By Camille Steed, STATEWIDE Correspondent.

Gone are the days when all prison labor was known for was pressing out license plates. Today's prisons routinely house a number of factories behind their well-guarded walls.
[Don Lincoln, Superintendent of Cornhusker State Industries] In my opinion one of the best abilitative -- or rehabilitative programs we've got is teaching inmates to work.
Don Lincoln is the superintendent of Cornhusker State Industries. C.S.I. is the agency that oversees prison industries throughout Nebraska's penal system. Lincoln staunchly believes that one way to reduce the number of repeat offenders is to help an inmate learn a trade.
[Lincoln] The vast majority of inmates when they come into the system either never had a job or a positive work experience. If we can help develop just basic work ethic then that whole laundry list of things that go along with that, self-esteem and pride and earning your way, then we have a good chance of possibly inmates getting out and not coming back.
Created as correctional industries program, Cornhusker State Industries has existed in one form or another since the Depression. At one time inmates raised a number of livestock. Thousands of pounds of meat and eggs were produced annually. There was even 50 acres devoted to growing crops. However, changing times and rising security risks eventually caused the agricultural program to be shut down. Today, tucked behind these walls is a modern upholstery shop. Office furniture of every variety is fashioned here. C.S.I. by statute can only sell its products to state, city, and county nonprofit agencies.
They also design and build furniture for the pen and other correctional facilities within the system. The prefabricated furnishings you see here are from the prison's metal shop. The beds, bookshelves, and desks to be used in a correctional center in Omaha will come from here also. Located inside the prison's print shop is a nationally-recognized Braille operation. Here inmates transcribe textbooks into Braille and make books with enlarged text for the visually impaired. They even developed a computer program that transcribes Braille back into script. Within the Braille shop, there is a work station belonging to the Nebraska State Historical Society. C.S.I. has contracted with the Historical Society to assist them in their ongoing task of restoring newspapers from across the state, a function once assigned to work study students from the university. Howard Miller mans this work station. He has been in prison now for over 16 years. A former map maker and a science illustrator, he has been working with newspaper restorations for over a year.
[Howard Miller, inmate] What we do is we first get the papers in. Those have to be logged in. Then we take them bundle by bundle and the papers are open up and cut. We cut each page apart. Then they're ironed to flatten them out. Then we put them on the one rack until they're ready to be filmed. When we film them, we basically go page by page through the whole paper. I think the Braille shop is one of the best shops around here to work in. I think -- it's quiet in there most of the time. It's got a good bunch of people in there working in there.
Miller is one of the fortunate ones. He and several other inmates are in the process of being trained for certification in microfilming where they could actually go out and operate a shop on their own, and that's an important difference from the more traditional work found most often behind bars. The average inmate works at some kind of job, be it in the kitchen or laundry work and the like. However, the shops provide the skills most useful on the outside. C.S.I. employs over 300 inmates system-wide, 16% of the prisoners who can work, well above the national average. To become eligible, an inmate passes a pre-employment training program which tests basic reading and math skills. Hires are based on interviews conducted by shop supervisors. There are a number of benefits open to cons who work the shops. For one, they can make anywhere from 38 cents to over $1.00 an hour. Their pay goes towards supporting family members and 5% of their pay goes into a victims' compensation fund. Gate pay, money to help them make the transition to the outside upon their release from prison, is also set aside for them.
[Miller] To me working in the shop and everything is it makes the time pass a lot easier and it gives me something to do all day. It does make the whole time go a lot quicker and a lot faster.
There are also benefits for the prisons -- fewer problems from inmates with nothing to do.
[Mike Kenny, Assistant Superintendent of Prisons] Inmate idleness is a problem not only in this prison but in any prison I have ever read about or been to.
Mike Kenny is the assistant superintendent of prisons. He and other prison officials work hard at keeping inmates busy.
[Kenny] Because idle time means people are bored, again you look at the mental health aspect of bored people tend to try to invent things to not be bored. While that may be creative for them, it usually doesn't result in very much good. The kind of population we have here, I don't want people becoming real innovative and creative in making up their own diversions.
[Carl Martin, inmate] The reason I like it so much is because it allows me the opportunity to stay off the yard.
Carl Martin knows the pitfalls associated with doing time. He has been institutionalized much of his life.
[Martin] If I didn't have this job, I would be out there gambling getting into debt, putting somebody in debt.
[Kenny] Every time somebody gambles, there is a winner and a loser and the losers many times are not able to cover their bets and so the price that they exact from you for compensation in a prison is really not good. It creates a security problem for us. It can endanger the life or well-being, at least the safety, of the person and consistent with how it works in society. Sometimes you borrow to pay off a debt but that creates another debt, and it's a vicious circle.
What has this done for your self-esteem? Are you proud of the work you do?
[Martin] Yeah. Over three years, I done learned a lot about the job. I feel like -- I'm the lead man in my position right now so I had to work for that.
[Kenny] Even in prison if you have your meals and your medical and your housing needs taken care of, there's still, I believe, a very large emotional need. We still see people gravitating towards the shops because they do find meaning. They find an emotional significance and maybe even self- actualization in being able to go down and work for a period of time and work hard and look at the results of their work and say, I did something.
But for many like Carl Martin, reasons are far more personal. Holding down a job while serving time gives him a chance to be something he wasn't a great deal of on the outside, a provider for his daughter.
[Martin] I can give her some of the things that I didn't give her when I was out there because I was moving too fast and getting into something that I wasn't supposed to get into. Now I ain't got much to do with my money so I can send it to her.
[Lincoln] We don't have enough jobs. We have many more inmates that would like to work than we have jobs available to them.
The Braille unit, the furniture, the microfilming are all state agency projects, but these are not enough. Many more jobs are needed to train men in skills valuable on the outside. There is hope to increase the number of inmate industries run by the private sector.
[Sen. Dwite Pedersen, Elkhorn] From the first time I started going to prisons was put out with the fact that the people have nothing to do. There is no work. It's one of the things that the prisoners themselves complain about.
State Senator Dwite Pedersen has worked with incarcerated juveniles for over seven years. He currently has a task force that wants to find more companies willing to set up shop behind prison walls.
[Sen. Pedersen] I'm more interested in the private venture, because the private venture is a company coming in and running the business inside the prison and paying the inmate a prevailing wage of whatever they would pay that same person on the outside and then that inmate making that kind of money pays the State back for their board and room.
The number of inmates employed through private venture is less than 40. Either companies are unaware of this outlet or are cautious about the whole idea of a prison work force.
[Kenny] If people feel threatened by this and then they don't want inmates taking productive jobs and they don't want to get involved in building more factories in prisons, the only thing I can counter that with is what you make up in that little bit of gain by not building them, you might well likely lose in the cost of law enforcement, in the cost of re-incarceration, in the cost of insurance rates, in the cost of other more invisible taxation when those people are released into society and they don't have meaningful jobs and they return to a lifestyle that is not productive. That's invisible, but it's perhaps even more real to most of us than the cost of having a prison factory of some kind.
But it's not invisible to a guy like Howard Miller.
[Miller] Oh, it's -- gives you something to shoot for. Just makes -- helps me understand me and working with other people and other inmates.
For Statewide, I'm Camille Steed.