How The Last Mile, a program to teach coding in prison at 15 facilities in five states, helped one man go from a life sentence to a $100K+ engineering job
Zachary Crockett / The Hustle : Tweets: @zzcrockett Tweets: Zachary Crockett / @zzcrockett : At 15, Zachary Moore committed a murder. Now 38, he's an engineer in Silicon Valley. Here's my latest. https://thehustle.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Last Mile has quietly built one of the larger prison-education footprints in tech — coding instruction at 15 facilities across five states — and Zachary Moore is its proof-of-concept graduate: a life sentence converted into a $100K+ Silicon Valley engineering role. The story lands in a broader arc about who gets into tech without a degree, following the bootcamp boom that pushed alternative training toward parity with CS departments.
The employer side of this pipeline already exists: Slack's Next Chapter initiative hires formerly incarcerated graduates into full-time roles, meaning the demand end was proven before this profile ran. The counterpoint in the coverage — an inmate hacker who hid computers in a ceiling to commit fraud — frames why structured, sanctioned programs matter: skills exist inside prisons either way.
First-order effects
- Graduates like Zachary Moore move directly into salaried engineering work, while The Last Mile gains a headline outcome it can use to recruit both facilities and funders.
- Employers such as Slack, already hiring through Next Chapter, get a validated talent source at 15 facilities' worth of scale rather than one-off cases.
Second-order effects
- More tech companies face pressure to stand up second-chance hiring programs of their own, since Slack has demonstrated the model works and the candidate pool is now being trained at scale.
- Prison systems in the five participating states become de facto suppliers to the tech labor market, raising the question of whether corrections budgets should fund vocational tech training as core programming.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, prison education shifts from rehabilitation rhetoric to workforce infrastructure, with tech firms treating incarcerated populations as a credentialed-by-outcome pipeline alongside bootcamps and universities.
- The definition of a qualified engineer loosens further around demonstrated skill rather than pedigree, extending the bootcamp-era challenge to traditional CS-degree gatekeeping.
The trend: Tech hiring is institutionalizing prison-to-engineering pipelines, turning correctional education into a recognized alternative credentialing route for the industry's labor needs.