At just 16 years old, Jessica Hicklin was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole after murdering a friend during a drug deal gone bad. At the time, Hicklin was addicted to methamphetamine.
“My introduction to prison was, ‘You have a lot of time, you’re going to die here, and you need to decide what to do with your life,’” Hicklin says. “I was faced with the reality that I would spend the rest of my life in a square mile in Missouri’s death row prison.”
For more than five years, Hicklin, who was committed to a men’s prison and transitioned while incarcerated, struggled to find motivation to get out of bed. “So I decided that if I was never going to come home, the best thing I could do was help other people come home and stay home,” he says.
Teaching turned out to be one of the best ways to do this. Research shows that those who receive education in prison have a lot lower recidivism rates. Before going to prison, Hicklin had been a talented STEM student. “I was one of those dumb people who thought I would be an actuary when I grew up,” he says. “STEM is the way we understand our world, or how we come to understand it more deeply.”
She built on that love of STEM, first as a volunteer math instructor helping fellow inmates prepare for the GED test, and then by teaching herself and others to code without Internet access. Hicklin was inspired by the initial content created by Khan Academy in the mid-2000s and created video learning opportunities for prison education. Ultimately, these various efforts culminated in the co-founding of Hicklin. Laboratories unlockedan educational technology nonprofit with a mission to make prison education more accessible and recently won the award Milken-Penn GSE Educational Business Plan Competitionawarded in the edtech Week Conference.
Due to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that together banned mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole for those under 18 years of age, and then made this ban retroactive, Hicklin had the opportunity to be released on parole in 2022, after spending 26 years in prison. She is now dedicated to helping those still in prison access education.
What are unlocked labs?
“The overall mission of Unlocked Labs is to empower justice-involved technologists to leverage lived experience to build a better justice system,” Hicklin says. “What that means in practice is that we teach people while they’re incarcerated how to become technologists or software engineers.”
When those incarcerated are released, Unlocked Labs can help them enter the workforce and even hire many of them to continue the mission. “Seventy percent of my team was previously incarcerated,” Hicklin says.
Unlocked Labs is also working to develop open source educational technology that facilitates access to higher education and vocational training classes in prison. “We are focused on open source educational technology because not everyone will be interested in programming,” she says. “So we’re interested in how we can allow higher education in prison to be hybrid and things like that.”
An example of this type of work is better data tracking tools that can help stakeholders offering prison education meet the reporting requirements of Pell Grants for incarcerated people. Another example is providing content for existing programs, for example working with the non-profit Ithaka S+R to provide an offline version of JSTOR.
“We are not content creators. The idea is just to build that infrastructure,” Hicklin says.
Data-driven efforts
One of the statistics that inspires Hicklin to do the work he does is that 83% of those released from prison will be arrested again within 10 years. Education can help reduce recidivism.
Although there are many prison education efforts, Hicklin would like to see greater coordination among them and greater sharing of best practices. “Because the data is not collected and aggregated in one place, we cannot analyze what is working: what is keeping the 17% at home, what is keeping them successful?” says Hicklin.
The hope is that Unlocked Labs’ open source software will help answer those questions. “The idea is to build that open source public educational infrastructure for prisons so that we can all start to collectively analyze what’s happening and what’s working, and connect it to results and corrections based on data and evidence,” he says.
How can educators get involved?
Opportunities abound for educators seeking to help teach the prison population.
“Almost every corrections department has a director of education; approach them and tell them you’re interested,” Hicklin says.
She also encourages educators interested in this area of education to contact her directly if they have not been able to start the conversation with local corrections officials. “We have engaged with 26 states at this point to gauge interest. And we have yet to get to a state that we’ve talked to that says, ‘No, there’s no interest,'” she says. “So try starting the conversation on your own. If you can’t, let’s see if we can join.”
Ultimately, the problem of prison recidivism affects everyone, Hicklin says.
“Ninety-five percent of incarcerated people will one day live next door to you and me,” he says. “We have an obligation to help those people live there safely.”
Wanting to help those released from prison also has less altruistic reasons, Hicklin says, since doing so can reduce crime and the taxes that go to keeping those incarcerated.
“Whether you understand it’s for them or not, it’s for your family, it’s for your neighbors, it’s for everyone,” Hicklin says. “It’s in everyone’s interest to make sure that when people come home, they can be successful.”
