Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Inmates learn to make it on the outside

It's not easy getting out of prison.

After years, perhaps decades, of life behind bars, many convicts are released in the middle of Las Vegas with little more than a $25 check to help them start a new life.

That hardly gives them a financial leg up on beating the tough odds of staying out of prison and not becoming part of the nearly 70 percent who eventually wind up behind bars again.

But officials hope a new facility can bring that number down while also saving taxpayers money and freeing up prison space.

Casa Grande, located in an industrial area west of McCarran International Airport, began taking inmates from Nevada prisons last month. On Thursday it will have its official opening.

When full, the facility -- its name is Spanish for "Big House" -- will house 400 men for the last three months of their sentences. The inmates will learn skills there intended to help them make it on their own on the outside. Similar facilities in other parts of the country report that they have cut recidivism rates in half.

"Not only will this place affect the lives of the 400 people who go through here," Richard S. Worthington, president of the Molasky Group, which built the facility, said on a recent tour. "But it will also affect the lives of the hundreds or thousands of people that their lives touch. It's the difference between going back to prison and becoming a productive, contributing member of the community."

The inmates are not the only ones who will benefit, added Howard Skolnik, deputy director of the state Corrections Department.

"The thing that's probably the most impactful, and least measurable, is all the people who will wake up tomorrow and won't be victims" of crime, he said.

The facility represents an in-between for ex-cons. Like in prison, they cannot come and go as they please and they sleep on narrow bunks in rooms shared with other inmates. But unlike prison, there's no barbed wire or guard towers, and they can commute to and from jobs.

The inmates are expected to find jobs -- and to pay rent. To defray the facility's costs and to help the men develop money management skills, they must pay about $15 a day to stay there.

The inmates' contributions go toward paying for the facility, which was built by Molasky for $23 million. Prison work crews who helped with the construction are thought to have defrayed the cost by about $1 million.

Inmate transition houses of this size are rare. Officials say Casa Grande is only the sixth in the country. The others -- in California, Utah, Florida and two in Chicago -- have been remarkably successful, yet not widely imitated.

Casa Grande itself had a rocky road. Locating it in the city was vital to its purpose of helping inmates get jobs and reintegrate with society, but no city wanted it.

Every municipality in the Las Vegas Valley rejected the Corrections Department's appeal, fearful of having hundreds of former convicts living among their citizens.

"It was a not-in-my-back-yard kind of thing," Worthington said. "Nobody wanted this thing. We went from city to city and they all said, 'Get lost.' "

But former Corrections Director Jackie Crawford, who retired in September, kept pushing the idea, backed by Gov. Kenny Guinn. Finally, Clark County approved the facility's current location, which is not near residential areas but is close to both industrial and hotel jobs.

Thirty-four-year-old Michael Vidal, a stocky, gleaming-bald man who spent a year locked up for car theft, is one of the facility's first wave of 155 residents. Vidal found religion while in prison, and to him, Casa Grande seems like proof that "I have God on my side."

"I was scared, I was really scared," Vidal said. "I had to do a new start, and I didn't know how to do it. I knew I had to find a job, but I'm an ex-felon -- I was worried that no one would hire me."

Thanks to the training and assistance of Casa Grande, Vidal has not one job but two. He works full time for a Terrible Herbst lube shop and part time as a table busser at an Outback Steakhouse.

The inmates have to learn to structure their own lives once the strict structures of prison life are gone. With topics ranging from want ads to attitude to hygiene, the classes they take at Casa Grande teach them the ways of what may be a foreign world: going straight, working hard, solving problems the right way, earning a living. The lessons can make all of the difference for these men, and the men know it.

"I look at the other people, out there, not getting told what to do, when to get up, when to eat, where to go," Vidal said. "They're different than me."

The state hopes Casa Grande will be successful not least because Nevada's prisons are almost out of space. The facility's mere existence frees up some space, and will more than pay for itself if it keeps ex-cons from going back to prison.

"We're full up," Skolnik said. "Although there's been planning for growth, I'm not sure we've built enough. We really need this place for the bed space, as well as for transitioning inmates."

Critics have faulted the state's Parole Board and Division of Parole and Probation for not doing enough to ease convicts' re-entry upon release.

One report drafted by the Corrections Department last year said these agencies were endangering the public and costing taxpayers money because their practices encouraged recidivism. The department's current director, Glen Whorton, has disowned the report.

But critics hope Casa Grande will assuage some of those concerns by giving inmates more resources to escape lives of crime.

"Preparing inmates to come out, understanding what they need to succeed on the outside, is in many ways more imporant than incarceration itself in terms of the individual, society and the taxpayer," said Richard Siegel, president of the Nevada chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, who testified before the Legislature in support of Casa Grande.

"There are people who think we should just lock people up and throw away the key, but the reality is, they're coming back, and many of them can have successful lives if we support them with the right programs."

Molly Ball can be reached at 259-8814 or at [email protected].

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