Like so many others, Shandea Hardin entered the Arizona State Prison Complex in Perryville full of confusion and fear. A series of traumas and the throes of addiction left her with little idea of how she would get by, or even what to expect.
Immediately, she found Persevere–or rather, Persevere found her. “I hit the yard,” she says, “and they were handing out these white slips. At the time, I thought it was mandatory – I would do anything I was told, I just wanted to be good and follow instructions. It turned out these slips were notices about a town hall meeting. The town hall meeting was about Persevere.” A town hall meeting is an info session given to potential participants.
Speaking to her frame of mind at the time, Shandea admits to her nervousness when she saw the Persevere flier circulating in the yard. “For one, I’m incarcerated, and I don’t know what they want from you in there. All I know is I don’t want to get into trouble and I have to listen to whatever they say. I missed the whole part where they told us this was an optional opportunity. I just kept telling myself, ‘Don’t mess up.’” Faced with this intense fear of failure and letting others down, she saw Persevere and prison more generally as a chance to “fix” herself – to heal her trauma and develop rituals and routines that would help her flourish in the outside world. Many of Persevere’s participants’ speak to this same growth mindset, citing it as a key factor in their success through the program.
Shandea composed an essay for Persevere, with the hope of being admitted. Out of the 1,000+ women who applied for Perryville’s Persevere program, she was only one of 20 who gained entrance. When she started the program, however, she wondered whether she was really supposed to be there.
“I had such incredibly low self-esteem. I had thought it was one of the programs the women in the yard told me about, for recovery. I had no idea until I showed up that I had got into a coding course. When I got in there, they were telling me these things about HTML and CSS. I said, ‘I have no idea what you mean. What were you thinking about picking me? I can’t even set up my own Facebook.’ I thought they had lost their minds.”
This was all part of Shandea’s approach to life at the time: “I was always thinking: ‘Why me? I’m just me. They couldn’t pick me.’ It was debilitating. My time with Persevere was the first moment when I started to step beyond that.”
She admits now that Persevere saw something in her that she didn’t, or could not. She fell in love with coding almost right away and discovered that the problems and solutions-based-thinking came naturally. It also helped her learn to speak again. In her own words: “I was just beginning to talk again because I had been a trauma-induced mute for two years. Coding helped me level up as a human being, helped me develop crucial communication skills. That was a core goal of my instructors, to get me from being that mute mouse to having the confidence I have today. That was what they did, and they did a phenomenal job at it.”
When she was released in summer 2021, Shandea was able to communicate effectively, but still lacked confidence in her abilities. Nevertheless, she was hired as a web developer at Banyan Labs and threw herself into the challenge of life outside of Perryville.
“I had client projects and took more courses in the Persevere curriculum. The main problem at the time was that I didn’t want to talk about my emotions, which impeded my progress. I had to attack that. The Persevere Plus learning program allowed me to do that.
“About six months into my time at Banyan, I realized there was a gap in Persevere. What folks have access to while incarcerated is all static. There was no internet. Now, we had to use things like Github and Jira and learn agile methodologies, all things we didn’t have access to while behind bars. So someone at Banyan told me: “build a program to bridge that gap.”
Her old problem reappeared, “There are tons of people who are way more equipped to build this. But still, I started gathering data to see what the obstacles are for students, and how I could take that information and help the developers coming out. I ended up developing a transitional program, and Persevere said to me: ‘Okay, kid, you’re running it. You’re going to see the developers coming through Banyan Labs and teach them this program you created.’ Again, my reaction was, ‘I’m just me. There has to be someone better equipped.’”
Yet again, Shandea showed herself she was not only capable of something she had doubted, but uniquely gifted to carry it through. “I became the transition coordinator,” she says, “so I help all these developers coming out behind me, not only with the hard skills but with adapting to life outside. Who better to help a person in recovery than someone who’s already been through this progress – who knows the struggles that face us when we get out as junior developers who have only been in a static environment? Who’s been incarcerated and knows these barriers?”
The education Shandea received through Persevere extends well beyond coding. “My mentors were not just for coding but for mindfulness. When I first heard of mindfulness I thought it was kooky, but I didn’t know. One of my mentors taught me to breathe, and it seems so simple, but it really unlocked so much for me – learning to breathe, to reset and ground yourself. Now I can have a calm demeanor and show my students that I will walk them through the same process I walked through, and maybe we can try it together and see if it works for them too. I feel like I teach them mindfulness without even intending to.”
When Shandea looks back at her time at Perryville, she sees someone wracked with despair – and she feels hope. “Those two years I was so depleted, hopeless. I was definitely suicidal when I first hit the yard. I was at my endpoint. And between suicidal thoughts, drug addiction, being in the system, I watched these women maintain happy demeanors in prison. My experience wasn’t the normal one – these women were laughing, loving, happy, caring in spite of everything. They were living normal lives in a confined, smaller area. I learned from those women and so when I look back on those years I see perseverance, strength, and growth.”
Growing up in a household with addiction, in some sense Shandea was a prime candidate for addiction and incarceration herself – in our hands-off society it is horrifyingly easy for destructive cycles to repeat. And though there is an aspect of tragic irony to the idea that she had to go to prison to learn healthy behaviors, Shandea remains grateful, both for her time at Perryville and her discovery of, and by, Persevere.
“I had so many women tell me in prison, whether in Persevere or in my recovery classes: ‘We are not going to let you back out. You need to see your uniqueness and stop minimizing yourself.’ And even if I still sometimes have to stop myself from saying, ‘It’s just me,’ now I feel like a different person. I feel transformed. I had so many mentors telling me, ‘Shandea, I want you to do this. What if your story helps someone else?’, and having so many people supporting me eventually taught me to support myself and then support others.”
For Shandea, coding is about more than HTML and CSS. It’s about support, encouragement, a window into happiness, a distance from one’s traumas. “Prison set the stage for what I do now, which is that I help people code and I help people live their best life. I never thought those things would go hand-in-hand. It’s pretty amazing to wake up every morning, get on a standup call, and be able to help developers adapt to their new lives.”
This process reflects Persevere’s core principles: through technical hard skills, showing justice-impacted individuals how to hope again, how to refuse to let their pasts shape them, and how to shape themselves. In a world and a country that locks away its problems rather than working to solve them, Persevere shows these individuals, such as Shandea and now Shandea’s students, how to unlock the potential that is uniquely theirs.
