Inmates Build Homes for Needy Families : Maryland: Innovative program aims to train prisoners and give them something useful to do, perhaps cutting recidivism in the process.

Mike Ammenhauser worked for five months building a one-story, three-bedroom house. Then he watched with pride as it was lowered onto a flatbed truck and squeezed through the narrow, barbed-wire-topped prison gate.

Ammenhauser, serving a 15-year sentence for attempted murder, stayed behind.

The house he and nine other inmates built at Maryland’s maximum-security Patuxent Institution will be home to a poor family under an innovative state prison program.

“We were able to put our time to work, to help people and to help ourselves,” Ammenhauser said. “We get a sense of pride and accomplishment and a family gets a nice house.”

The idea came to Roger Hultgren, a General Accounting Office employee, five years ago as he toured the prison while serving on a grand jury. Hultgren noticed inmates working on houses and asked what happened when they were done.

“What they did was they tore the house apart and built the next house a little smaller” until they could no longer use the wood, Hultgren said. “That struck me as being discouraging for people who built the houses, to see them dismantled.”

“This is a lot more productive,” said Dave Todd, who also worked on the modular house and is serving 40 years for assault and attempted rape. “I feel like I’m giving something back to society, plus I’m learning something.”

The project is run by State Use Industries, a self-supporting state program that trains inmates in such skills as printing, meat cutting and making clothes and furniture.

Robert Martineau, chairman of the Correction Industries Assn., an organization of officials involved in inmate-training programs, said he has not heard of any similar home-building projects in the country.

But as the nation’s prison population approaches 1 million, correction officials are looking for more ways to put inmates to work, he said.

Another reason for the interest in inmate training is that prisoners with skills are less likely to wind up back behind bars.

About 10% of inmates in the industry programs end up back in the Maryland prison system within three years, compared with almost half of those in the general population, said Steve Shiloh, general manager of State Use Industries.

Businesses sometimes resist such programs for fear of unfair competition. But Maryland’s rules allow products made behind bars to be sold only to government agencies.

The 24-foot-by-40-foot house built by Ammenhauser, Todd and eight other inmates was sold to Howard County for about $28,000, to be rented to a low-income family.

A second home is bound for Prince George’s County. Howard County wants two more such homes, and State Use Industries is negotiating with a county to build a subdivision of 25 to 30 homes.

“We’re hoping to expand as long as we’re successful in finding buyers,” Shiloh said.

The 10 inmates chosen for the program worked every day from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

“They work here as if this is a job site,” said Leonard Sipes, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. “If you don’t work hard enough, they fire you.”