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| Privileged Prisoners? |
| By wspa.com |
| Published: 07/06/2012 |
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CHESTER, SC -- At 13.6%, Chester County had one of the highest unemployment rates in South Carolina in May. But in this county of 33,000 that sits east of Spartanburg and south of Rock Hill, there is one group of people always working. They work as landscapers and carpenters. They work as painters and electricians. They built the fancy birdhouses that sit outside the county administration building. And they built the fancy dais that county leaders sit behind at meetings inside that building. And they do it all for free. Or, at least, for freedom. They are inmates -- state prison inmates classified as minimum security who have earned the privilege to be housed at county jails. They leave those jails during the day to work under the supervision of county employees. Chester County has 31 working inmates, more per capita than any other county. “They save us money,” says Chester County Supervisor Carlisle Roddey. “They do hard work, jobs that we can’t afford to hire people to do. And we’re gonna keep using them.” One man aims to see that they don’t. THE WHISTLEBLOWER John Massey has been called a lot of things. Disgruntled. Crazy. Obsessed. He agrees with the last one. “I am obsessed. I don’t think Chester County should be allowed to use state inmates,” says Massey, 62. “They have shown they can’t supervise them. We weren’t supervising them. We were rewarding them for their crimes.” Massey worked for Chester County’s maintenance department from October 2007 through June 2008. He says he was assigned to supervise an inmate. That inmate’s name is not being used in this report because he cooperated with this story and gave us an interview on condition of anonymity. Massey says during his third week on the job, his boss gave him a special set of instructions for supervising this inmate. “This inmate had a girlfriend who worked at the county health department,” says Massey. “He had met her there while working on a renovation project. (The maintenance director) told me anytime we were caught up on our work, I should take him to go see his girlfriend.” He says this resulted in several trips to the health department every week. He says he would usually sit outside in his truck while the inmate went inside and talked to his girlfriend. He says he knew this violated SC Department of Corrections’ rules for inmate supervision, but he had little choice. “That’s the first time in my life I had been ashamed of what I had to do to keep a job,” says Massey. Read More. |
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