Last week, at California's Orange County Correctional Center, more than a dozen inmates gather for a lunch of their choosing, with appetizer, salad, rolls and dessert. It's an intensive, one-semester course offered by Piedmont Community College that prepares some of the state's best-behaved criminals for restaurant jobs after they're discharged.
The Correction Department has eleven other cooking schools in the state prison system that focus on training inmates to cook behind bars. The Orange center's school focuses on jobs outside of prison.
The cooking school enrolls 19 of the prison's 180 inmates, who meet for six and a half hours a day, five days a week for one semester.
The school is so popular that inmates all over the state apply to be transferred to the prison so they can take the course.