THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 16, 1996 TAG: 9603160367
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY ANNE SAITA, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MOYOCK LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
Unseen by passing motorists, abandoned tires are common along rural roadsides, and some have been there so long that tall trees have grown up through the middle.
Most of the tires accumulated in deep ditches, well out of sight. Nevertheless, this week the rubber eyesores were being removed by a group that is also trying to clean up its act.
Since Monday, minimum-security prisoners from Pasquotank County's new correctional facility have plucked thousands of spider- and snake-infested tubes from Mack Jones and South Mills roads.
They are part of a program initiated by Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. and called the Prisons' Community Work Program. It was designed as a response to the public's perception of idle inmates.
``For the state to come in and clean up like this is a grand thing for the county,'' said John Mulvey, Currituck County's economic developer.
The sight of inmates doing highway cleanup is nothing new in Currituck, where detainees from the county's own medium-security prison in Maple have been working to make the county look a little better.
Communities in Chowan, Gates and Hertford counties also have benefited recently from work done by prison work groups out of Gates Correctional Center.
But this week's crew is different. These inmates are the first from the area's newest prison, and they are being supervised by unarmed guards.
``We try to be very selective in the people who work out there,'' said Charles Creecy, the administrator of the Pasquotank Correctional Institution just north of Elizabeth City.
``These are not the type of people to go out and murder somebody, or rape somebody or assault a person,'' he said.
The 14 minimally supervised men in this week's squad are part of about 220 inmates who have been arriving at the new prison since last August.
When the place is fully operational by late spring, about 1,200 men will be incarcerated there. Inmates will require from ``minimum'' to ``closed security,'' the highest custody classification.
A dedication and ribbon-cutting by Franklin Freeman, the state's secretary of the Department of Corrections, is scheduled for March 27.
The modern version of chain gangs has become popular again in North Carolina and elsewhere across the South.
The results of a recent public opinion survey released this week indicate North Carolinians want inmates working.
They also want prisoners to serve longer sentences and they want community punishment programs, according to the survey conducted by John Doble Research Associates of New Jersey.
The survey was based on opinions given last summer by sample groups in Durham, Greenville, Charlotte and Asheville.
``Nearly two-thirds of North Carolinians think prisoners are idle all day, while in fact more than 18,000 are working and working hard in jobs such as the Governor's Community Work program used by the state and local municipalities,'' Freeman said in a news release.
Count local prisoners among that group.
``So far, it's going quite well. I haven't seen any problems, and it's serving a good purpose,'' Creecy said. He hopes to expand the program to four squads of 14 inmates each.
Currituck County Public Works Director Frank Bray also is pleased with the work, which must be done on state property.
``We didn't have the manpower, nor the money, to clean it up,'' Bray said.
The $7,000 to $8,000 the county receives from a state tire tax to dispose of scrap tires usually falls far short of the costs, which must be made up by the county, Bray said.
From the prison's standpoint, these types of projects help inmates acclimate to ``the outside'' and develop work skills before they are scheduled to be released.
The unfettered crews out this week have earned the trust of prison officials, even those who may have come into the system at the highest security level, Creecy said.
The first assignment was to clean up the roadsides, marred by old tires surreptitiously deposited in ditches after a Moyock tire-burning business shut down because of environmental concerns.
``All of the sudden you had a lot of tires in the ditches in these roads bordering the state line,'' Mulvey said.
Mulvey estimates at least three or four tractor-trailer loads of tires will be removed during the 10-day project that started on Monday. The work is dangerous, Mulvey said, since poisonous snakes and spiders breed in the tires. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by DREW WILSON/The Virginian-Pilot
Inmates from Pasquotank County's correctional unit gather tires
along Mack Jones Road in Currituck Thursday.
by CNB