Prison Grooms Inmate Entrepreneurs

[WhiteTara]

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/usa/places/Prison-Grooms-Inmate-Entrepreneurs-123906209.html

It can be hard to find a job in the current tight U.S. economy, especially when you have a criminal record. At one prison in the American Northwest, inmates are learning not just how to get jobs, but how to open businesses of their own.

A class called LIFE (Lifelong Information For Entrepreneurs), at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, teaches inmates how to start their own businesses after they’re released from the Oregon women’s prison.

MercyCorps Northwest, the local branch of a global development organization, started the program four years ago, based on its experience in international aid.

snip

MercyCorps Northwest just started up another LIFE program at a women’s prison in Washington state. Cooper hopes the idea spreads throughout the country’s prisons and their 1.5 million inmates.

“Ninety-five, 96 percent of those people are going to come back to our communities with the stigma of being an ex-felon," he says. "And to the extent that we make it hard for them to come back and be successful, it hurts everybody. It hurts our community. It hurts our tax base.”

[xphile]

1. A lot of inmates are inmates because of their entrepreneurial endeavors.

Just saying.

Of course we could rethink our so-called war on drugs, legalize marijuana and hemp which doesn't even get you high but I digress, and that would put less people in prison but it seems to me that TPTB WANT to throw as many people in prison as possible because prisoners are cheaper to hire and easier to abuse in the workplace than those of us who have slightly more freedom about what jobs we take. (All things being relative as the job market is currently in the shitter)

[WhiteTara]

2. I couldn't bring myself to comment

when I posted, But I agree that the laws make these people inmates and a law change would do us all a world of good.