Officials: Inmate work crew program paying off for taxpayers and prisoners

The next time you see inmates picking up trash along the roadside, think about all the dollars the long-time work program is saving Whitfield County taxpayers.

“They do a lot of work,” said Captain Wesley Lynch, who oversees the county jail’s inmate work crew program. “We manage to get a whole lot done without spending too much because we’ll have one supervisor who’s paid (an officer) and he can supervise up to seven or eight inmate workers.”

In fact, last year the crews picked up 80,460 pounds of trash along roads and another 2,600 pounds of trash at schools.

The inmate crews stay busy doing everything from mowing at many county facilities to setting up and breaking down displays at Prater’s Mill Country Fair, from carrying food bags for the elderly to moving furniture for United Way, from painting county buildings to setting up the Christmas party for the GreenHouse to putting out dozens of voting machines across the county.

“All the inmates are volunteers,” Lynch said. “Nobody’s made to work, but we don’t really have to make them because we get letters every day, ‘Hey, I want to be a trusty.’ Believe it or not, a lot of them want to work. Occasionally you’ll see people who have been to jail 10, 12, 13, 14 times and can’t arrange their personal life at all, but once they’re here and they get away from those demons in their personal life, you’d think, man, why isn’t this guy a supervisor somewhere? But when they get back out and get around the drugs and all the other bad things in their lives, they come right back here.”

While a lot of inmates may want to be in the program, not all are eligible to be on the work crew. Prisoners who have been convicted or are accused of drug trafficking or other serious crimes such as murder, rape and child molestation, for example, do not meet trusty requirements.

“We look at their criminal history,” Lynch said, “and their behavior while they’ve been in custody this time or in the past if they’re a repeat offender. You’ve also got to filter out the people who have a medical condition and the people who can’t get along with others (even if they haven’t had serious charges in the past) and have had disciplinary problems inside the facility.”

That process of elimination narrows the list of eligible inmates to about 40 at any given time, Lynch said.

Still, those 40 inmates — coupled with the oversight of officers (Sgt. Tracy Davis and Deputies Jaime Haynes and Wayne Saylors) — do enough work in a year’s time to save county taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in labor costs, he believes.

“Just hiring one person is going to cost you anywhere from $35,000 to $45,000 when you include benefits,” Lynch said. “Our kitchen staff is contracted through a company called Trinity, but at any time, we might have 10 to 14 inmates helping out for free in there. If you had to hire 10 to 14 people at just basic low-end pay, you’re still talking about a lot of money with benefits.”

Then there are the inmates who mow the grass at several county buildings, including the jail and the GreenHouse, and pick up trash along the roads.

“If you had to contract that out over the course of a year, that would be a lot of money, too,” Lynch said.

Besides helping taxpayers, the program also helps morale at the jail, especially since the work crew is housed in a special area of the jail that affords them a little more freedom.

“It gives them a reward, allows them to be productive and to do something,” Lynch said.

Added Lt. Emmit Tate, who has helped oversee the program since 2008: “The inmates love it. In fact, we get more of a negative response from them when it’s raining outside. If it’s rainy for a week and they don’t get to go outside, they’re all the time asking, ‘When are we going out?’”

Tate believes the program is a morale booster.

“It makes their time pass by,” he said. “Instead of sitting here all day long, they go out, they pick up trash, they do this, they do that, and they blink, and man, their day’s over. Man, I got another one knocked out.”

The inmate work crew also gets a few fringe benefits, like a little extra food because they’re burning off more calories with their labor.

But with that freedom also comes a responsibility.

“We are very, very, very strict on our trusties,” Lynch said, “much more strict than anyone else in North Georgia is. If they make an error, if they mess up something, if they sneak tobacco in or something minor like that, we treat it as a very serious offense because they have access to the outside of the facility. Any kind of contraband-related issue, they end up getting in some serious trouble.”

If you’re a trusty and you bring cigarettes back into the jail, for example, you likely just added 30 days to your sentence.

Overall, Tate doesn’t see any negatives to the program. “I wish we could do more,” he said.

He’ll assemble a small crew to do maintenance on the lawn mowers in preparation for the beginning of the mowing season.

“That way we’ll have the mowers sitting there ready to go the first day we need to mow,” Tate said. “I lucked up a couple of years ago. We had an old boy in here — man, talk about mechanically inclined. He fixed a couple of weedeaters that hadn’t worked in a couple of years, had’em running all summer. Of course, they didn’t work the next year, and I didn’t have him to go in there and fix’em again.”

From time to time, the crew also includes some talented craftsman, like the time a brick mason in jail was called upon to build a concrete block wall to make a new office in the building.

“We bought like $200 worth of blocks and mortar,” Tate said, “and that’s all that wall cost us because I already had the paint and the inmates painted it and he laid all the blocks and did a professional job — looks good. He was happy to do it. We couldn’t have ever built it out of 2x4’s and come out that cheap. I think we did real well on that saving the county money.”

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