Refactored in prison (Interview)

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38:13And after this moment, did you just think to yourself, well, I like computers. I've been a computer guy since the start. Part of the time, ironically, how you started your life towards this place was through the where's scene and really being adept at using the internet. And you just decided, I'm going to pick up programming or I had you in 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 like Doris Buffett.

39:04And there was, you know, I think that the professors would come in and have like in-person classes or they do like maybe they do Zoom calls. But there was no like laptops like in the cell, like with Internet. Um, so, uh, I had applied for college already and while, while waiting is kind of when this, uh, when this all kind of occurred and the first semester that I end up, uh, in college just so happened to be the first semester that laptops existed, uh, somewhat as they do today. And I had gone through like a couple different, you know, avenues in my head about like what I'm going to do. And, you know, I've always loved learning.

40:03Like I have spent thousands of hours, I read, I mean, like hundreds and hundreds of books. Obviously I've done a lot of time and segregation. So that's like the main kind of thing you do. But I had studied like 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 like kind of obsessively learning about the markets and like options trading because I figured that I could, you know, day trade when I got out. And that was like a potential kind of career path.

40:54And then when college started, I get the computer and that was kind of like epiphany number two. and I was like, kind of realized like, wow, I have like four years left. Like where else does someone get 24 hours a day, right? Well, you got to sleep. So like, you know, 14 hours a day to learn something like, you know, I had programmed in high school, kind of before high school, nothing, nothing super crazy, like, you know, lamp kind of, you know, PHP, like, you know, I've had a, I've had a Ubuntu Linux tattoo since 2009. right so i was uh i was definitely i mentioned before i was definitely a computer nerd so i kind of had just enough context to to understand and and remember like if you're really really good at programming that's kind of all they care about right like if you know what i mean like that i and i i definitely did some research and kind of found out that like criminal records or like college degrees or like any of that stuff is is negotiable like you know I think I don't know what year it was but like Google and Microsoft like did away with their they don't even care if you have a degree right because there's just self-taught people out there that are you know spectacular um so that that was epiphany number two when I was like wow if I were to spend 12 to 14 hours a day, every single day, uh, for the remainder of my time, I could theoretically be pretty good at this.

43:00And hopefully by the time I, you know, get out, uh, might, you know, be looking at the possibility of having like 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 is, that was pretty much exactly roughly a thousand days ago. That's amazing. It's amazing to have that realization, make that choice. sometimes people make a choice that's a sort of dream like you know 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 you know you want to make change can get a hold of you because we're all human no matter what our scenarios are you know sometimes we just 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 that's wild that you've been able to do that yeah uh for sure it it uh i think the environment definitely uh i think it works it works well for this environment right the laptops right are issued for college and the network is heavily filtered um so the like that they're also you know as far as like what you're allowed the sites you're allowed to visit um it is for school right it's like it's not for your entertainment uh they they allow like Spotify, if you want to stream music or something, but like if, if, you know, the rules are essentially like if you're watching YouTube videos strictly for your entertainment, then that's like technically like against the rules.

45:09Right. So that opportunity that I saw the, you know, when I got it, I was always very, very cautious of there's no scenario where I'm losing this opportunity, right? Like, so definitely I would say that the environment of like, 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 um yeah that it certainly helped yeah i saw some reddit trolls who were i think reacting perhaps to the primogen talking about you or something or maybe it was terso 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 like the best life hack ever ever if you actually want to learn how to code like it's the best situation you could possibly be in it's kind of true i mean obviously nobody would choose that but once you're there it has everything that it takes on 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 you can do yeah i actually get that pretty frequently do you yeah i have a lot of so my the blog posts that i wrote about my story and then again uh when the primogen reacted to it on stream uh the youtube video uh i have a lot of it's actually been it's been really cool uh a lot of people reach out like i get everyone from just like people just being supportive to like other people that have uh that have done like prison time and that might be in tech uh and then a lot uh probably more than anything is like college students that are maybe going for their CS degrees and, uh, like asking like what the secret was, like, what's the, the, the hack like, uh, and, and I have been told more times than I can probably count that they are jealous, uh, of my situation, uh, because, you know they wish that they could just spend all that time uh and get really good at programming that's a that's a wild thing to be told i think what's 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.

48:05They 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 um and that's that's something that i i keep in mind for sure like i've never been much of a social media person um but like i understand that like most most people's one of their primary like time killers slash distractions is going to be social media.

48:56And, you know, I'm going to be getting out fairly soon, whether, regardless of what happens, like the worst case scenario, it's like a, it's like a year. Um, but you know, either way, it's like, it's, it's soon. Um, and that's kind of like something that I've like resolved to, uh, to keep is if it's not difficult to give up like pleasures that you've like never really had. So there's a long list of things that I've kind of told myself, like, I'm not going to like start this, right? Like, because I don't see a reason to like, to, to, to change a whole lot, right like my the the sites that i visit my what i do on the internet the people i talk to you know like there's definitely a feeling of like oh like when i get out there's no you know what i mean like there's no like uh barriers and and and rules and like but at the same time like i there's also not a whole lot that i care to do that i can't do now um i work at my job for eight hours, starting at like 8 or 8.30 in the morning.

50:15And 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 like, you know, 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. Yeah. Well, you've developed good habits, and 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.

51:09I think your program, 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, et cetera? Yeah. So I guess I could, you know, I could kind of start into like, just like, I guess, like programming, um, in, in general, uh, in, in here and how that started. Um, so at the very beginning, there was no, uh, there was internet access on the laptops, but it was only, uh, in the recreation building, like where the education department was.

51:50That's like where the wifi was. So you could, you know, you could browse the internet in the, in the rec building, uh, in the education, you know, hallways and stuff. But when you go back to the, you go back to the pod, you go back to your cell, there's no internet access. So it was like, I would like save, you know, Python, like documentation. And especially back then, uh, there was, you know, 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.

52:35So you cannot install anything. You can run bundled, kind of like 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 indulator that would... There 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, uh, yeah, so, so after kind of jumping through these, uh, these hoops and at the same time kind of constantly bugging staff to install things and like asking for like, Hey, like I need to, you know, I need Git and I need, you know, and like, and, and, uh, and also like volunteering to, to help out with like, you know, there's, they don't exactly have a bunch of like full-time like IT staff.

53:43And this was a new thing at the time. So I ended up like 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 like sick of me asking to install things or, you know, for like certain like privileges. I eventually ended up getting that job and being able to at least have like some level of like root access to my laptop. And that certainly made it like a lot easier. And I was just like writing Python and C and like wrote my own like, like kind of like C standard library type deal.

54:38I knew enough to know that I wanted to start from the bottom and not just learn, react or whatever. I think the usual starting point today will be considered that pathway. like I knew enough to know that I like, that's not what I wanted to do that. I wanted to start from like fundamentals. After some time I'm in school and I am working for the education department, maintaining the network, um, helping fix things and like get laptops ready and, and, uh, re-imaging and, and kind of like doing like the daily maintenance. Uh, they started a, uh, I can't even say they started, but people that were enrolled in college that had graduated and got their bachelor's, there was a couple that were either in the process of getting their master's or they were going for their PhDs.

55:49And they had gotten this special permission to work usually with the university that they were attending um one person was a uh like a fellow like he would like teach essentially like like i don't know like substitute teacher he would he was like teaching or whatever from uh over zoom uh for the school and uh there was people were talking about like oh they might start allowing remote work uh they were like playing around with that idea of like hey like if people can get jobs remotely, we might just like sanction it. So I actually was the only, I was the only one that was not a master's student.

56:39And I put in a request to seek remote work after I'd probably been like learning to program at that point for probably like six months or so, seven, maybe seven, eight months, uh, really kind of completely out of touch with what I actually like needed to, to, to know. And like, what was going to be expected of like, uh, you know, uh, someone, but like, I just, I just knew I wanted to, to, you know, to look for, look for work. Like I'm spending 12 hours a day. And I thought, you know, why not? And they actually, they actually granted my application to, you know, I put in like a special request or whatever to seek remote work and it got granted.

57:40And in another brilliant stroke of luck, I ended up 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. He's big into that kind of community, criminal justice reform, prison reform stuff. and yeah I just kind of got like a random like tip and ended up getting on a call Zoom call with my CEO co-director now and they honestly had no like probably shouldn't have hired me like considering like the situation but yeah they like they gave me a shot and And that was pretty huge. That was a great opportunity. And while 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.

59:04right around that time is when I got involved in EZA. That was right after EXA was deprecated. So that would have been 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 like active in a project um and i don't know if you guys are familiar with like the ls replacement command line uh which one are we are actually we talked about it um when was that adam with nick jantac a couple years ago don't personally use it but we are aware of it as like a ls on I was gonna 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 yep that uh it was like officially uh exo was deprecated because that was like in like debian stable like repo you know it was like uh you know how long yeah yeah been around since 2015 and uh yeah the the the author like disappeared i'm not even sure to this day if anyone's heard from him.

1:00:37But guy pretty much disappeared. Really unfortunate, super talented programmer. And Exit was one of his, probably his most popular tool. We had a couple other ones too. And it being deprecated ended up on the front page of Hacker News. Um, and I don't know, I think that was like at the, at a stage when, if I like found like some like issues that I felt like I could fix, it was like, it was like made my, you know, made my day. And I was like super excited to contribute, uh, to, to anything and have like commits in, in any, you know, project was just like the most exciting thing for me. actually ended up having to so prior to like putting in to get remote work I had put in a request like to the to the warden at the other facility to contribute to open source because you're technically not supposed to like talk to anyone or have like any like comment on anything like any kind of like you're making no like post requests it's like get get only yeah was that a tough pitch or not so much yeah like it's hard when I think like I actually like I think I contributed to like micro like the text editor it's like written in go it's like a nano replacement it's like actually pretty cool but that was my first like commit that was my first PR open source PR and that was like Must have been beginning of 23.

1:02:32Yeah, I think so. It was beginning of 23. And I like screenshotted the whole process and wrote this like big proposal and like put the screenshots in there of like, this is like what it is. This is the code I wrote. like this is like what it does and try to like give, you know, administration like an idea of, uh, of, of what I was going to be doing or whatever. And yeah, they, they, they approved that. That was, uh, that was really cool. It was probably three or four months after that, that I put in, uh, to seek, uh, remote work. But yeah, yeah. When I started at Unlock Labs, I had continued, like, you know, I work, right?

1:03:25Like I mentioned, you know, there was a period of time where I would work for Unlock Labs. Like the 12 or 14 hours a day was all like spent on like work work because I was like determined to like, 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 like show, uh, gratitude, like for the, for the opportunity with them. And, uh, yeah, I had, you know, quite a, quite a bit to learn, but I pretty much always have continued to like either build stuff for the, the DOC, like for the education department, like either build tools for them or my own personal like open source projects or yeah, just other like other contributions.

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1:05:36I'd imagine it's like you've got this new superpower that you never had before. You know, because skill-less, I don't want to say you literally had zero skills, but comparative to what you have now, skill-less, probably, beforehand. You had some experience with LAMP. You've had some experience with, obviously, Internet and different aspects of that. But, like, 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. You're like, where can I make a dent? Where can I put some good out in the world?

1:06:12I'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 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 that's what i'm thinking is that is that a version of what you did yeah most definitely you know with all the time right the the uh it was like if i had a if i had like a 20 minute conversation with someone like outside of my cell i would feel guilty that i wasted 20 minutes like because I felt like the three or so years that I had left like was such a finite amount of time that like like any non-trivial amount of time spent doing anything but learning was considered to be like like was definitely something I felt guilty about um and there's I think everyone kind of knows like how much like enthusiasm like like newer developers have to like Like you write, you know, whatever and, and, and take on like features or projects that are like real ambitious that you kind of learn, like aren't super realistic.

1:07:35So that ended up with like, you know, I wrote like the first thing was just like an inventory system for like the education department to keep track of like all the laptops and the credentials and who had them and the condition and the allow list. And just like, you know, crud, you know, 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. Now I'm at, as you mentioned, Mountain View Correctional Facility. uh not mountain view california no all the way on the other side of the country but yeah uh when i came here they have believe it or not actually the state of maine and and from what i hear uh most facilities it's probably something that viewers will be interested to learn have quite a bit of like internally written software by presidents.

1:08:53That's like actually a fairly common thing. And I definitely was not aware of this prior. But the mainstay prison had a resident there that wrote pretty much all the software that it runs on like to this day. So like all the account sheets, like the inventory for like the woodshop and inventory for the kitchen and the like a system where you have to scan like a barcode in the back of your ID and use that to like access your account to purchase things from like the commissary. Um, so, uh, there was like a, quite a bit of this like hand rolled, like infrastructure, um, at the other facility. And the administration here was aware that that existed.

1:09:47And 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. So the system, the point of sale system that they use for the Annex is written in VB.net. It's VBA. Yeah, it's definitely VBA because it runs on, whatchamacallit, Access and Windows 8. so to this day still maintain a point of sale written in dba uh on windows 8 which is the absolute bane of my existence um but uh yeah so the the the staff here had like asked me to build a like real-time like uh something to keep track of like what everyone's like position in the facility is.

1:10:53So when you come back to the unit, you like scan, um, your ID and it will check you in to, to the units. Right. Cause like currently you have to like sign out and there's like people whose jobs it is pretty much to like maintain these like clipboards with everyone's current location so that if something happens, they have to like count everyone. They have like record of like where everyone is. Right. So they like wanted that built. Like, so yeah, I like, I like built that like RFID based, like, like system made that like pretty much like production ready. And that they, they pretty much abandoned like 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.

1:11:46And 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? It is a web app. It was Actix backend and SolidJS frontend. Just uses these, actually these right here. of course this is going to keep alerting me but yeah it's like RFID like HID reader and yeah 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?

1:13:08Yeah so it is just a So I had the client runs in like a towery window. And these particular RFID readers are keyboard input like emulators. I had a client for this on a Raspberry Pi Pico that actually like interface with like the HID. because you have like administrator privileges to like open like dev like you input um and actually get like the raw bytes like from the um from the os but the the web app uh front end just had like an invisible like form and because it rang in a towery window like allowed me to just capture all the keyboard input using towery that's one thing i noticed about you preston is you seem to be very on the tip of technology like if i on your about page like you know big fan of rust obviously neo vim tmux ghosty alacrity you're using towery using solid js you just seem like you're uh 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 i would i would agree i think it it There's a, I think some of it probably has to do with the fact that of just like when I, like, like the time periods that, so it's like, so the last time I programmed anything was in like 2009.

1:14:52and then when I kind of came back to it like you know 2022 is when I started like learning again yeah um and I think that was like you know maybe the the peak of like the rust like hype uh if you were to see like a you know like a chart um right and uh yeah I don't know so it just seemed like the technologies that you know were real popular at that at that time period um it was it was a lot of like it was kind of trippy because you kind of think you already have this like you have this like preconceived notion of like what people use and like how popular things are and like you like don't you know it's like i didn't like know that like php is like like look down about now and it's like kind of has like a reputation now like i was not completely unaware of that like at the very beginning uh and that's because you're not on social media preston that's where we talk about these things you know the only place really newsletters yeah newsletters podcasts youtube although php is cool again you know because it is laravel is cool you know taylor otwell's cool uh making money on the internet's cool facebook i don't know about facebook uh you know i think it's kind of 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.

1:16:21That's pretty wild. I mean, I can stalk some people I went to high school with. You know, that's a unique attribute in the world. I like that. I'm not doing it, but I like that I can. You like the idea that you could if you wanted. If I want to check somebody out before I become one layer friend deeper, you know, 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 that's pretty wild see i do a different style you know i look at someone's blog and i'm like okay you like tmux you like ghosty neo vim hey because you're talking to developers jared i'm like pressing must be cool because we're both using ghosty 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 definitely family is number one on that list for sure and I've been fortunate enough to So I purchased a house right across the street from where they live in Michigan.

1:17:51So 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. I'm waiting for the day that somebody writes the screenplay about your life uh from prison to promised land is a good ring to it I think um are you scared at all because I mean you you said you valued this last three years with finite pressure and the fact that if you wasted 20 minutes talking to somebody you're like man I did not uh adhere to my goal of total focus are you concerned at all do you have anything 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 i'm super concerned about um i think i've kind of cemented my uh mindset and my like goals and priorities now uh so much that I feel really confident.

1:19:05The main reason that I had a lot of that, the guilt that I would have previously for wasting time that could have been spent learning was because I previously had no future and no hope for a career and money. And so I definitely feel a lot more you know things are pretty concrete now as far as like i know pretty much exactly what i want to do you know for a career um like i've been really fortunate to meet like some just awesome people in the in the industry uh i've gotten a lot of support um so yeah i feel i feel pretty good about about the future any particular names you could drop that uh you can either thank or just mention that you've met that's like stars or not stars or just influential to you personally?

1:20:06Yeah. Yeah. No, most definitely. Uh, I think, uh, super thankful for, uh, the, the company I work for, um, for giving me a chance, like at the time, um, that, that I met them, uh, like, I think 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 like to see other people given the chance to be able to change their lives.

1:21:12So definitely big, big thanks to Unlock Labs. And yeah, definitely a big thanks as well to the whole like Terso team, Glauber, Glauber Costa specifically is definitely the like the reason that a lot of this, you know, my story got picked up by like Prime. Prime is absolutely on that list too. uh primogen has been the only source of like entertainment that i've allowed myself uh all this time and uh he's was a huge influence in like the the previously mentioned discussion about like what technology i use and and chose to to to learn uh it's the reason that i use a tiling window manager and T-Mux and, uh, his story was like one of the first, um, that I found, uh, after kind of deciding to go down this route, watching his, uh, from meth to Netflix video, uh, was really inspirational.

1:22:22Uh, so definitely big, big thanks to the primogen for sure. And, uh, yeah, I, I mean, I guess, I don't know how, like how broad being here, but I feel I would, I would feel uh horrible if I didn't like mention my uh my family has like been by my side this whole time and even when I definitely did not deserve it uh they continued to support me and they stuck around for all the years that I was uh insufferable uh you know just to like you know they're they're great people and and uh super fortunate to have such a great family that's awesome we all need uh people that pour into us you know we don't we realize you know 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 you know 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 it's even better when you got sort of a peer you know like from meth to Netflix, for example, something that you can say, wow, I can emulate that.

1:23:37I 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 problem with Jim being able to watch him and being entertained by him, I'm entertained by him. It's pretty wild. I think it's awesome having that. Yeah. And I definitely, like, I certainly hope that, like, you know, people that are in situations, like, maybe kind of similar to the one I was in can see what I've done and what I've gone through.

1:24:23and think, you know, it's like, 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 like the things you see other people have, careers and family, and you feel like that's so, it's unreachable that you're like, that putting any effort in that direction just feels feeble. And 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 get able to get some hope out of that. I'm not sure how much further you want to go, Drew. I'm kind of curious about your thoughts, Preston, on this reform idea.

1:25:24I 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 is 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? 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, like would flourish and would pursue these things and give themselves a way out.

1:26:18Because without this skill and without the network, right? I guess like the skill is one thing, but without the ability to network and the ability to like make other people aware, of your story, like it, 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 like 200, you know, gang members surrounding you, like you could be like even me right now, who's so far from any, uh, from having that mindset and being involved in that lifestyle. uh you know it's like if you don't have the means to improve yourself it's like it's really difficult to expect at like different behavior um you know that that's that's like i think what i want people to consider is like you know if your expectations are that uh incarcerating people um are you know it's the department of corrections right it's like it's expected that you're going to learn your lesson and you're not going to do it again.

1:27:34And, you know, but the 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, you know, 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. Um, it's, uh, you know, to, to then expect someone to get out and now have a criminal record and no work history for N years. Like it's now just orders of magnitude more difficult to actually improve your situation than it was before this punishment.

1:28:35And so when that when people, you know, when their recidivism rate is like 70 percent of people return to prison after, I think, like three years, like, you know, that the reason for that shouldn't be like a big surprise. Right. Like I think making people aware that like investing in education and investing in giving people opportunities to, you know, improve themselves and in ways to find like a career path and and meaning like that, that pays off significantly more. There's all kinds of statistics. I wish I was, you know, good at kind of reciting these things. Like one of my co-workers is shout out.

1:29:23Jess can tell you all the statistics about how every dollar spent on education, like, you know, saves, you know, end dollars in recidivism costs and all that. Horrible at remembering those things. But yeah, I think that that's the that's the general idea. 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, like it was based on a real study conducted in 1971. it was like 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 that uh experiment i am actually familiar with it i'm curious if the movie like shines any light on some of the details that have come out since then where I like read that a lot of the participants like weren't really aware that like I think they were like encouraged to kind of like go farther than uh like uh I don't know like I I know this is like out there because if you like do any amount of research like you'll see that um I know people will come out and say like yeah like was a part of that but I like didn't know it was like you know they kind of thought it was like a you know more of like a game like the the i don't know but that that is something that i that i saw and i'm just curious did the is did the movie play on that at all or was it kind of still discussed like it was like a very serious thing the uh i i'm not deeply familiar with it uh i did watch the film and i know it's based on real scientific studies I'm sorry, I got my child just busted in here.

1:31:23Get 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, like, 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 this scenario where there was guards and prisoners, basically. And the prisoners were not truly in prison. They weren't truly prisoners.

1:32:13Not that prisoners should be treated that way. No offense to you, Preston, But, you know, the scenario of like power, this 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 were 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.

1:33:01I 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. I can be wrong on that front. But it was just this realization that, wow, how in this scenario you are you know you're likely abused you're obviously you know 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 term prisoners in this experiment had meltdowns breakdowns because they were being treated like people with no value, people with no hope, with people that have been in scenarios you've been in and they were, it was not good.

1:33:53It was, you know, 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 of president's life or i'm sure a version of it yeah that's uh something that maine has come very far uh in quite a few forefronts of like corrections uh but uh one thing that they're that they're big on is like little things like language, right?

1:34:41Like inmates here refer to as residents. And it's, it seems like such a, I apologize. People just can't. Yeah. So Maine has, has humanized residents quite a bit. And although the power dynamic is still obvious and there's still, um, there's always like going to be, it's like a certain kind of person that is more drawn to roles like police officer or corrections officer that, that, uh, like, you know, are more likely to seek out a position of power over someone. Uh, and like that is, you know, obviously still happens. But yeah, I think a non, certainly not a negligible, like portion of like why I had no hope or care about my life was certainly, I mean, I can absolutely imagine that some of it 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 you're, you know, how you feel and your, you know, opinions and like just don't matter.

1:36:11And yeah, it's absolutely a real phenomenon for sure. um i think i think people most people would be surprised and i would say probably 99 of people that have a loved one um that ends up having to to do time um are absolutely shocked by some of the uh experiences that they'll have and most people's reaction is always like well they can't do that like and it's like it's like but like all of your whole like preconception of like your human rights and like you're like like uh like that's like that's gone like there is none of that uh and uh a lot of people are absolutely shocked by how the average person is is treated like everything in your mind that that kind of like makes up your you know your like psyche of like and your own self-worth is challenged because at any given point you can be told to you know

1:37:22I'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 I'm sorry that you've had to go through that I know that you've been down a road that has been troubling. 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, that you can find rehabilitation in your life and a flourishing future ahead of you given, you know, future choices that will be exemplary of what you've recently done.

1:38:58You know, 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 had to cover 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 with us.

1:39:34We'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 when you say a year in the worst case? Yeah, a year in the worst case. May 5th of 26th would be the worst case scenario. Would be the worst case, so less than a year. Get that out of 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.

1:40:18And 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. Come back to me for the title. That's right. Appreciate you guys having me. You bet.

1:40:36Well, let me just say that this conversation with Preston has opened my eyes to some different perspectives when it comes to reform with the prison. Different perspectives when it comes to what it takes to get someone to change their life. and really just some sadness out there. Some sadness, some unfortunate events, some unfortunate choices that we make in our lives that can take us to literally the worst. Literally the worst. You know, while Preston has a rosy story coming out, this has not been a rosy road for Preston at all. I can tell you that. And we are all just one bad choice away from something different.

1:41:14So if you're listening to this and you have your freedom, go away from this moment right now. shake a friend's hand hug somebody call a loved one whatever you got to do to take stock of what you got in your life and not take it for granted and directly after that go code something okay a big thank you to our friends over at retool retool.com our friends over at depot at depot.dev and of course to our friends and partners over at fly check them out fly.io and to the beat freak in residence break master cylinder bringing those beats every single week love them okay friends that's it this show's done we'll see you when we see you