elaborate too much, but… They ended up getting me on a list for an interstate transfer. They just want to get you out of the system completely. And one of the luckiest things that have ever happened to me - because I had court dates remaining on that sentence, you can only get sent within the New England States. So because they were going to have to transport me back for my sentence review board, and – so I had some scheduled court dates, and I was scheduled to go to Massachusetts… And I was actually excited about that. I have a lot of friends down in the Massachusetts system. That is what I thought that I wanted. That was the one I would have picked if you would have given me the choice. And I actually went out for a very minor surgery, and when Massachusetts came to pick me up, or they called or whatever, and learned that I was in the infirmary after this surgery, they actually denied my transfer. Like, after previously accepting it. And I had a bed there, and everything. New Hampshire had already accepted the inmate they were going to swap with me. So it was pretty set in stone.

So by just a sheer miracle, they ended up denying me, and I thought I was going to sit – I had been sitting in solitary confinement this whole time. So it had been over a year at this point that I’d been in solitary confinement. Nothing, just a cell, and books if you’re lucky, for 13 or 14 months by this time.

[31:57] And then one day they, they came in and told me to pack up. And I was expecting it, but I thought it was going to take a bit longer. We ended up coming up to Maine, and it was certainly not – I didn’t even think it was an option. I thought it was going to be Rhode Island or Connecticut. Those are the three - Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut are generally the three you would go to. I didn’t know Maine was an option. And that was quite literally the best thing that’s ever happened to me. It absolutely changed my life.

The Maine system is very different from just about any other system. It’s probably tied with Vermont for being the safest prison in the country. And it doesn’t have a lot of the prison – it doesn’t have as much of the mentality and the subculture and the gangs. It’s not as prevalent; not nearly as prevalent. The New Hampshire system is certainly not San Quentin, but there are units where that’s very much how things work, and you’re going to be exposed to that, for sure. Maine is very different, and not being around any of those people that I had been – by this point I’d done six years or more… So not being around the people that I had been influenced by, and the people I felt like I had some kind of a reputation to uphold myself to, and just kind of being in a new place, and with a large sentence, and just… You’re kind of focused – you have no choice but to just focus on yourself, because there’s nothing else to do. I didn’t owe anyone there anything. I didn’t owe anyone back home anything either, but it was just a feeling like I was this person and I was entitled to act this way, and be this person, in the other system.

So Maine has a lot of educational opportunities, and a lot of – it’s just a much nicer system. And after a couple of years I kind of just had an epiphany of like “At what point did I just decide that I was okay with this?” At what point did I decide that I was alright with being the person that I was? When did I decide that I was okay that I just am in prison, and I live in a cell, and this is normal? Why is this normal? Why am I not spending my time trying to better myself and work on being the person that I’m going to be when I get out? Because I can’t go back to what I was doing and who I was. And yeah, it was quite literally a single day… I vividly remember the day that I had this epiphany, and from there I just started to make – that was the beginning.

Break: [35:45]

And after this moment, did you just think to yourself “Well, I like computers. I’ve been a computer guy since the start.” Because that is, ironically, how you started your life towards this place, was through the ware scene, and really being adept at using the internet… And you just decided “I’m going to pick up programming”, or had you been programming all along? Tell us the technical side of your journey.

Yeah, so I had enrolled in college, or had already enrolled in college by this point… And this was pre-laptops. So the college - essentially, you could apply for a Pell Grant, and there was some funding through Doris Buffett, and there was… I think the professors would come in and have in-person classes, or maybe they’d do Zoom calls, but there was no laptops in the cell, like with internet.

So I had applied for college already, and while waiting is kind of when this all kind of occurred… And the first semester that I end up in college just so happened to be the first semester that laptops existed, somewhat as they do today. And I had gone through a couple different avenues in my head about what I’m going to do. And I’ve always loved learning, I have spent thousands of hours, I read - I mean, hundreds and hundreds of books. Obviously, I’ve done a lot of time and segregation, and so that’s the main kind of thing you do… But I had studied organic chemistry, I had studied - finance was the big one, right before I ended up enrolling in school… I learned everything that I could possibly consume, from getting books sent in, to watching CNBC all day… And I was kind of obsessively learning about the markets, and options trading, because I figured that I could day trade when I got out, and that was a potential kind of career path.

And then when college started, I get the computer, and that was kind of epiphany number two… And I kind of realized, “Wow, I have four years left. Where else does someone get 24 hours a day…?” Well, you’ve got to sleep, so 14 hours a day, to learn something… I had programmed in high school, kind of before high school. Nothing super-crazy. LAMP, kind of, PHP… I’ve had an Ubuntu Linux tattoo since 2009. So as I mentioned before, I was definitely a computer nerd, so I kind of had just enough context to understand and remember “If you’re really, really good at programming, that’s kind of all they care about.” You know what I mean? And I definitely did some research and kind of found out that criminal records or college degrees or any of that stuff is negotiable.

[42:26] I don’t know what year it was, but Google and Microsoft did away with their – they don’t even care if you have a degree, because there’s just self-taught people out there that are spectacular. So that was epiphany number two, when I was like “Wow, if I were to spend 12 to 14 hours a day, every single day, for the remainder of my time, I could theoretically be pretty good at this. And hopefully, by the time I get out, I might be looking at the possibility of having a promising career.” And that was probably a thousand days ago, and I have spent 12 to 14 hours a day, every single day, since that day. That was pretty much roughly a thousand days ago.

That’s amazing. It’s amazing to have that realization, and make that choice. Sometimes people make a choice that’s sort of dreamlike. “I dream” or “I wish I can do this”, and there’s some people who make a choice and resolve to do it, and they commit to that resolve, and they show up every day and they do that. I mean, because sometimes boredom, even though you want to make change, can get ahold of you, because we’re all human, no matter what our scenarios are. Sometimes we’re like “I really want to be this amazing thing, and here’s my pathway to do it”, but you don’t follow the steps to get there, and you’ve done that. That’s wild that you’d be able to do that.

Yeah, for sure. I think the environment, definitely – I think it works well for this environment. The laptops are issued for college, and the network is heavily filtered. As far as what your allowed, the sites you’re allowed to visit, it is for school. It’s not for your entertainment. They allow Spotify, if you want to stream music or something, but the rules are essentially if you’re watching YouTube videos and it’s strictly for your entertainment, then that’s technically against the rules. So that opportunity that I saw, when I got it, I was always very, very cautious of “There’s no scenario where I’m losing this opportunity.” So definitely, I would say that the environment of – there’s not a lot of distractions. It’s kind of the ideal environment for someone that wants to spend 12 or 14 hours a day learning to do something. Yeah, it certainly helped.

[45:49] Yeah, I saw some Reddit trolls who were, I think, reacting perhaps to the Primeagen talking about you, or something… Or maybe it was Turso, I don’t know. And they were jokingly – of course, it’s just a joke; it’s not real, guys… But saying that “This is the best life hack ever, ever, if you actually want to learn how to code.” It’s the best situation you could possibly be in. And it’s kind of true. I mean, obviously, nobody would choose that… But once you’re there, it has everything that it takes. You have to still put the work in, like Adam talks about, but…

Yeah.

You are well positioned, with a lot of free time, and very few distractions, especially like you said, because these machines are specifically for education… You know, what else are you gonna do?

Yeah, I actually get that pretty frequently…

Do you?

I have a lot of – so the blog posts that I wrote about my story, and then, again, when the Primeagen reacted to it on stream, the YouTube video, I have a lot of… It’s actually been really cool. A lot of people reach out. I get everyone from just people just being supportive, to other people that have done prison time, and that might be in tech… And then a lot, probably more than anything, is college students that are maybe going for their CS degrees, and asking what the secret was; like, what’s the hack. And I have been told more times than I can probably count that they are jealous of my situation, because they wish that they could just spend all that time and get really good at programming.

That’s a wild thing to be told. I think what’s wild, even potentially more wild to that, is that we all literally have a choice. You made a choice that changed your life. And those folks who envy you, or are jealous of your scenario, can also make a choice. They can turn out and tune out different things in their lives. The place they’re in is a series of choices that got them to where they are. And we know that because you just shared your story, and it’s a series of choices. And so while they have jealousy for you, they can do the same thing; not in the exact same scenario, but they can make the choice to tune out the rest of the world, if they so choose. But wow, it is just so hard.

Yeah, definitely. And that’s something that I keep in mind, for sure. Like, I’ve never been much of a social media person, but I understand that most people’s – one of their primary timekillers/distractions is going to be social media. And I’m going to be getting out fairly soon, regardless of what happens; the worst case scenario, it’s like a year. But either way, it’s soon. And that’s kind of something that I’ve resolved to keep, is if it’s not difficult to give up pleasures that you’ve never really had… So there’s a long list of things that I’ve kind of told myself “I’m not going to start this, because I don’t see a reason to change a whole lot.” The sites that I visit, what I do on the internet, the people I talk to… There’s definitely a feeling of “Oh, when I get out, there’s no barriers, and rules…” But at the same time, there’s also not a whole lot that I care to do, that I can’t do now. I work at my job, for eight hours, starting at 8 or 8:30 in the morning, and I write open source software from 6 to 10:30 at night… And I work out before that. But obviously, I’ll be spending time with my family, and all the kind of normal life stuff, but as far as how I spend my time on the internet, I’m probably going to stay pretty close to what I do now.

[50:46] Yeah. Well, you developed good habits, so that will be a real virtue for you, to maintain those habits. I would add options trading to the list of things you should not get into when you get out, because your Robinhood account can also be an entertainment that turns into disaster… And I’m sure you’d like to avoid future disasters. I think your open source work is far more profitable and way less risky than options trading options. But tell us about the open source. How long did it take you to get into? How did you get into it? What do you work on in the open? etc.

Yeah, so I guess I could kind of start into just, I guess, programming in general, in here, and how that started…

Sure.

So at the very beginning, there was no – there was internet access on the laptops, but it was only in the recreation building, where the education department was. That’s where the Wi-Fi was. So you could browse the internet in the rec building, in the education hallways, and stuff. But when you go back to the pod, you go back to your cell, there’s no internet access. So I would save Python documentation… And especially back then, there was – it’s like Windows Active Directory network, and you don’t have any execution policy/privilege. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the old AD Windows networks, but yeah, your execution policy is turned off, so you cannot install anything. You can run bundled, kind of, where all the libraries and stuff are bundled in the one application, the portable ones… But yeah, it was pretty painful. I had to get a particular kind of terminal emulator, that would – it was all kinds of… I had to use a PIP proxy, that was from a .edu domain, to be able to get Python libraries, and stuff…

And yeah, so after kind of jumping through these hoops, and at the same time kind of constantly bugging staff to install things, and asking for “Hey, I need Git, and I need…” And also volunteering to help out with – you know, they don’t exactly have a bunch of full-time IT staff, and this was a new thing at the time. So I ended up volunteering, and eventually working for the education department at the prison I was at, and ended up helping out quite a bit, just like running the network. And eventually, I think they just got sick of me asking to install things, or for certain privileges… I eventually ended up getting that job, and being able to at least have some level of root access to my laptop. And that certainly made it a lot easier.

[54:25] And yeah, I was just like writing Python, and C, and I wrote my own kind of C standard library type deal… I knew enough to know that I wanted to start from the bottom, and not just learn React, or whatever. I think the usual kind of starting point today would be considered that pathway. I knew enough to know that that’s not what I wanted to do. That I wanted to start from fundamentals.

After some time, I’m in school, and I am working for the education department, maintaining the network, helping fix things, and get laptops ready, and re-imaging and kind of doing the daily maintenance… They started a – I can’t say they started, but people that were enrolled in college, that had graduated and got their bachelors, those – there was a couple that were either in the process of getting their masters, or they were going for their PhDs. And they had gotten this special permission to work, usually with the university that they were attending.

One person was a fellow, and he would teach, essentially – I don’t know, substitute teacher. He was teaching, or whatever, over Zoom, for the school. And people were talking about “Oh, they might start allowing remote work.” They were playing around with that idea, of “Hey, if people can get jobs remotely, we might just sanction it.”

So I actually was the only one that was not a master’s student. And I put in a request to seek remote work, after – I’d probably been learning to program at that point for probably six months or so, seven; maybe seven, eight months. Really kind of completely out of touch with what I actually needed to know, and what was going to be expected of someone, but I just… I just knew I wanted to look for work. Like, I’m spending 12 hours a day, and I thought “Why not?”

And they actually granted my application to – I put in a special request to seek remote work, and it got granted. And in another brilliant stroke of luck, I ended up kind of cold messaging my CEO (now), on LinkedIn. I had heard about the company from someone else that was on my pod, that does work in prison reform… Like, he’s big into that kind of community – criminal justice reform, prison reform stuff… And yeah, I just kind of got a random tip, and ended up getting on a call, Zoom call with my CEO, co-director now, and they honestly had no – probably shouldn’t have hired me considering the situation, but… Yeah, they gave me a shot. And that was pretty huge. That was a great opportunity.

[58:45] And while I was – I was doing open source stuff at the time, and I was writing a lot of Go, and C, and Python… And I was learning Rust at that point. Right around that time is when I got involved in – that was right after Exa was deprecated. So that would have been, I would say, my primary introduction to the open source community. I had certainly made contributions to a few projects before that, but that was the first thing I would consider to be – like, being active in a project. And I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the ls replacement command line…

We are. We are, actually. We talked about it. When was that, Adam? With Nick Janetakis, a couple of years ago…

Probably with Nick, yeah.

We don’t personally use it, but we are aware of it, as a like an ls on – I was going to say on steroids, but I don’t know. On better.

On plus plus.

Yes, there you go. So you got involved with Exa, and began contributing there?

Yup. It was officially – Exa was deprecated… Because that was in the Debian stable repo; it was –

[unintelligible 01:00:19.27]

Yeah. It had been around since 2015… And yeah, the author disappeared. I’m not even sure to this day if anyone’s heard from him, but the guy pretty much disappeared. Really unfortunate. Super-talented programmer. And Exa was one of his – probably his most popular tool; a couple other ones, too. And it being deprecated, it ended up on the frontpage of Hacker News. And I don’t know, it was at a stage when if I found some issues that I felt I could fix, it made my day, and I was super-excited to contribute to anything, and have commits in any project. It was just the most exciting thing for me.

Actually, I ended up having to – so prior to putting in to Git remote work, I had put in a request to the warden at the other facility to contribute to open source… Because you’re technically not supposed to talk to anyone, or have any comment on anything, any kind of – you’re making no post requests. It’s like get only.

[01:01:57.14] Gets only. Yeah. Was that a tough pitch, or not so much?

Yeah, it’s hard when – I think I contributed to Micro, the text editor… It’s written in Go. It’s like a Nano replacement. It’s actually pretty cool. But that was my first commit. That was my first PR, open source PR… And that was like – it must’ve been beginning of ’23. Yeah, I think so. It was beginning of ’23. And I screenshotted the whole process, and wrote this big proposal, and put the screenshots in there of “This is what it is. This is the code I wrote. This is what it does” and tried to give the administration an idea of what I was going to be doing, or whatever… And yeah, they approved that. That was really cool. That was probably three or four months after that, that I put in to seek remote work… But yeah.

Yeah, when I started at Unlock Labs, I had continued – I work, like I mentioned… There was a period of time where I would work for Unlock Labs – like, the 12 or 14 hours a day was all spent on work-work… Because I was determined to prove that they made a good decision in hiring me… And there were certainly no other opportunities for me at that time, so I really wanted to show gratitude for the opportunity with them. And yeah, I had quite a bit to learn, but pretty much always have continued to either build stuff for the DOC, for the education department, like either build tools for them, or my own personal open source projects, or… Yeah, just other contributions.

Break: [01:04:31.01]

I’d imagine it’s like you’ve got this new superpower that you’d never had before… Because skill-less – I don’t want to say you literally had zero skills, but comparative to what you have now, skillless probably beforehand. You had some experience with LAMP, you’ve had some experience with obviously internet and different aspects of that, but you’ve got this new superpower, and you’re like “I just want to contribute. I just want to be useful.” I’m imagining this is what you’re thinking, because of your story that you just shared. “Where can I make a dent? Where can I put some good out in the world? I’ve been doing so much bad, or so much internally bad thinking, and so much negative self-talk about my identity, and I’ve had this epiphany and I’ve got this new dream, and I’ve got hope”, and you’ve got all this inertia towards it, and you’ve got this new skill that you’re like “Where can I put this skill to use? Where can I be useful?” That’s what I’m thinking. Is that a version of what you did?

Yeah, most definitely. With all the time… Like, if I had a 20-minute conversation with someone - outside of myself - I would feel guilty that I wasted 20 minutes, because I felt like the three or so years that I had left was such a finite amount of time that any non-trivial amount of time spent doing anything but learning was considered to be like… It was definitely something I felt guilty about.

And I think everyone kind of knows how much enthusiasm newer developers have to rewrite whatever, and take on features, or projects that are real ambitious, that you kind of learn aren’t super-realistic… So that ended up with like – you know, I wrote… The first thing was just an inventory system for the education department to keep track of all the laptops, and the credentials, and who had them, and the condition, and the allow list… Just crud – that was the first thing that I built for the education department. Yeah, that worked out pretty well. And then when I came here, to this facility, from the – I was just at a different Main facility. I was at the Main State Prison, and now I’m at, as you mentioned, the Mountain View Correctional Facility. Not Mountain View, California.

No. All the way on the other side of the country.

But yeah, when I came here, they have – believe it or not, actually, the state of Maine, and from what I hear, most facilities… It’s probably something that viewers will be interested to learn. They have quite a bit of internally written software by residents. That’s actually a fairly common thing. And I definitely was not aware of this prior, but the Main State Prison had a resident there that wrote pretty much all the software that it runs on to this day. So all the account sheets, the inventory for the woodshop, and inventory for the kitchen, and a system where you scan a barcode in the back of your ID, and use that to access your account to purchase things from the commissary… So there was quite a bit of this handrolled infrastructure at the other facility. And the administration here was aware that that existed. And when I came here, they had been made aware that I was someone that could replicate this. And definitely someone that could maintain some of this stuff here.

[01:10:04.06] So the system, the point of sale system that they use for the [unintelligible 01:10:09.08] is written in – it’s vb.net. Let’s say it’s VBA. Yeah, it’s definitely VBA, because it runs on Access, and Windows 8. So to this day I still maintain a point of sale written in VBA, on Windows 8, which is the absolute bane of my existence.

But yeah, so the staff here asked me to build a real-time – something to keep track of what everyone’s position in the facility is. So when you come back to the unit, you scan your ID, and it will check you in to the units. Because currently you have to sign out, and there’s people whose jobs it is pretty much to maintain these clipboards with everyone’s current location, so that if something happens, they have to count everyone, they have a record of where everyone is. So they wanted that built. So yeah, I built that RFID-based system; I made that pretty much production-ready. And that – they pretty much abandoned wanting to actually get it set up, because I think they were just… The guy who wrote all the previous software at the other facility ended up getting out, and now they’re in a position where they don’t have anyone to maintain it, and I think they’re just trying to avoid that happening here. But I’m actually pretty grateful that they had asked me to do that, because writing a full production front, full stack application definitely I think is being on the list of projects that I completed by myself. I definitely credit quite a bit of my ability today to that.

Is it a web app, or what kind of an app is it?

Yup, it is a web app. It was a [01:12:31.06] and SolidJS frontend. It just uses these – actually, these right here. Of course, this is going to keep alerting me, but yeah… It’s RFID HID reader. And yeah, I spent quite a few… I would say probably at least a couple hundred hours on that.

So do you have to interface with the scanners themselves, or is there a way that you’re getting the location data off the RFID?

Yeah, so it is just a – so the client runs in a Tauri window, and these particular RFID readers are keyboard input emulators. I had a client for this on a Raspberry Pi Pico, that actually interfaced with the HID. Because you have administrator privileges to open dev – like, you input, and actually get the raw bytes from the OS, but the web app frontend just had an invisible form. And because it ran in a Tauri window, it allowed me to just capture all the keyboard input.

[01:14:02.00] Using Tauri… That’s one thing I noticed about you, Preston, is you seem to be very on the tip of technology. Like, on your About page: “Big fan of Rust”, obviously Neovim, Tmux, Ghostty, Alacrity, you’re using Tauri, you’re using SolidJS… You just seem like you have a certain group of people who like to live on the edge. Do you know that about yourself? Do you realize that?

I would agree. I think some of it probably has to do with the fact of just like the time periods that – so the last time I programmed anything was in 2009. And then when I kind of came back to it… Like, 2022 is when I started learning again. And I think that was maybe the peak of the Rust hype, if you were to see a chart. And yeah, I don’t know, so it just seemed like the technologies that were real popular at that time period.

It was kind of trippy, because you kind of think you already have this pre – you have this preconceived notion of what people use, and how popular things are, and… I didn’t know that PHP is looked down upon now, and it kind of has a reputation now… Like, I was completely unaware of that at the very beginning.

That’s because you’re not on social media, Preston. That’s where we talk about these things.

The only place, really. Newsletters, podcasts…

Yeah, newsletters, YouTube… Although PHP is cool again, because Laravel is cool, Taylor Otwell is cool… Making money on the internet is cool…

Facebook is cool…

Facebook? I don’t know about Facebook.

Oh, you know… It’s actually kind of cool. I mean, it’s kind of cool that Facebook still exists, and that people can connect so well globally. That’s pretty wild.

Hm.

I mean, I can stalk some people I went to high school with. That’s a unique attribute in the world. I like that. I’m not doing it, but I can.

Oh, you like the idea that you could if you wanted to…

If I want to check somebody out before I become one layer friend deeper, I can. I can be like “Well, this is who you associate with, these are your friend groups, this is where we overlap…” That’s pretty wild.

See, I do a different style. I look at someone’s blog and I’m like “Okay, you like TMUX, you like Ghostty, Neovim… Hey, we could be friends.”

[laughs] Because you’re talking to developers, Jerod… [laughter] I’m like “Preston must be cool, because we’re both using Ghostty”, you know?

I do like that though a lot.

So you made a list of things you’re not going to do when you get out. What about – do you have plans? Like, what you are going to do. Because, I mean, it’s coming up, man.

Yeah, I think the primary thing is definitely make up for lost time with my family. That is definitely – my dad’s retired now, and to be able to hang out with him every day is like – it’s definitely… Family’s number one on that list, for sure. And I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to – so I purchased a house right across the street from where they live in Michigan… So the thought of fixing up the house, and learning to do all the handy stuff that I never really learned… So yeah, at-home projects, stuff like that is what I look forward to.

[01:18:09.28] I’m waiting for the day that somebody writes the screenplay about your life. “From prison to promised land” is a good ring to it, I think. Are you scared at all? Because, I mean, you said you valued this last three years with finite pressure in the fact that if you wasted 20 minutes talking to somebody, you’re like “Man, I did not adhere to my goal of total focus.” Are you concerned at all? Or do you have anything that you’re trying to do to sort of push back against the fact that you will have unfettered access to the world, and distractions everywhere?

Not really something I’m super-concerned about. I think I’ve kind of cemented my mindset and my goals and priorities now so much that I feel really confident. The main reason that I had a lot of that – you know, the guilt that I would have previously for wasting time that could have been spent learning was because previously I had no future and no hope for a career and money. So I definitely feel a lot more – things are pretty concrete now, as far as like I know pretty much exactly what I want to do for a career. I’ve been really fortunate to meet some just awesome people in the industry, I’ve gotten a lot of support… So yeah, I feel pretty good about the future.

Any particular names you could drop that you can either thank, or just mention, that you’ve met, that’s like stars, or not stars, or just influential to you personally?

Yeah, most definitely. I’m super-thankful for the company I work for, for giving me a chance at the time that I met them. Pretty much none of this would have been possible, at least the way that it played out, without them. Great, great group of people, great mission. Definitely everyone check out Unlocked Labs, if you haven’t. We build education tools for incarcerated students, and generally try to bring internet access in a meaningful way to correctional facilities.

I want to give – we’re trying to give more people the opportunity that I was able to have, and to see other people given the chance to be able to change their lives. So definitely, big thanks to Unlocked Labs. Yeah, definitely a big thanks as well to yeah, the whole Turso team, Glauber Costa specifically. He’s definitely the reason that a lot of this – my story got picked up by Prime. Prime is absolutely on that list, too.

[01:21:42.29] The Primeagen has been the only source of entertainment that I’ve allowed myself all this time, and he was a huge influence in the previously mentioned discussion about what technology I use, and chose to learn… He’s the reason that I use a tiling window manager, and Tmux, and… His story was one of the first that I’ve found after kind of deciding to go down this route. Watching his “From meth to Netflix” video was really inspirational. So definitely, big thanks to the Primeagen, for sure.

And yeah, I guess I don’t know how broad I’m being here, but I would feel horrible if I didn’t mention my family, that has been by my side this whole time. And even when I definitely did not deserve it, they continued to support me, and they stuck around for all the years that I was insufferable, just to – they’re great people, and I’m super-fortunate to have such a great family.

That’s awesome. We all need people that pour into us. We realize – there’s a lot of us that can pull our life up by our bootstraps kind of thing, and just sort of muster through and get through whatever we have to, and the variations of that scenario can be very wide, obviously… But we definitely need other people in our human journey to get to where we’re trying to go. And it’s even better when you’ve got sort of a peer. “From meth to Netflix”, for example; something that you can say “Wow, I can emulate that. I can see now there’s hope, because there’s somebody who’s done it, a version of that”, or similarity in some way, shape or form that says “This place I’m at is not the end. There is opportunity for a new beginning, a new change, a new identity, a new future.” And having those people pour into you, and the Primeagen, being able to watch him, and being entertained by him… I’m entertained by him. He’s pretty wild. I think it’s awesome having that.

Yeah. And I definitely – I certainly hope that people that are in situations maybe kind of similar as the one I was in can see what I’ve done and what I’ve gone through, and think… It’s really tough when your life is that far gone; you feel like you’re so far away from just a normal life, or the things you see other people have, careers, and family… You feel like that’s so unreachable that putting any effort in that direction just feels feeble. And yeah, I definitely hope that people are able to look at my experience and see just how far I was from any of this, and kind of be able to get some hope out of that.

I’m not sure how much further you want to go, Jerod, but I’m kind of curious about your thoughts, Preston, on this reform idea. I think one of the things you said, either in this conversation or in your blog post, how you advocate for – you’re an example of how access to education and betterment, as an example of an inmate or somebody who’s incarcerated changing… What does the world not know about your thoughts or advocacy of that, that we should know?

[01:25:48.26] Yeah, I think my main point there was - there’s a lot of people with similar mindsets to myself, in different facilities that don’t have any of the opportunities that they have here… That if given the chance, would flourish and would pursue these things, and give themselves a way out. Because without this skill, and without the network… I guess the skill is one thing, but without the ability to network and the ability to make other people aware of your story… To be in a place with no ability to better yourself, and if all you’re given is there’s like four phones on the wall, and 200 gang members surrounding you… You could be like even me right now, who’s so far from having that mindset and being involved in that lifestyle… If you don’t have the means to improve yourself, it’s really difficult to expect a different behavior.

I think that’s what I want people to consider, is if your expectations are that incarcerating people… You know, it’s the department of corrections, it’s expected that you’re going to learn your lesson and you’re not going to do it again… But oftentimes the reality is you take someone that maybe has far less exposure to some of the things they’re going to be exposed to in prison, and they spend a few years there and just end up absorbing the criminal mindset and the negativity, and they have absolutely no resources to improve themselves. There’s no access to meaningful education, or any way to find a way out of the hole that they dug for themselves. To then expect someone to get out and now have a criminal record, and no work history for N years… It’s now just orders of magnitude more difficult to actually improve your situation than it was before this punishment.

So when people – when the recidivism rate is 70% of people return to prison after I think like three years… The reason for that shouldn’t be a big surprise. I think making people aware that investing in education and investing in giving people opportunities to improve themselves, and in ways to find a career path, and meaning… That pays off significantly more.

There’s all kinds of statistics, I wish I was good at kind of reciting these things… One of my coworkers is. Shout-out, Jess. He can tell you all the statistics about how every dollar spent on education saves N dollars in recidivism costs, and all that. I’m horrible at remembering those things, but… Yeah, I think that’s the general idea. I think people need to be given a way out.

Did you ever study the Stanford prison experiment? Either the movie… I don’t think you probably have access to that. Maybe. But the study of it; it was based on a real study conducted in 1971. It was a stark realization of normal people going into these scenarios and role-playing, but becoming very real and very abusive, and psychologically jacked up, I would just say, to paraphrase it… Are you familiar with that experiment?

[01:30:19.13] I am actually familiar with it. I’m curious if the movie shines any light on some of the details that have come out since then. I read that a lot of the participants weren’t really aware that – I think they were encouraged to kind of go farther than… I don’t know, I know this is out there, because if you do any amount of research, you’ll see that people will come out and say “Yeah, I was a part of that, but I didn’t know it was…” They kind of thought it was more of like a game. I don’t know, but that is something that I saw. Did the movie play on that at all, or was it kind of still discussed like it was a very serious thing?

I’m not deeply familiar with it. I did watch the film, and I know it’s based on real scientific studies. I’m sorry, my child just busted in here… Get out of here, Micah. Trying to bother me… It was a study done, and it was a psychology professor who had done this… And I think he’d canceled it after six days. It was serious. So to paraphrase the scenario, the film was based on this experiment. And the experiment was real. And the fact that they set up a mock prison, they took normal people in the world, with their normal freedoms, probably in college, is my assumption, or university… And they put them in the scenario where there was guards and prisoners, basically. And the prisoners were not truly in prison, they weren’t truly prisoners…Not that prisoners should be treated that way. No offense to you, Preston, but the scenario of power, the struggle of power, where you’re in a position of power, and then you’re in a position of lack of freedom and lack of power. And the utter role reversal – these people leaned into their roles, they leaned into all these things, and the prisoners literally had become prisoners, and the guards had literally become guards. And it got so real and abusive that even the professor was becoming abusive. And it’s just such a stark reality. And the reason why I even bring this up is just to say that you’d mentioned before how you’re advocating for more education access, because this is a way to reform mass incarceration. I think it’s not the answer, but it may be one of the answers to some folks who are in prison - not so much all of them, but I can be wrong on that front… But it was just this realization that- wow, how in this scenario you are likely abused, you’re obviously accessible to people with power, and they can abuse that power… And that what happens when you lose that freedom and how it psychologically changes you. Because these people that were, like I said, non-prisoners, turned prisoners in this experiment, had meltdowns, breakdowns, because they were being treated like people with no value, people with no hope, people that have been in scenarios you’ve been in, and they were… It was not good. The efficacy of the experiment was true, and it’s evident that in scenarios where you are treated like you’re worthless and hopeless, you become worthless and hopeless. And you do not act like normal you, you act like somebody who’s been abused. And it’s just such a – if you haven’t seen the film or looked at the study, I’d recommend just doing it after this podcast, to sort of just have one more layer of understanding of Preston’s life. Or, I’m sure, a version of it.

[01:34:23.04] Yeah, that’s something that Maine – Maine has come very far in quite a few forefronts of corrections… But one thing that they’re big on is little things like language. Inmates here are referred to as residents, and it seems like such a – I apologize, there’s people just getting through… Yeah, so Maine has humanized residents quite a bit. And although the power dynamic is still obvious, and there’s still – there’s always going to be… There’s like a certain kind of person that is more drawn to roles like police officer, or corrections officer, that are more likely to seek out a position of power over someone… And that obviously still happens.

But yeah, I think certainly not a negligible portion of why I had no hope or care about my life was certainly – I mean, I can absolutely imagine that some of it might have been from spending a third of my life locked up and treated like a number, and like you’re not human, and that how you feel, and your opinions just don’t matter… And yeah, it’s absolutely a real phenomenon, for sure. I think most people would be surprised. And I would say probably 99% of people that have a loved one, that ends up having to do time, are absolutely shocked by some of the experiences that they’ll have. And most people’s reaction is always “Well, they can’t do that.” And it’s like, but all of – your whole preconception of your human rights… That’s gone. There is none of that. And a lot of people are absolutely shocked by how the average person is treated. Everything in your mind that kind of makes up your psyche and your own self worth is challenged, because at any given point you can be told to… Yeah, I’m not going to go too far into some of the experiences I’ve had locked up, just because I’m still here, but… Yeah, it certainly would shock most people.

[01:37:33.10] Well, I’m sorry that you’ve had to go through that. I know that you’ve been down a road that has been troubling, and I think maybe early on you may have been a threat to society, just based on what you’ve shared about your choices… And who knows the lives that you’ve impacted as a result of your choices… But I am a believer in redemption, and I’m so thankful that we live in a society where redemption is an opportunity, and that you’ve been able to see and have that epiphany about your life, that your identity that you thought was accepted by you, pressed upon you etc. was not going to be your long-term reality. And you put it into your mindset that you’re going to change, and I’m glad that you were able to do that.

I’m glad that something as simple as a computer and access to the internet, and your previous curiosity into software, and the fact that open source exists… And that in today’s age, that if you can produce, and you can be valuable, then that’s all that’s required to have access to the world is a thing, versus a degree or something else that you can find rehabilitation in your life, and a flourishing future ahead of you, given future choices that will be exemplary of what you’ve recently done. Keep making these good choices, keep making these choices that are about your future, and the future you want to have versus the ones that you don’t ever want to go back to. So I’m thankful for that for you.

I appreciate that.

Well, Preston, is there anything else on your mind, on your heart, or you were hoping us to ask you, which we haven’t asked yet, that we could talk about before we let you go?

I think we definitely covered quite a bit. Yeah, I don’t know… I think that about wraps it up, probably.

Well, we appreciate you arranging this, being willing to open up, tell your story, share it with us… We’re thankful for the freedoms that you do have inside there, to hop on a podcast and turn your video on, and connect to the internet, and talk to the outside world… So thank you, and I guess thank the folks who are in charge there, for giving you this amount of freedom… Until you get your real freedom back. Hopefully less than a year from now, but… What did you say, a year in the worst case?

Yeah, a year in the worst case. May 5th of ’26 would be the worst case scenario.

Would be the worst case. So less than a year.

Get that house next to your parents, make up for lost time, do some fixer-upper, make sure you video it and put it on the internet, because you’ll be famous when you do that… And all those good things, man. Good luck to you.

When you sell the rights to your movie, make sure you get good money.

That’s right. And come back to me for the title.

Gotcha. I appreciate you guys having me.

You bet.