ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, January 2, 1997 TAG: 9701020037
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
A Virginia Tech agriculture project may get a little help from the Virginia General Assembly with its effort to help state prison inmates grow their own food.
Del. Jim Shuler, D-Blacksburg, will ask legislators for $250,000 to launch a study of meat and dairy product production by inmates. Shuler says it's part of an effort to develop a plan where inmates can produce all of their food.
Virginia's state prisons house 25,300 inmates. The exact amount spent on food for each is unavailable, although $16,590 was the average annual cost of feeding, housing, and maintaining a prisoner during fiscal year 1996, which ended July 1, said David Botkins, spokesman for the state Department of Corrections.
Shuler's proposal would lead to the second phase of a program started three years ago with the aid of Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Under the first phase, inmates grew "high value, labor intensive crops" such as asparagus, strawberries and tomatoes, at a 210-acre Sussex County farm, according to a release from Shuler's office.
Tech professor Paul Hoepner, who leads the project, expects crops will be sold for a $2 million annual profit, according to the release.
The Corrections Department owns 10,000 acres of land, and not all of it is being cultivated.
"The more we can produce within the prison system for their own sustenance, the less we have to put in from taxpayer dollars to fund that," Shuler said.
Botkins said he was not familiar with this particular inmate work program, but that the state corrections system "has been moving toward self-sufficiency when it comes to food production." It also operates a meat-processing plant and a dairy, both at James River Correctional Center in Goochland County.
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