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| Death Row Inmates Work for State |
| By Nashville City Paper |
| Published: 09/26/2005 |
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Some death row inmates in Tennessee work within a prison to earn money and through their labor help operate the very state agency that oversees them. While 103 inmates 101 men and two women sit on the state's death row, 14 males are employed to mostly enter car title information into computers for the state's Department of Safety at Nashville's Riverbend Maximum Security prison. The revenue the death row inmates produce helps operate Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Correction, or TRICOR, which runs the state's Department of Corrections prisoner labor program. More than 18,000 inmates in the state's 15 prisons, about 1,000 are employed by TRICOR. The inmates are paid in return for their work. The death row laborers receive an average of about $1 per hour, the standard wage for all industrial workers within TRICOR. After prisoners are paid, their wages are deposited into a Department of Corrections trust fund that regulates how a prisoner can spend the earnings. The reason death row prisoners are allowed to work in the first place is to help relieve management costs for the Department of Corrections, Weiland said. TRICOR's mission is to help inmates gain skills for employment once they are released from prison. Since death row inmates likely will never be released, they are only allowed to work “as a service to support prison management at Riverbend,” Weiland said. Through that relationship, Weiland said TRICOR saves the Department of Corrections $3 million per year by supervising inmates while they work during their shift. During their shift, the corrections department does not have to pay workers to supervise them and therefore saves the department and the state an average of $3,000 per inmate, Weiland said. |
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