North Carolina Minimum Wage

Haywood prison gets death sentence: Community laments loss of inmate work crews

Western North Carolina is losing one of its strongest municipal work forces. And a quick look at their record of projects shows that, in towns and counties around the region, they will be sorely missed.

But this loss isn’t exactly the result of layoffs or furloughs. It’s what will happen when the Haywood Correctional Center closes at the end of this year, and its 125 inmates — who serve as a nearly free labor force for the region — are shipped off to larger prisons in the state system.

It’s been a good ride while it lasted for communities benefiting from the prison work crews.

They’ve painted public pools in Haywood and Jackson counties, pulled weeds from the dam at the Waynesville watershed, assembled playgrounds, painted schools, done landscaping on municipal buildings, cleaned up the grounds of state parks, assembled school equipment. One crew built an entire boat ramp by hand on Lake Fontana. They shoveled snow from sidewalks in downtown Waynesville one particularly rough winter.

“At one time we had three crews,” said Donnie Watkins, the prison’s superintendent.

SEE ALSO: A new life in the cards for Haywood's prison?

And that’s just in the community work program, which offered up inmates to local governments, schools and the like to add free manpower to a whole range of projects.

Inmates also staff litter pickup crews, and assist the N.C. Department of Transportation with projects on almost a daily basis. This week inmates labored along the roadsides in a Maggie Valley subdivision, repairing old landslide damage.

In the transportation department program alone, inmates logged 122,656 hours between 2006 and the end of July. Worked out to minimum wage, that’s $889,256 of work that’s been almost donated to communities from the state line all the way to Buncombe County. The cost of inmate labor is 70 cents per person each day. It’s a service, said Watkins, that will be noticeable when it’s gone.

The state-run prison is being shuttered, along with three other small-scale minimum security prisons, to save money. It’s cheaper for the state to run fewer big prisons rather than more smaller ones. But the cost to the local community will be immense.

The community work program has been in business for eight-and-a-half years, and tracking the exact projects inmates have helped with over that time is a little difficult. There are so many that to go through the whole record would probably be a box or two of papers to sift through.

Asheville-based National Climate Data Center turns 65

The only Asheville City School that made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) this year under the state’s ABC program is the School of Inquiry and Life Sciences (SILSA), a small honors school serving 195 students on the campus of Asheville High. The full list of schools is below.

Last year, three of the city’s schools achieved AYP (Hall Fletcher, Vance, and SILSA). However, this year North Carolina’s target goals increased to move the state closer to the federally required 100 percent target by 2013-14 of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).

As a result, for a North Carolina public school to make AYP in 2010-11, 71.6 percent of third- though eighth-grade students in each subgroup must be proficient in reading and 88.6 percent must be proficient in mathematics. For 10th graders, 69.3 percent of each subgroup must be proficient in reading and 84.2 percent must be proficient in mathematics.

In comparison, in 2009-10, the AYP targets for elementary and middle school (third through eighth grade) were 43.2 percent proficient in reading and 77.2 percent proficient in mathematics. For 10th graders (high schools), the targets were 38.5 percent proficient in reading and 68.4 percent proficient in mathematics.

Although eight out of Asheville’s nine schools failed to meet this year’s federal AYP standards, city officials touted improved graduation rates and other ABC measurements.

Asheville City Schools achieved an 80.7 percent graduation rate in 2011, the highest rate since the new state graduation model was implemented five years ago — a seven-point gain from the previous year. North Carolina’s graduation rate also increased by 3.5 points to 77.7 percent.

In addition, five city schools (Hall Fletcher, Isaac Dickson, Claxton, Vance and SILSA) were given “high growth” status by the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, which administers the accountability program. Two schools serving students in grades K-five were recognized by the state as “Schools of Distinction”: Isaac Dickson and Vance Elementary Schools. And Asheville High School earned “School of Progress” status for a second consecutive year. Students there met 16 of 17 AYP goals for 2010-11, a sizable increase from the prior year, when just 11 of 17 AYP goals were achieved.

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