THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, February 15, 1995 TAG: 9502150015
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 48 lines
``Enterprising'' begins to describe the way the Virginia Beach Sheriff's Department has put volunteer inmate labor to work.
For some time, the department has sponsored work crews for charitable projects such as repairing houses for the elderly and for city services, such as moving city offices, cleaning out neighborhood drainage ditches, removing graffiti and more.
Now the department has bid on, and been awarded, a state contract to clean up litter on Route 44 between Virginia Beach and Norfolk and on Interstate 264 in Norfolk. The Beach sheriff has subcontracted to the Norfolk Sheriff's Department for the cleanup along 264.
The Beach's department was a low bid - about half what the Department of Transportation has paid in years past - with high returns: Taxpayers save on the cost of litter cleanup. They also save on the costs, financial and otherwise, of jail overcrowding and the conflicts that arise from the boredom and pent-up tension of close quarters of imprisonment. Inmates at the Beach earn good-time credit to reduce their time in jail. Inmates on the Norfolk work crews, who also provide other services for city agencies, earn a monetary credit toward the fines they owe.
Of course, the inmates are on these work crews are not those convicted of violent crime, and they are supervised closely, though some one of them will probably attempt escape.
But a couple of points that need making are being made by this enterprise. Inmates of local and state facilities should work, and the federal constraints that prohibit an inmate work requirement. Many prisoners do volunteer for work. Too many others whose lack of work history contributed to their incarceration do not volunteer. The credits they earn from work could go toward restitution to the victims of their crimes, or to unpaid child sup-port, or to offset the cost of tax-paid assistance to their victims' family or their own family.
Somewhere short of what critics decry as ``slave labor'' there's room for rules that would require inmates to work, to study - to do something more constructive and productive for them and for society than watch TV or pump iron and law books. by CNB