https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gykav9/these-formerly-incarcerated-entrepreneurs-are-trying-to-keep-people-out-of-prison

When Teresa Hodge received a seven-year sentence for mail fraud, she vowed to become an expert on the prison experience. “I observed prison,” Hodge says. “I watched women come in, I watched women leave, and I watched some women come back.”

She filled her days learning about those around her, their lives on the outside, and what brought them to the cramped space at a federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia. She and her daughter, Laurin Leonard, now 33, brainstormed ideas in the visitor’s room, wondering what would allow these women to reclaim their lives. “This became my life’s work,” she says. “I left prison 100 percent committed to building solutions that would help me and help other people.”