Prison volunteers make the grade by crafting school supplies for kids

By Aline Mendelsohn
The Orlando Sentinel

	THE ORLANDO SENTINEL Pamela Lamb reviews the hand puppet she has sewn at Lowell Correctional Institute in Florida.
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LOWELL, Fla. — The room is cheerful, colorful and full of light.

Welcome to school, reads the decorative border framing the door. A list of goals covers a white board nearby.

And taped to the cinderblock wall are dolphin, butterfly and frog cutouts, each bearing a name: Jessica, Christina, Cheryl, Tracy, Julie, Pamela, Susan, Deborah, Natasha, Pamela again.

The owners of these names, wearing identical blue uniforms with white stripes down the legs, work quietly at individual stations.

When these women enter this room, they temporarily forget about the barbed wire and locked gates that define their daily lives.

In this room, they are worker bees, buzzing with purpose.

It's an unlikely alliance formed between a prison and a store for schoolteachers.

Program scorecard The Crafts With Conviction project at Lowell Correctional Institution is based on a program of the same name in Ohio. Since the Ohio program's inception in 1998, 6,500 male inmates at 17 prisons and six juvenile facilities have clocked in 1.1 million 1,100,000 hours of service. As of October, the participants have made: • $5,562,798 worth of supplies. • 185,102 flashcards. • 445,419 journals. • 100,000 pocketed chair covers.

A Gift For Teaching, the Orlando nonprofit that provides teachers with free school supplies, teamed up with Lowell Correctional Institution for a program called Crafts With Conviction.

Based on a similar initiative in Ohio, inmates at the Marion County, Fla., prison volunteer to make school supplies such as flashcards, puppets, hall passes and tote bags. The products then go to the Gift For Teaching store and eventually end up in Florida county classrooms, directly benefiting students — and the women who make the supplies.

"It's touching both the children and the women," says Kylene Petrin, communications manager for A Gift For Teaching. "You can just see them light up."

With initial funding from The Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, A Gift For Teaching purchased the equipment and supplies. The program only includes women inmates, but with more funding in the future, officials hope to expand the project to involve men as well.

The 10 volunteers enjoy five-hour shifts, five days a week for a job far more interesting than kitchen, laundry or grounds duty. And they find that their work makes their time go by faster.

Some women have even requested to work weekends, and a handful have told the assistant warden that they would rather continue volunteering for A Gift For Teaching in prison than enter a work-release program.

For the most part, the women work in silence, and they generally don't ask one another why they're in prison, because in this room, it doesn't matter.

"You can't judge people by why they're here," says one of the women, Christina Haven. "We're all people, and there are a lot of good people in here."

Nearly all of the women in the room are mothers, but there is only one Mom.

"That's what they call me around here," says Deborah Lantz, 52, a woman with thick-framed glasses, wavy brown hair and a sweet smile. "That's what happens when you're over 50."

At first, Lantz resisted the maternal moniker, but she came to like it when she realized that the "younger girls" could benefit from her experience.

Like the others, Lantz is counting the time she has left at Lowell, now only months. She looks forward to watching movies in her Tampa Bay, Fla., home.

Just more than a year ago, Lantz worked at a hospital as a medical health coordinator. Last December, she was arrested for leaving the scene of an accident. She contends she is innocent, yet she hasn't lost her smile.

"I came to prison," Lantz says, "and it's not going to change who I was. I'm going to stay nice."

Natasha Martin has long black cornrowed hair, neatly divided into three high ponytails.

It took two days to do her hair, but that didn't matter. Martin has plenty of time to spare.

Only 21, Martin is serving a four-year sentence for a 1998 burglary.

She is working toward her General Equivalency Diploma and looks forward to her release date in June, when she can finally spend time with her 3-year-old daughter, Desiree, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The holidays can be tough for Martin and the others. But she brightens when she remembers that she will celebrate her first birthday in years at home.

And the Gift For Teaching program has also brightened her outlook.

"It's like a second chance," Martin says. "I'm giving something back that I took."

Taped on the wall next to Pamela Lamb's workstation is a picture of her dog, Wrigley.

"Wait until the cat finds out I have the dog on the wall," Lamb, 47, says with a laugh.

The sewing machine hums as Lamb stitches together a puppet.

"This is our program," Lamb says, "and we're proud of it. It's for a cause, not just work for the sake of work or discipline. It definitely gets you out of the realm of thinking about yourself."

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company