Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

j. patrick coolican:

Inmate work program key to turning lives around

M-Truss and Components Inc.

Steve Marcus

Inmates demonstrate building a truss at the M-Truss and Components Inc. facility outside the Southern Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs Wednesday, July 6, 2011. The company is owed $30,000 for work on the Cosmopolitan, said owner Cathy McBride.

M-Truss and Components Inc.

Inmate worker demonstrates truss building at the M-Truss and Components Inc. facility outside the Southern Desert Correctional Center in Indian Springs Wednesday, July 6, 2011. The company is owed $30,000 for work on the Cosmopolitan, said owner Cathy McBride. Launch slideshow »
Click to enlarge photo

J. Patrick Coolican

Ronnel Pingul says he was a successful dealer at a Strip casino until he slipped a disc in his back and got hooked on opiates — prescribed painkillers at first, and then heroin. That demon chased him over years of petty burglaries and prison.

Now, after having gone through withdrawal in county lockup, he’s within a month of being released from Southern Desert Correctional Center and starting his life over. And he’s developed job and life skills after working just outside the prison walls for M-Truss & Components, assembling steel supports for roofs of big government and commercial projects, such as the Cosmopolitan.

The program allows a few qualified candidates — relatively close to their release dates and deemed nonthreatening and not flight risks — to leave the minimum security prison early in the morning and walk to the adjacent work site.

The men are paid minimum wage, minus the cost of room and board as well as any restitution or child support they owe. The money goes into an account, which they can use at the commissary or take with them upon release.

Money’s nothing compared with being in the fresh air, and when they’re lucky, they work while watching the planes from Nellis Air Force Base dogfight or drop bombs at the nearby range.

I can hear the objection now: Those six jobs outside the prison — during the building boom there were 25 — could go to Nevadans who are on the straight and narrow and would make more than minimum wage.

It’s a fair point, but we also have an urgent need to rehabilitate prisoners and give them work and life skills, a priority badly neglected in recent decades.

Despite spending more than $60 billion per year on corrections nationwide, 52 percent of prisoners released wind up back there within three years, according to the bipartisan Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons Commission. This is a massive and hugely expensive — in dollars and human costs — public policy failure. The recidivism rate is lower in Nevada.

Thankfully, Republican governors — yes, Republicans — are leading a movement to reform our justice system to reduce incarceration rates for nonviolent offenders and keep former inmates out of prison by giving them the skills they need to survive outside. This is happening in Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana and even Texas.

Sadly, the movement hasn’t arrived here.

But it will, and until then, we have the McBrides and their workers.

“They’re employees, and I treat them as employees, not as inmates,” Tom McBride says. “When you show them the respect of a fellow human being, as an employee, it gives them a lot of self confidence, and that will help them get back in society.”

The inmates say they’re blessed to be in the program, and they say they’ve learned teamwork, commitment and integrity. Perhaps they’re just good liars, and yeah, I’m probably particularly gullible, but still, they had me convinced.

The pain Pingul and his wayward life have caused his family shows in his expression, but, as he says, “It’s not what we did in the past, but what we strive to do in the future.”

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