This Program Is Like Airbnb, but Only for the Formerly Incarcerated

*Last name has been removed to protect privacy
After a person leaves prison, they face a new set of challenges. Are they able to contact their family? Can they find a job? How are they going to eat?
And perhaps most urgently: Where will they sleep that night? 
Many formerly incarcerated individuals don’t have a support network to turn to, which can make finding a place to live post-release an insurmountable task. Affordable housing can be costly and difficult to obtain, and landlords frequently won’t rent to formerly incarcerated individuals. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, former inmates are almost 10 times more likely to be homeless than the general public. 
“For people getting out of prison, the penalty hasn’t ended and re-entry is its own obstacle course that everybody has to navigate,” Alex Busansky, a former prosecutor and president of Impact Justice, a nonprofit that works in justice reform, told NPR. “And housing is essential to being able to get through that obstacle course. If you don’t have a place to sleep, to shower, to keep your things, it’s very difficult to think about doing anything else.” 
Enter the Homecoming Project: an Airbnb-like program for former inmates in Alameda County, California.
Impact Justice launched the Homecoming Project pilot in 2018. This program pairs people recently released from long-term incarceration with homeowners who have bedrooms to spare.
After a lengthy screening process for both the formerly incarcerated and their hosts, the Homecoming Project sets up potential roommates. By pairing like-minded people (think cat vs. dog lovers, night owl vs. early bird, clean vs. messy), the hope is to create a positive living situation with the potential for friendship. Before moving in together, the pair meets to discuss rules, preferences and if it feels like a compatible match or no. If yes, the host receives a subsidy of $25 a day and the former inmate gets a room for up to six months.
While the project is still in its pilot phase, as of this past April, 10 former inmates have been matched with hosts, and program officials hope to double that figure by the end of this year. The first former inmate has successfully left his home and moved to his own place.
For DeLora*, she gained more than just a place to rest with the Homecoming Project.
After serving eight years for conspiracy to distribute heroin, the 32-year-old had no job or stable shelter. Then she found the Homecoming Project and was welcomed into Sabina Crocette’s home.
 “I just saw her as a dynamic young woman who could come back into the community and be a great resource to others,” Crocette told KPIX. “You have to recognize people’s humanity. People are not the thing that they have done. That is not who they are.”
Since arriving in Crocette’s home, DeLora has been mentored by Crocette, and in return, DeLora has mentored Crocette’s daughter.
“We didn’t know that the hosts were going to be serving — by proxy — as a role model, showing them what it’s like to live in the community,” Homecoming Project coordinator Terah Lawyer told KPIX.
Just as Airbnb has expanded across the globe, leaders at Impact Justice hope to create the same ripple effect in this compassionate twist on the sharing economy. 
“[The Homecoming Project] says you’re a person and we’re going to treat you like a person and give you the footholds and the scaffolding to be able to come back home and to be a full member of society just like anybody else,” Busansky said.
If you live in Alameda County and have a room to offer or are in need of a place to stay, visit the Homecoming Project.
More: People in Prisons Are Learning to Code — and It Might Alter the Course of Their Lives

People in Prisons Are Learning to Code — and It Might Alter the Course of Their Lives

In prisons throughout America, you might find traditional classes in math, English and science or training programs for welding, auto repair and cooking.
But at San Quentin State Prison, individuals are gaining unlikely skills — HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The people learn to code while repaying a debt to society.
The Last Mile is a San Francisco-based nonprofit that teaches people who are incarcerated how to develop websites, software and apps. The nonprofit launched a pilot in 2014 at San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, California, and it has since expanded the program to 12 other correctional facilities.
One of the biggest obstacles a person faces post-incarceration is finding a job. Checking the criminal background box on a job application can lead to rejection. Twenty-seven percent of formerly incarcerated people are unemployed — five times higher than the unemployment rate for the general population, according to the advocacy group Prison Policy Initiative. And without a way to earn the wages they need to survive, they’re more likely to commit a crime out of desperation, which lands them back in prison. That vicious cycle contributes to the country’s shocking recidivism rate of 76 percent.
The Last Mile aims to make finding a job after prison easier, and in turn, reduce recidivism. Coding and similar technology-focused careers can offer secure, well-paid employment.
Chris Redlitz and Beverly Parenti founded The Last Mile in 2010. The idea came when Redlitz, who has a background in venture capitalism, spoke to a group of men in prison.
“I noticed that many of the men had ‘the look’ that I see in the eyes of founders and entrepreneurs in which we invest, but it was at a deeper level,” Redlitz told Inc. “These men had a look that reflected their primal hunger to learn and deep desire to build a better life after they served their time.”
Since the San Quentin pilot, The Last Mile has expanded to four states and worked with more than 460 people. The program has two tracks, each six months long. The nonprofit aims to have programming in 50 prisons over the next five years.
At San Quentin, after students graduate from the program, they can join TLM Works, which is a software development shop inside the prison. At TLM, participants earn $17 an hour, which makes them the highest paid workers who are incarcerated in the state of California. (The average worker in prison gets just 86 cents an hour.) The graduates work with clients that range from small startups to bigger companies, like Dave’s Killer Bread and Airbnb.
And once they leave prison, they have the potential to make six figures in the tech industry.
This approach to employment seems to be working. Not a single one of the 460 graduates has returned to prison, and 60 of those are fully employed or in higher education.
For Chris Schuhmacher, The Last Mile proved life-changing.
After being in prison for nearly two decades, Schuhmacher wasn’t sure what was outside waiting for him.
“For the longest time while I was inside my biggest fear was, ‘What’s life going to be like for me after prison? Who was going to give me a chance?’ I was going to have this stigma of being an ex-felon,” he told CNBC.
But once he started The Last Mile program, software development was his clear pathway to success.
Now he’s had an internship at Fandom, an entertainment site, and he’s created his own app, Fitness Monkey, which helps people recovering from addiction track fitness and “clean” hours.
“Coming back into society, I can take everything I learned and share it and pay it forward,” he said. “And I feel like that’s my responsibility.”
Schuhmacher’s unusual background gave him a different perspective compared to the average college graduate. And Redlitz attributes the program’s success partly to the tech industry’s openness to a variety of backgrounds.
The tech industry has a dearth of coders. Tech Republic projects a shortage of one million computer programmers by 2020. Incarcerated people could help fill that gap. Additionally, the tech industry has a diversity problem: With people of color dramatically overrepresented in the nation’s prisons and jails, The Last Mile could help increase diversity in the tech world.
“The Last Mile gives them a pathway into a segment of the workforce that traditionally there aren’t many avenues into,” Kenyatta Leal, a founding member and graduate of The Last Mile program, told PC Magazine. “Tech can be a force for good, I believe that. We can leverage tech to help people turn their lives around.”
More: In These Prisons, Former Offenders Find Healing In Theatre Arts

Putting Their Prison Pasts Behind Them

America’s criminal justice system currently houses more than 2 million people — that’s more per capita than any other nation on earth. Even worse: Many are repeat offenders who haven’t been offered the support or resources to get their lives back on track once released.
This, along with the stigma attached to a criminal record, has a devastating effect on their job prospects, with an estimated 60 percent still out of work one year after release.
A new initiative, backed in part by the singer John Legend, is hoping to reverse those dire statistics. Unlocked Futures is a joint project of the philanthropic fund New Profit, Bank of America and Legend’s own nonprofit, FreeAmerica.
Over the course of 16 months, the accelerator, which recently announced its inaugural class, will provide support, funding and mentoring to eight people chosen for their visionary prison-reform efforts. These social entrepreneurs have more in common than just a dedication to helping former inmates flourish on the outside: All of them have been either incarcerated themselves or impacted by the criminal justice system in some way.
“Too often are formerly incarcerated individuals locked out of job opportunities because of their past,” Legend said last spring, when Unlocked Futures was announced. “I have seen that entrepreneurship is a viable way for formerly incarcerated individuals to build sustainable livelihoods and contribute to their communities and neighborhoods.”

“This normalizes success ― others seeing us as actual human beings who can succeed even though we’ve gone to prison,” says Will Avila of the Unlocked Futures program.

The initiative will support entrepreneurship as a powerful pathway out of the incarceration cycle, which costs America $80 billion a year in hard dollars and untold billions more in its negative impact on vulnerable families and communities. By amplifying organizations built by those whose lives have been rocked by the judicial system, Unlocked Futures also hopes to change public perception about the humanity and potential of people who refuse to be defined by their worst mistake.
The ventures founded by the first cohort of entrepreneurs and nourished by Unlocked Futures range from an app called Flikshop that lets people send photo postcards to loved ones behind bars to the Bronx, N.Y.-based Hope House, which provides transitional housing for formerly incarcerated women.
After spending a chunk of his teens and 20s in prison, Will Avila founded Clean Decisions, a commercial kitchen cleaning company that exclusively employs formerly incarcerated men in Washington, D.C., and its nonprofit offshoot, Changing Perceptions, which provides job training and reentry support to recently released inmates. Avila credits Unlocked Futures with validating his efforts and for giving him the confidence to inspire others.
“We are always waiting for someone to come tell us that we did something wrong, and as we get more success we struggle to know what to do because we don’t feel like we deserve it or that we belong,” says Avila. “This normalizes success ― others seeing us as actual human beings who can succeed even though we’ve gone to prison.”
In the nation’s capital, where Avila grew up, 71 percent of returning citizens were unemployed in 2015.
“There are a lot of reasons that’s the case,” he says, “but we all have felt that pain, as well as the pain of homelessness, substance abuse to numb this pain and anger that leads to violence. For this reason, when we do start our own enterprises, we want to give back. Entrepreneurship is a powerful cycle because almost every returning citizen I know is crafting a business that helps others who have served time.”

Singer John Legend is one of the key backers of Unlocked Futures.

Amanda Alexander, founder of the Detroit Justice Center, which provides community lawyering services and economic opportunities to those in and around the prison system, asserts that there is a boldness to the group’s ideas, as well as a sense of urgency.
“Folks in the cohort are always talking about the brothers and sisters they left behind in prison and wanting to reach a hand back to them,” says Alexander, whose father was locked up during a portion of her childhood. “I was fortunate to have support through my dad’s incarceration, and that’s allowed us to have a lifelong relationship. I want the same for other families. My aim is to ensure that families caught up in the criminal justice system aren’t shut out of the city’s future.”
And, she adds, Unlocked Futures helps good ideas spread faster.
“Ultimately, it’s not about the eight of us and our work. It’s about movement building,” Alexander says. “Mass incarceration has touched every part of our society, so it’s going to take a broad movement to bring it down.”
As for Jason Cleveland, founder of tech platform Obodo, which helps nonprofits serving returning citizens streamline data and training systems, Unlocked Futures affirms what he’s long believed ― that there are real market opportunities within the prison-reform movement and that it is possible to both care and prosper.
“For too long, efforts to serve have been hampered by lack of access to capital and an outdated notion that to do good, a person or an organization needs to be impoverished themselves,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is not just about starting businesses; it is about seeing problems as opportunities. It is about seeing beyond the now to what is possible.”
Whenever Cleveland visits prisons around his home state of Missouri, teaching what he calls “the entrepreneurial mindset,” he encounters a glut of potential business leaders.
“Most people there do not understand that they are already entrepreneurs. They don’t see that they have been finding unique solutions to problems their entire lives,” Cleveland says. “Oftentimes, when these people are provided with a framework for making different decisions and given the tools they need to move forward, they do.”


Correction: A previous version of this article indicated that Amanda Alexander’s father had been incarcerated more than once during her childhood. NationSwell apologizes for the error.

A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course

Since 2014 the New York City–based Drive Change has been operating a food truck, called Snowday, as a way of reducing recidivism rates among young people. The organization hires and mentors formerly jailed young adults between the ages of 18 and 25. And so far, it has ushered more than 20 of them through its paid fellowship program, which provides both specific training in the culinary arts as well as broader professional-development skills. Graduates of the program have gone on to work as line cooks in upscale restaurants and catering companies.
Now Drive Change is ready to scale its operations for greater impact as other cities, including Baltimore and Pittsburgh, have expressed interest in launching similar programs. With a commissary set to open in 2018, Drive Change hopes to increase the number of fellows from roughly eight a year to 40.
Also on the menu for the nonprofit: a re-branding and a new look. Beginning in July, the award-winning Snowday will be called Drive Change, though it will still feature a seasonal menu with locally sourced food. In addition, the company is adopting an affiliate model where other food trucks that hire young adults coming home from prison can get Drive Change–Certified.
Founded by 31-year-old Jordyn Lexton, Snowday was originally conceived as the first in a fleet of food trucks. But the re-branding was necessary, Lexton says, because marketing different trucks while still promoting the organization’s social-impact mission proved too resource-intensive.
“We were constantly trying to figure out how to put our resources behind one brand versus the other,” says Lexton. “We recognized it caused more confusion than we had originally envisioned.” There was also a concern that Drive Change could be perceived as exploiting the very group of people it aims to help, adds Lexton. “We’ve been able to have young people we work with take ownership of our mission and what we stand for, and that’ll be forefront in our [new] brand identity.”
As Drive Change transitions, it is only accepting event bookings from organizations working directly in the field of social or racial justice, including re-entry from the criminal justice system. Says Lexton, “We’re really trying to raise awareness around those issues so change can happen.”
Homepage photo via Drive Change.
Continue reading “A Food Truck Run by Former Inmates Charts a New Course”

10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016

The most contentious presidential election in modern history offered Americans abundant reasons to shut off the news. But if they looked past the front page’s daily jaw-droppers, our countrymen would see that there’s plenty of inspiring work being done. At NationSwell, we strive to find the nonprofit directors, the social entrepreneurs and the government officials testing new ways to solve America’s most intractable problems. In our reporting this year, we’ve found there’s no shortage of good being done. Here’s a look at our favorite solutions from 2016.

This Woman Has Collected 40,000 Feminine Products to Boost the Self-Esteem of Homeless Women
Already struggling to afford basic necessities, homeless women often forgo bras and menstrual hygiene products. Dana Marlowe, a mother of two in the Washington, D.C., area, restored these ladies’ dignity by distributing over 40,000 feminine products to the homeless before NationSwell met her in February. Since then, her organization Support the Girls has given out 212,000 more.
Why Sleeping in a Former Slave’s Home Will Make You Rethink Race Relations in America
Joseph McGill, a Civil War re-enactor and history consultant for Charleston’s Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, believes we must not forget the history of slavery and its lasting impact to date. To remind us, he’s slept overnight in 80 dilapidated cabins — sometimes bringing along groups of people interested in the experience — that once held the enslaved.

This Is How You End the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline
Abandoned by an abusive dad and a mentally ill mom, Pamela Bolnick was placed into foster care at 6 years old. For a time, the system worked — that is, until she “aged out” of it. Bolnick sought help from First Place for Youth, an East Bay nonprofit that provides security deposits for emancipated children to transition into stable housing.

Would Your Opinions of Criminals Change if One Cooked and Served You Dinner?
Café Momentum, one of Dallas’s most popular restaurants, is staffed by formerly incarcerated young men without prior culinary experience. Owner Chad Houser says the kitchen jobs have almost entirely eliminated recidivism among his restaurant’s ranks.

This Proven Method Is How You Prevent Sexual Assault on College Campuses
Nearly three decades before Rolling Stone published its incendiary (and factually inaccurate) description of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a gang rape occurred at the University of New Hampshire in 1987. Choosing the right ways to respond to the crisis, the public college has since become the undisputed leader in ending sex crimes on campus.

This Sustainable ‘Farm of the Future’ Is Changing How Food Is Grown
Once a commercial fisherman, Bren Smith now employs a more sustainable way to draw food from the ocean. Underwater, near Thimble Island, Conn., he’s grown a vertical farm, layered with kelp, mussels, scallops and oysters.

This Former Inmate Fights for Others’ Freedom from Life Sentences
Jason Hernandez was never supposed to leave prison. At age 21, a federal judge sentenced him to life for selling crack cocaine in McKinney, Texas — Hernandez’s first criminal offense. After President Obama granted him clemency in 2013, he’s advocated on behalf of those still behind bars for first-time, nonviolent drug offenses.

Eliminating Food Waste, One Sandwich (and App) at a Time
In 2012, Raj Karmani, a Pakistani immigrant studying computer science at the University of Illinois, built an app to redistribute leftover food to local nonprofits. So far, the nonprofit Zero Percent has delivered 1 million meals from restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets to Chicago’s needy. In recognition of his work, Karmani was awarded a $10,000 grant as part of NationSwell’s and Comcast NBCUniversal’s AllStars program.

Baltimore Explores a Bold Solution to Fight Heroin Addiction
Last year, someone in Baltimore died from an overdose every day: 393 in total, more than the number killed by guns. Dr. Leana Wen, the city’s tireless public health commissioner, issued a blanket prescription for naloxone, which can reverse overdoses, to every citizen — the first step in her ambitious plan to wean 20,000 residents off heroin.

How a Fake Ad Campaign Led to the Real-Life Launch of a Massive Infrastructure Project
Up until 1974, a streetcar made daily trips from El Paso, Texas, across the Mexican border to Ciudad Juárez. Recently, a public art project depicting fake ads for the trolley inspired locals to call for the line’s comeback, and the artist behind the poster campaign now sits on the city council.

Continue reading “10 Innovative Ideas That Propelled America Forward in 2016”

What’s on the Menu at These Correctional Facilities? Local Food and Job Skills

Comparing bad food to prison grub is becoming a thing of the past. That’s because several new farm-to-prison programs are incorporating locally-grown food onto jail menus at several facilities across the country.
As more and more of these initiatives sprout up, the hope is that not only will they improve the health of inmates, but reduce recidivism rates as well. Here’s a look at some leading the pack.
San Diego’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility
The Farm and Rehabilitation Meals (FARM) program, which began this year, designates three acres of prison land as a community garden for the inmates. Twenty prisoners work the land and are assisted by prison staff gardeners and volunteers, according to Sustainable Cities Collectible. The garden’s fresh fruits and vegetables are added to the inmates’ meals, and the surplus is donated to local food banks.
The program cost $4,000 to start and was funded solely by private donors. The prison hopes that working in the garden will give the prisoners agricultural skills to help them find jobs upon release.
Vermont Department of Corrections
In 2012, the Vermont Department of Corrections started a partnership with Salvation Farms. Through it, locally-grown potatoes and apples have been added to jailhouse menus, and inmates have participated in the food-processing experience. Since then, 141,000 pounds of food has been planted, grown, harvested and processed by the inmates. Of that, about 2,000 pounds has been consumed by prisoners, with the rest donated to food banks, schools and other local institutions.
Montana Women’s Prison
Using local beans, breads, cereal, eggs, meat and milk, this facility spends about $60,000 a year on local food — 30 percent of its food budget. Started back in 2007, the prison’s local food program has grown to include an on-premise greenhouse, which boosts production and trains inmates in gardening and food production.
With these programs, prisons are equipping inmates with more than just a high quality meal — they’re giving them a second chance.
To learn about more farm to prison programs, click here.
MORE: Why Prisons of the Future May Look Like College Campuses
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What Would A Prison Designed By Inmates Look Like?

When you think about the long hallways and small cells of prison, it’s impossible to even comprehend what it’s like to live locked up day after day. For the incarcerated, however, it’s reality.
But does it have to be?
That’s just what San Francisco’s County Jail No. 5 has been exploring. Recently, the prison recently held a workshop where inmates designed their own prisons.
Run by architect Deanna VanBuren and restorative justice scholar Barb Toews, 18 prisoners, many of whom are awaiting trial for violent crimes, participated in it.
To begin, inmates talked about their feelings concerning the justice system and how the prison system should be redesigned in order for them to get the most of out of it. Afterwards, the prisoners had the opportunity to create their own architectural models of their ideal prison design.
So, what do prisoners want? Interestingly, many added waterfalls, atriums and computer rooms. While some of the suggestions may seem a little too extensive, others are just basic human needs — like natural light and privacy barriers for the showers and toilets.
Much insight into the minds and needs of prisoners can be gained from this workshop, particularly the design of broad-chested, tattooed, 29-year old Pratt. His design features “an airy room with a skylight to cure vitamin D deficiencies and a fountain with a cascading waterfall to represent resilience and adaptability. Privacy barriers for the shower and toilet. A healing center with lots of windows and, in the middle, a talking circle with a sun emblazoned in its center.”
And while it may be a little too progressive for American prisons, it’s not that unreasonable for other countries. The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world — emphasizing punishment instead of rehabilitation. It also keeps 80,000 prisoners in long-term solitary isolation, which is considered a form of torture by the United Nations. And despite this country’s tough treatment of prisoners, the country has a high rate of recidivism.
Take a trip across the globe, however, and it’s a different story. The Scandinavian countries, in particular, take a radically different approach to jailing, focusing on rehabilitation instead of punishment. Take Norway’s Halden Prison, for example. Although it’s a high-security prison, there are huge windows instead of concrete walls and iron bars. Further, the security walls surrounding the building are barely visible thanks to the trees that line the property. Perhaps surprising, Norway also boasts one of the lowest recidivism rates.
With all of this information, it seems that maybe our justice system is actually the one that needs reform. Although it remains to be seen if the workshop’s conclusions will have any bearing on the future of prisons, it’s a positive step in the right direction.
“The goal is to empower those inside the institutions and prod architects to actually talk to the people they are designing for,” VanBuren tells the L.A. Times. “That’s how an architect would practice in any other setting.”
If that’s the case, maybe one day the cold iron bars and privacy-lacking bathrooms will be replaced by a cascading waterfall — or at the very least, a few more windows.
MORE: How Second Chances Are Helping States Reduce Their Crime Rates

How Second Chances Are Helping States Reduce Their Crime Rates

Being convicted of a crime can certainly have lifelong ramifications that don’t necessarily involve life behind bars without parole. It can mean a lifetime of unemployment.
Minneapolis-raised Kissy Mason witnessed this firsthand in her own family. “People in my family were being locked up, and then they were locked out of a right to live, a right to employment,” she told Nur Lalji of Yes! Magazine.
Seventy percent of people released from prison commit another crime within three years, and part of this recidivism rate is due in part to how difficult it is for them to find a job.
Mason was determined to make better choices for herself than those being made by her family members. But in 2006, she was involved in a domestic argument that escalated, leading to a felony conviction. Although she never went to jail — she served probation instead — whenever she filled out an application for employment, she had to check the ubiquitous box indicating that she was a convicted felon. This status also disqualified her for low-income Section 8 housing.
Instead of lamenting the situation, Mason worked to change it. She joined the campaign to “ban the box,” which was started by All of Us or None (a group founded by formerly incarcerated people that had difficulty finding work) in 2003. Since then, 12 states have removed this question from job applications. Employers can still conduct criminal background checks, but by the time they get that far in the hiring process, they’ve usually had a chance to study the applicant’s other qualifications.
Mason’s home state, Minnesota, enacted legislation banning the box in January 2014. Because of the initiative, one of the state’s major corporations, Target, has stopped using the check-off box on job applications not just in its Minnesota stores— but throughout the country.
“Sometimes people bar you from jobs forever because of one incident, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Mason told Lalji. “People should be given another chance. It shouldn’t be one time and you’re out.”
MORE: Meet A Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement On Its Head
 

From Convict to Coding: How One Man is Connecting America’s Inmates

Some of Silicon Valley’s best ideas come about through unusual circumstances. (Case in point: Facebook, which has its origins as a classmate ratings site.) But perhaps one of the more profound examples of this comes from Frederick Hutson, who cooked up his winning concept while behind bars.
Hutson always had a proclivity for business, launching anything from a window-tinting concept out of high school to opening a cell phone store. But his misstep came in 2007 at the age of 24, when he decided to help a friend create a more streamlined plan for marijuana distribution from Mexico to Florida through his mail service business. Though he received an honorable discharge from the Air Force and had no previous criminal record, Hutson was sentenced to 51 months in prison.
It was during his time as an inmate that Hutson came up with the idea for Fotopigeon, an online platform that lets friends and families of inmates upload photos to send through the postal service for 50 cents per print. As Hutson explained to the New York Times, prison officials often refuse anything from third party companies like Snapfish or Shutterfly “because they don’t like anything that doesn’t come in a plain white envelope.”

The concept seemed simple, but Hutson believed something as basic as helping inmates feel more connected to the outside world was a chance to reduce recidivism.

“Isolation is the worst thing for an inmate,” Hutson said. “It makes it hard for him to rebuild his life when he gets out.”

As an insider, Hutson knew that the average prisoner had just $300 a year to spend on goods at the prison commissary and for phone calls. (Families of inmates spend an additional $600 annually on their loved one.) Hutson believed that if he could market to prisoners directly and get 10 percent of their family and friends to send 10 photos a month (plus provide inexpensive phone calls), he could bring in $22 million in revenue within three years.

This insider knowledge proved to be a huge asset.

“I thought my record would prevent people from doing business with us, but it was just the opposite,” Hutson said. “I had domain expertise.”

While honing his concept at NewME, a San Francisco-based accelerator that focuses on underrepresented demographics in the tech world, Hutson and his investors realized that the platform could provide much more to the untapped market of 2.3 million inmates across the country. And so Pigeonly was born. 

Pigeonly now operates as an online data platform that not only offers photo-sharing services through Fotopigeon, but also cheap phone calls for inmates through its telecommunications arm, Telepigeon. How does it do it? The company partnered up with Internet phone-service providers to give inmates local access numbers that can be used to make long-distance calls — reducing rates from 23 centers per minute to 6 cents.

But perhaps even more important than its two main services, Pigeonly has centralized the more than 35 million pieces of data on inmates that are dispersed in the fractured public records system across more than 3,000 prison institutions, according to the company site. While inmates are frequently shuffled around in the system, addresses are often lost or never updated. Customers can use the platform as a directory to look up an inmate by name, regardless of address.

Pigeonly has also opened up its application programming interface (API), which allows developers to use the data to build more products directed toward the unusual consumer market and their networks. As Hutson points out, incarceration impacts more than just the inmate, affecting a prisoner’s network of seven to 10 people on average. Communication with friends and family is proven to reduce recidivism, according to Hutson, and part of his goal of Pigeonly is to better understand who is affected by prison.

By opening up the difficult-to-reach market, he just might find out.

MORE: New York Enlists Venture Capitalists To Help Keep People Out of Prison