Last Mile Prison Evolution
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A story about how Chris Redlitz, a successful businessman, started The Last Mile, a program teaching coding to prison inmates.
"Ten years ago, Chris was dating a woman who volunteered at San Quentin prison teaching math. Someone asked Chris to come talk about entrepreneurship to the inmates. He agreed, and they kept asking him to return.
Eventually, he realized this was a major problem he cared about. He and his wife went to Sacramento, the capital of California, and lobbied for the program. They offered to put up $100,000 and talked to politicians to get approval for an entrepreneurship cohort in San Quentin.
They then realized teaching coding would be even better than entrepreneurship. Chris convinced Apple, the Trump administration, the Koch brothers, and other wealthy donors to contribute money. Now they have a huge program across multiple prisons.
They only allow 20 or 30 people per cohort and operate in about 15 prisons. They've graduated around 1,000 people, and none of them have returned to prison - compared to the average 65% recidivism rate for regular inmates. The program helps them get jobs at companies like Slack and eBay after release."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.