Emerge Career’s tech-forward job training lets incarcerated folks hit the road on release

techcrunch.com:

Reentering society after years in prison is difficult for many reasons, among which perhaps the most prosaic is simply that it’s hard to get a job — and what training and transition programs exist are far from sufficient. Emerge Career hopes to change that with an improved in-facility training curriculum that prepares the soon-to-be-formerly-incarcerated for an in-demand job using a more modern method.

The startup, itself about to emerge from Y Combinator’s latest batch, was founded by two people who had been working on improving another shortcoming of the prison system: video calls. Ameelio, which I covered back in 2020, replaced aging proprietary video calling systems in prisons with ones based on a modern open-source stack, saving money and making the whole operation simpler and better for everyone involved.

“Having spent the last three years developing tech for prisons, we got a feel for the major challenges that are facing people post-release, particularly job and employment stuff,” said Uzoma Orchingwa, co-founder of Ameelio and Emerge Career with his colleague Gabe Saruhashi. “Reentry and in-prison education is left up to very small and underfunded organizations, and workforce training post release relies on typical brick and mortar schools, which obviously limits their reach and ability to scale.”

Prison calling systems attracted complaints from regulators and activists because they are exploitative and unethically run, but in this case it’s more like even people the best intentions were facing an uphill battle against entrenched methods and red tape.

“So we felt the need to start a separate entity for upskilling formerly incarcerated people, and using government money to do it,” Orchingwa continued.

To be clear,