Marcellino Ornelas had been in and out of juvenile hall seven times by the time he finally went to prison at the age of 19 for assault with a firearm. He'd already been kicked out of high school and was working, he says, as the "local drug dealer," with a side gig at a Ross department store. In the past, every time he got out, he'd start dealing soon after.

"It was like, this is how I make money. This is who my friends are," Ornelas says. "That always brought me back to the same situation."

Now 22, Ornelas believes that pattern easily could have continued if it hadn't been for a program he joined at San Quentin State Prison that taught inmates to code. Since 2014, a nonprofit called The Last Mile has taught coding and entrepreneurship classes inside San Quentin and other prisons in hopes of helping incarcerated people develop marketable skills for when they get out. It's had plenty of success, graduating nearly 400 students over the last four years. It also recently launched a for-profit web development shop, where advanced students get paid about $16 an hour to work on real-world projects for paying clients.

But while the classes were fulfilling for students like Ornelas, they were also painstaking. Nearly every state across the country strictly prohibits internet usage. That means that Ornelas and his fellow students had no way to access the site that's like oxygen for coders around the world: Google.

Dan Wheeler

So last year, armed with their newfound skills, Ornelas and three of his classmates decided to build their own search engine for the inside. They called it JOLT, an acronym for the first letter of each of their last names. Now, The Last Mile has deployed JOLT in six prisons, where it's helping enhance a program that Ornelas insists has already changed the course of his life.

In order to get The Last Mile's coding courses up and running to begin with, staffers essentially had to recreate the internet inside the prison's high barbed-wire walls. They set up their own servers, and loaded them up with digitized textbooks, video lectures, and relevant offline Wikipedia entries. This library wasn't comprehensive—only coursework was allowed—but it was just enough to teach students the basics.

"We were building a small pond to mimic a big ocean," says Dan Wheeler, the program's lead instructor and a former Dropbox engineer. "You can still learn the basics of swimming."

But much like the pre-Google internet of the 1990s, there was no easy way to navigate the entire body of material Wheeler and others were building, requiring students to spend precious class time scrolling through the database to find what they were looking for. If The Last Mile really wanted to set students up for success outside of prison, Wheeler knew they'd need to be as adept at research as they were at any given coding language. "In most coding jobs, knowing how to do research is just a daily need," Wheeler says.

In 2017, Wheeler launched a new course for advanced students, based on a class he took as a computer science student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For half of the duration of the class, students would team up to work on an open-ended project. The idea for JOLT arose out of the students' own needs, says John Levin, one of the members of the team.

"We were wasting a lot of our time just trying to find the right resource so we could learn what we wanted to learn," says Levin, a former IT professional who has been serving a life sentence since 2013.