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Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptop to find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit’s principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late into the night.

But outside Thorpe’s window, there’s a soaring chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire. And at noon and 4 p.m. every day, a prison guard peers into his room to make sure he’s where he’s supposed to be at the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Charleston, Maine, where he’s serving his 12th year for two drug-related convictions in New Hampshire, including intent to distribute synthetic opioids.

Remote work has spread far and wide since the pandemic spurred a work-from-home revolution of sorts, but perhaps no place more unexpectedly than behind prison walls. Thorpe is one of more than 40 people incarcerated in Maine’s state prison system who have landed internships and jobs with outside companies over the past two years — some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them.

A handful of other states have also started allowing remote work in recent years, but none have gone as far as Maine, according to the Alliance for Higher Education in Prison, the nonprofit leading the effort.

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds. Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers’ wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get reentry support for housing and job searches before they’re released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date résumés, a nest egg — and the hope that they’re less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by.

Some crime victims would rather have their perpetrators “rot in hell” than see them have these kinds of privileges, said Randall Liberty, commissioner of the Maine Department of Corrections, and victims are notified, and their concerns considered, when offenders line up remote jobs. Executives say they have also encountered apprehension, at least initially, from community members and co-workers when they hire incarcerated people.

Tensions can arise inside prison walls, too, given the vast income disparities with residents working in the kitchen or woodshop who make far less. But there hasn’t been much grumbling, especially since those who land outside employment often give up more desirable prison jobs that then become available to others, said Laura Rodas, Maine DOC’s director of adult education. The DOC is in the process of formalizing its remote work policy, which will open up opportunities to more residents.

The benefits are undeniable, Rodas said: “The systems that we’ve set up to send people home with virtually nothing makes no sense at all if we want them to become good neighbors.”

More than anything, incarcerated residents say, these jobs give them a sense of purpose and dignity. And hope.