PORTSMOUTH, Va. (WAVY) – At 43 prison facilities across Virginia, some 24,000 people are serving time. One Virginia prison, the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in Goochland, stands alone as the sole facility in the state where prisoners can earn a certification as a full-stack developer.
In Virginia, full-stack developers, who build the front-end and back-ends of websites and applications, typically earn about $130,000 a year.
The educational program, PersevereNow.org, was created by a man who had a full stack of problems that landed him behind bars a decade ago.
Attorney Sean Hosman used to travel the country working with the various systems charged with holding the accused and the convicted. Over the years he became a drug addict and alcoholic. The addictions would land him behind bars a dozen times over a two-year period ending in 2012. In 2019, Hosman returned to prison, not in chains, but in a position to change lives.
That is where he launched PerservereNow.org which is transforming the lives of prisoners in a half dozen states including Virginia.
“They [inmates] are learning how to build websites from the ground up,” said Julie Landers, the program manager responsible for programs in Virginia. “They will also be certified in back-end development which is the server side where they will be able to analyze data.”
It is estimated there will be a worldwide shortage of 4 million website and application developers by the year 2025.
Students behind bars must have a high school diploma or GED and should be near the end of their sentence.
“They need to have a certain amount of time left on their sentence,” Landers said. “We don’t want them acquiring these skills only to be languishing after they graduate.”
Virginia pays for a program that Landers said has a priceless return on the investment that benefits offenders, their families and the entire community. The non-profit hopes to establish additional full-stack developer programs in prisons across the state.
“The impact this is having on our families and our participant’s children is going to be generational,” Landers said. “It’s going to break some cycles that I think are so critical in today’s criminal justice system. We need to break those cycles of poverty and criminalization and yes this is a really powerful program.”
