How Can an Ex-Convict Land a Job in Tech? Here's a Way.

Rehabilitation doesn't offer clear-cut solutions, but the right kind tech access offers greater potential for self-sufficiency instead of a railroad to recidivism.

James Tweed has always been fascinated by the act of learning in isolation. Having started life as a maritime derivatives trader, he founded his company in 2006 to provide education for people on ships, where there was “not a lot of internet,” he says. In recent years, he discovered a new cohort of learners who also can’t get online: prisoners. Today, Coracle Online Ltd. has distributed 2,600 laptops loaded with educational software to most of Britain’s prisons, or about one for every 30 prisoners. The results are as promising as those of similar projects in the US, and may well show that digital education can have an edge when it cuts out the distraction of the internet. Isolation from those diversions, in one way, has its advantages.