CRIME : Prison Program Teaches Inmates a Sense of Pride

In the six years that she has toiled in a small optics laboratory here, Virginia McCormick says: “I’ve found my niche in life. This is what I want to do when I get out--out in the real world.”

The real world lies on the other side of the walls and barbed wire of the Broward Correctional Institution, Florida’s maximum security prison for women. And between McCormick and freedom is a sentence that could stretch another two decades or more.

McCormick, 36, is serving a minimum mandatory sentence of 25 years to life in prison on a first-degree murder conviction. “I got involved with drugs--heroin and cocaine--and there was a woman, and I ended up killing her,” she says.

Inside a complex of low-rise, pastel-colored buildings near the Everglades, McCormick is one of 41 BCI inmates who hold jobs in a workshop that turns out an average of 200 pairs of prescription eyeglasses a day. The clients include prisoners in Florida and eight other states, as well as Medicaid patients nationwide. The optics lab is one of 53 industries run inside 21 Florida prisons by a nonprofit corporation called Prison Rehabilitative Industries & Diversified Enterprises, or PRIDE.

PRIDE last year earned almost $4 million on annual sales of $77 million worth of goods including office furniture, bedding, shoes, dairy products, printing and--of course--license plates. The program funnels about $2 million a year into the state’s corrections department and victim restitution funds, while employing about 3,000 inmates at a time.

Hailed as the only self-supporting, privately run prison industry program in the nation, PRIDE has given inmates a reason to hope.

Enrolled in an apprentice program sponsored by the U.S. Labor Department, McCormick has learned just about all there is to know about grinding, finishing and fitting eyeglass lenses. “With these skills, I know I’ll be able to avoid the bars, the drugs, the old scene that got me here,” she says.

In the busy laboratory, manager Ron Gudehus says he can see dozens of potential success stories. “No one ever gave most of these people the time of day,” he says. “Here, they learn a trade, but they learn self-worth too.”

Joann Van Buren, 40, who is due for release this year after serving seven years for kidnaping and aggravated battery, says: “I look forward to coming to work each day because I’m actually helping somebody to see better.”

PRIDE President Pamela Jo Davis says that of 4,000 inmates who have worked for PRIDE in the last 3 1/2 years and then been released, about 20% return to prison. That compares to a 50% recidivism rate for all state prisoners.

In addition to training, Davis says, PRIDE provides job placement and counseling services outside the prison walls. “Our corporate goal is to find 50% of PRIDE inmates jobs,” she says.

Since being chartered by the Legislature 14 years ago, PRIDE has not been without controversy.

Some public interest lawyers claim that PRIDE is often careless about safety standards, although Davis says the corporation is subject to the same federal safety and environmental standards as private industry.

And while largely prohibited from selling to anyone but government agencies, PRIDE does compete with some private manufacturers, who complain of unfair competition because of PRIDE’s “cheap labor.” PRIDE workers are paid 50 cents an hour, which is high by prison standards.

Despite the low wages paid to prisoners, Davis insists that prison labor is not cheap.

“We waste more because we’re in a training mode,” she says. “And private industry wouldn’t hire most of the people we’ve got. We have high material costs because we can’t consolidate operations, we’re subject to random downtime because of prison rules and the cost of supervision is high. But we are a real world industry providing people with something meaningful to do when they get out. . . . And that’s pretty important.”