•August 22, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

I just came back to my home office after attending the first-ever graduation of Illinois prison inmates who earned—outside their razor-wire fence “home”—their skilled welding program certificates at a Black Hawk College career training center in Kewanee.
Less than a year ago, I wrote in this space about a new, unique prison in Illinois called the Kewanee Life Skills Re-entry Center. The idea here is to provide career and behavioral training to medium and high-risk offenders who are within one to four years of release.
Black Hawk College has a welding center a few blocks from the Life Skills Center. Why not have inmates take their training “outside,” at the center?
“No way, can’t be done,” the bureaucrats said, of course. State senator Chuck Weaver (R-Peoria) and nearby attorney and workforce development specialist Mike Massie said, “Phooey on you,” and the barriers to such were pushed aside.
The objective is, of course, to reduce the Illinois recidivism rate, one of the highest in the nation. Recidivism refers to those released from prison who are returned to incarceration within three years of release. In Illinois the rate has been about half, and for African-Americans it has been three in five!     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.