GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) - The smell of hamburgers sizzling on a flat top wafted through the air recently at the Isiah Fredericks Senior Center as a room full of people sat down to lunch.
The smell is a fairly new one to the center, as food was previously driven there from the Lyman Senior Center three days a week.
The North Gulfport facility now has a fully functional kitchen and serves up meals five days a week, thanks to a new work program by the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office for female inmates.
“We’ve got people here that are really qualified to go out and do stuff like this and we just want to put them to use the best that we can,” said Sheriff Melvin Brisolara.
The women also work preparing food at Feed My Sheep, which feeds the homeless, homebound and needy.
The jail has consistently had a work program for males, who cook food in the jail and the work center. But females cannot work in the same area as males. The new program, which started last month, allows females to prepare food for the public.
“This is talent that’s just sitting here wasted if we don’t use it,” Brisolara said.
The county has had a female program before, he said, but that it is harder to find and keep female supervisors.
Brisolara said he was able to find two “outstanding” women with food service experience to work as supervisors.
Janice Merrell, director of the county’s Senior Services Agency, said this is the first time the group meals provided through the agency have been able to be cooked in the North Gulfport neighborhood. Some of the seniors have even started purchasing breakfast foods out-of-pocket to be cooked in the mornings.
“It’s going so well,” she said. “It really is a blessing.”
When the food was prepared at the Lyman center, the temperature had often changed by the time it arrived.
“The food came from so far away it was cold, and now it’s warm,” said Ken Cummings, a senior who lives in the area.
Supervisor William Martin said he helped get the center’s kitchen equipment up to code and worked with the sheriff to bring the program to Gulfport. Merrell said around 22 new people have signed up to receive the free meals since the program began.
Brisolara said free labor provided to the county through inmate programs saves taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He can’t expand the programs, though, until a federal order is lifted. After the U.S. Justice Department sued the county in 1995, the Board of Supervisors agreed in a U.S. District Court decree to address overcrowding and security issues.
The jail has been working with the Justice Department ever since, and Brisolara said he and others have addressed every issue and made many improvements.
“Harrison County is ready to take it back,” he said. “Enough is enough.”
The county facility cannot house long-term state inmates, who have enough time to be trained for work programs, until the decree is lifted.
State law defines a county inmate as having a year sentence or less. A state inmate is sentenced to more than a year. The average stay for a Harrison County inmate is 30 days.
Mississippi law also allows inmates to work voluntarily for a nonprofit or public agency of the state, county or city.
As of Tuesday, 89 of the 749 county inmates were being housed in the work center. Brisolara said the jail could hold all the county inmates without reaching its maximum of 760, and house around 100 state inmates in the work center.
The county also ran into problems in the 1990s over a vocational program that offered catering services to area nonprofits. It made then-sheriff Joe Price very popular with civic groups that received free catering services and he benefited politically.
The program was shut down in 1998 after a federal investigation. Two former deputies were convicted of defrauding the government of thousands of dollars by turning in false grade reports to make it appear they provided instruction in classes that were never taught.
The new female program, though, is not a vocational program, said Brisolara. That would require long-term inmates.
He said there are 10-12 women working right now, but he hopes to add more.
“I think this program can grow,” he said. “We’re gonna take it step by step and see how big it can get.”
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Information from: The Sun Herald, https://www.sunherald.com
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