Training for Future Jobs on the Rise for Prison’s Inmate Bakers

Buried in the prison landscape of cement cellblocks, watchtowers and barbed-wire fences is a building warmed by the smell of a staple of life--fresh-made bread.

Welcome to the bakery at the state’s Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, where inmates produce white and wheat bread to help feed the facility’s prisoners.

“Don’t tell them (prison officials) this, but I’d work for free, just to pass the time,” said inmate Mike Warner, who is making 25 cents an hour as a lead “dough man.” He helps oversee the initial creative stage, the mixing of the dough to make the bread.

“I wanted to come in here and benefit myself more,” said John Briseno of Bakersfield, who works as a dough mixer. “I can learn more about being a baker so I can look for a baker’s job when I get out.”

Briseno, who has 2 1/2 years left to serve on a residential robbery conviction, said the money he makes as a prison baker allows him to buy “toothpaste, shampoo and cards to send to my mother.”

Warner, convicted of attempted murder eight years ago, is counting on his bakery and supervisory experience to help him set up his own business when he gets out of prison.

“My mom and I are planning to open a restaurant when I get out,” said Warner, who is from San Diego.

George Ford II of Los Angeles, who is serving a 3-year sentence for armed robbery, worked in the prison’s canteen and laundry before switching to the bakery when it went on line last May.

“I love working in the bakery because I’ve never had this experience before,” said Ford, who works around the bakery’s 43-foot-long oven making sure the bread bakes properly and workers abide by safety rules.

He added that the civilian bakery superintendent overseeing the inmates’ work, Tony Angelini, “has been an inspiration to me. He’s teaching me how to be the best oven man there is.

“I find it interesting to see the flour and the yeast put together to make a loaf of bread, and it tastes good,” Ford said. “I’m used to going to the supermarket, and there it was. I never knew the inner workings of bread.”

The bakery is an operation of the Prison Industry Authority, a division of the state Department of Corrections. The statewide authority still maintains its best-known industry--the manufacture of license plates using inmate labor--but prisoners increasingly are being exposed to varied occupations, ones they can use when they are released.

“We can offer these men the skills that will make them a viable part of society when they get out,” said Mario Luque, a production manager for the authority at the San Diego prison. “But it’s like leading a horse to water. It still comes back to an individual thing.”

The prison authority is developing seven enterprises at the San Diego prison.

The authority’s jobs are the most desirable to inmates because they pay by the hour, giving prisoners a chance to make a little more money than they would if they worked for the state in a kitchen, prison fire department, or yard cleanup job at a flat monthly rate.

“Plus, for each day they work here, they get a day off their sentence,” Angelini said.

The authority, which employs 42% of the inmates statewide, starts its workers at 25 cents an hour for a monthlong probationary period. The inmates work a minimum 30-hour week and their pay can escalate in 5-cent increments over varied periods of time to a maximum of 90 cents an hour.

“The pay and conditions are so good as compared to other (prison) jobs that nobody wants to mess it up,” Warner said, when asked how the prison bakers got along with one another on the job.

Authority enterprises in the works at the prison include an optical laboratory for production of prescription and safety glasses, a laundry center, an auto refurbishing shop, a license plate plant, key data entry, and a textile mill to produce inmate clothing. Also, the authority will have a shipping and receiving and maintenance enterprise to support its production entities.

“The Prison Industry Authority is designed to eliminate idleness among inmates, to keep them working,” said Carlos Chavez, the authority administrator at the San Diego prison. “In the prison environment, idleness is your No. 1 concern.”

Products made by the authority are, by law, sold only to tax-supported agencies.

“We don’t compete with the public,” Luque said.

But state, county and local governments save millions of dollars each year by purchasing authority goods, Chavez said.

“They buy from us like they would any other outside vendor,” Chavez said. “But we’re highly competitive. We don’t pay minimum wage and we’re not designed to make a profit, just to break even . . . to be self-sufficient.”

The prison bakery, for instance, sells the bread to the state for 46.5 cents a loaf, well under the going rate on the open market.