Sheriff Would Like to Create Trade School
By Carrie Levine, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Nov. 6–Mecklenburg Sheriff Jim Pendergraph has an ambitious goal: cut the number of returning inmates by half.
He is asking voters to pass $14.5 million in jail bonds Tuesday’s ballot.
About a third of the money would go to build a new vocational center at the county’s Jail North in northwest Charlotte, so inmates could learn a trade.
The Sheriff’s Office would use the rest of the bond money to build a 111-bed extension of Jail North to house the growing number of 16- and-17-year-old males at the jail.
Pendergraph said his office would find a partner for the vocational center — likely Central Piedmont Community College — to provide instructors and help inmates learn a yet-to-be-determined trade, such as plumbing or masonry.
Pendergraph said participants in the jail’s existing work-release program have a below-average recidivism rate.
He is hoping the vocational program will have an even lower one.
Experts say vocational training has had positive effects when tried in prisons, but has rarely been offered in jails.
Most inmates have short sentences and don’t have time to go through a training program, they say.
Nancy La Vigne, a senior research associate for the Justice Policy Center of the Urban Institute in Washington, said research shows such programs accept only inmates with clean behavior records, and rarely those who commit violent crimes.
That means it’s hard to tell whether the programs are successful, because “it may be that those Boy Scouts would have been successful on the outside, anyway,” La Vigne said.
Pendergraph said the program would be offered to inmates sentenced to the jail for as long as six months, rather than those there briefly, awaiting trial.
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