KENAI, Alaska (AP) - Inmates serving the last months of their sentence at Kenai’s Wildwood Correctional Complex will be given the opportunity to get an early start on returning to outside life by living in dormitories at Kenai’s Pacific Star Seafoods cannery.
Corrections Commissioner Dean Williams called the return to outside living the next step of a work-release program that has the inmates working at the cannery, the Peninsula Clarion reported .
The inmates have been bused daily between the prison and their workplaces since Wildwood began allowing selected groups of inmate volunteers to hold jobs at Kenai’s fish processors in 2012.
“What I’ve been proposing . is instead of these people coming back to the facility at night, and because PacStar has all kinds of housing, why wouldn’t we just have them finish out the last part of their sentence here in the fish processing plant, where now they’re employed, they’re around other people that are working?” Williams said. “They have function again, they have purpose in their life.”
Inmates in the last year of their sentence can apply to work 12-14 hour shifts at the canneries. Those who pass a screening test earn minimum wage plus overtime. The program had 20 participants its first year, and has had up to 50 participants since, said Wildwood Superintendent Shannon McCloud.
“(Cannery managers) who were apprehensive about putting people there, we changed their minds,” she said. “We hope to keep it going.”
The inmates housed in the cannery will be under an electronic monitoring system that triggers an alert if they leave a certain area. McCarthy said Wildwood has never had an electronically-monitored work-release inmate leave their designated area.
Room and board costs will be paid from their wages.
Williams said work-release is “one of the best tools we have for helping to reduce our recidivism and helping these people become productive citizens again.”
Recidivism is the rate at which people released from prison are re-arrested for new offenses.
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Information from: (Kenai, Alaska) Peninsula Clarion, http://www.peninsulaclarion.com
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