Making Use of Time: 2019 Excellence In Residence, Ornell Caesar
Bundled up in a black coat jacket, Ornell Caesar stood tall in front of a red warehouse door that cold winter day on February 5, 2018, less than 100 days after he was released from prison.
“I promised myself I would make use of my time,” Caesar said. “I learned sign language, Spanish…I didn’t want to be further behind than the people outside.”
The details of Caesar’s sentencing go something like HBO’s The Night Of — Caesar wakes up in the middle of the night, in jail, bloodied up, beaten up, charged with a felony of assault with a deadly weapon. There was no fingerprint or DNA evidence on the gun that he didn’t own, and the victim walked out of the emergency room in less than an hour. No one dies in this true story.
Still, after three lawyers and thousands of dollars of legal fees, Caesar got slapped with 8 years. He served a total of 7.5 years.
2019 EIR recipient, Ornell Caesar, presenting on visualization using D3 JavaScript libraries at the Google Community Space during DeveloperWeek San Francisco. (Photo by Michael O'Donnell)
During his incarceration, Caesar transferred from multiple facilities throughout the state of New York. He landed at one running the Bard Prison Initiative, a program from Bard College that teaches inmates and former inmates how to code.
With the knowledge Caesar gained from the program, he built a public health app for a career fair where he noticed by Andrew Cencini, a computer science professor at Bennington College. Andrew then introduced Caesar to his former student Rohail Atlafl, who hired Caesar for his startup, co-founded with WeXL Board Member Timothy Woo.
A year later in 2019, WeXL awarded Caesar the 2019 Excellence In Residence (EIR) and created a custom program to showcase his thought-leadership. The generosity of the Forge team at Autodesk enabled WeXL to produce an event for Caesar to present at DeveloperWeek San Francisco.
For mentorship, WeXL connected Caesar to technology partner, Nag, Inc., a 28-year-old tech firm based in Washington, D.C., run by a father and son team — Swapan and Mo, respectively. Caesar worked with the Nag team to create the presentation.
Within three weeks, Caesar learned how to build a data visualization dashboard that told a story on prison reform and recidivism.
We also connected Caesar to Rasha Khatib, then a software engineer at Quora. She said her “favorite part of learning D3 and data visualization wasn’t the coding — that’s the easy part — it’s the storytelling.”
Rasha recommended the book Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter More Persuasive Data Visualization.
Data + Storytelling in JavaScript
On Friday, February 22, 2019, Caesar presented his learnings on “Visual Storytelling with Javascript D3 Libraries.”
Not able to attend the event, Rasha sent the following texts during Caesar’s presentation:
Before flying back to New York, Caesar got to have lunch at Google tour the GooglePlex thanks to mentor, Michee Smith, a Product Manager at Google who works on the Data Transparency Project. Caesar learned that it’s best to have an employee referral when applying to Google. Now he knows at least one.
(from left to right) Ornell Caesar; WeXL CEO Arabella DeLucco; Google Product Manager, Michee Smith; WeXL Board Member, Timothy Woo; (right photo) Caesar enjoying a bike ride at the GooglePlex in Mountain View, Calif.
Sometime in the whirlwind 5-day stay in the San Francisco Bay Area, Caesar shared his experiences with the criminal justice system on REPRESENT.
Caesar joined public policy innovator and now California State Senator (elected in 2020), Josh Becker, in this episode, “Post-Prison Prosperity.”
REPRESENT: Post-Prison Prosperity
Did you know that there are 2.1 million people incarcerated in the United States? In this episode of REPRESENT, WeXL explores the topic of prison reform and bipartisan legislation set up to improve the criminal justice system so that those re-entering the workforce can have the opportunity for post-prison prosperity.
