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Photo by Lori Greig
An idea to start a cosmetology school at a New Mexico women’s prison has sparked an unlikely debate between the state’s corrections secretary and one of his former deputies.
At issue is how best to prepare inmates for a return to life beyond prison. Studies show that offenders who get and keep work are less likely to return to prison.
Job training for prisoners these days is a timely topic in corrections circles as New Mexico and other cash-strapped states try to figure out how to save money. Fewer prisoners returning to prison in theory would yield costs savings.
The debate over the potential cosmetology school at the New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility in Grants is whether that’s the type of job training that could help inmates successfully transition from life behind bars to life in the community.
CCA is required to start vocational and educational programs
Corrections Corporation of America, a Tennessee-based for-profit company that operates the Grants facility for the state, has proposed and would pay for the cosmetology school. On-the-job training is the goal and graduates of the vocational program could also expect to earn state licenses, opening up job opportunities for them once they serve out their sentences, Joe Williams, the state’s corrections secretary, told the Independent.
It doesn’t hurt that the price is right. Like most of state government, the New Mexico corrections department has few dollars to start new programs after more than $10 million was cut this year to help balance the state budget.
“It doesn’t cost the state of New Mexico one dime. They are responsible to start vocational, educational programs,” Williams said of CCA. “These are real jobs. I don’t have Intel knocking down my doors to hire my inmates.”
They might be real jobs, but Gail Oliver, a former cabinet corrections secretary in charge of prison reform and re-entry, thinks the idea is misguided and has criticized it on her blog.
A field with few job openings each year
There are too few hair stylist or cosmetologist job openings each year to offer offenders just out of prison a good shot at gainful employment, she said. The school is an effort in futility, she said.
Indeed, state job data show the the number of openings for hairdressers, hair stylists and cosmetologists each year at around 60, with just under half – 30 – due to growth.
Over the long term, the industry would only add 280 jobs from 2008 through 2018, according to estimates from the New Mexico Workforce Solutions Department.
“They can’t compete and the people on the outside will get the jobs,” Oliver said.
It’d be better to encourage the women to pursue other high-growth fields or education, she said, adding the corrections system has contracts with New Mexico State University in Grants and Eastern New Mexico University.
Besides, Oliver said, a corrections department policy requires job training in industries with an expected rate of growth.
“If you do cosmetology, you can’t get a job. I wish you could,” Oliver told the Independent. “Look at labor statistics on the jobs of the future and set up vocational training programs.”
Williams rewrote the rule Oliver referred to because “I don’t agree with that policy, that we prohibit a program based on growth,” he said. “What job markets are growing?”
“How am I supposed to get a job when I’ve been in prison 15 years and there are people with Masters degrees who can’t get jobs?” Williams said, alluding to New Mexico’s unemployment rate of 8.8 percent, a 22-year high.
High vacancy rate hobbles prison education system
The debate between Williams and Oliver comes at a time when New Mexico’s efforts to bolster the corrections system’s education and job training programs to reduce the rate of offenders who return to prison has hit a rough patch.
New Mexico’s 47 percent recidivism rate is lower than the national average of 52 percent, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission. It was high enough for the Richardson administration to sound alarms two years ago, however.
But these days a 22-percent vacancy rate – 21 openings out of 111 positions – hobbles the system’s Education Bureau, which staffs instructors for educational programs, according to a spokeswoman. Education often is cited as one of the best ways to lower the number of offenders returning to prison.
Meanwhile a panel formed in 2008 at the urging of a governor-appointed prison reform task force hasn’t met in months.
Appointed by Gov. Bill Richardson and composed of corrections officials and community leaders from around the state, the Re-Entry Council was charged with devising tactics and strategies to reduce recidivism through education and job training.
The Council won’t meet again until the state hears whether it has won $750,000 in federal funding that would help pay for innovative ideas to reduce recidivism, said Bernard Lieving, who is the Corrections system’s reentry and prison reform czar. The agency did receive a $500,000 federal earmark for similar programs.
Lieving’s title comes with few perks.
“There is no prison re-entry and reform office. I don’t have an office,” Lieving said.
Williams said his agency requested 58 positions for the Re-Entry and Reform office, a request that came right before the economy tanked.
“It wasn’t going to happen in these times,” Williams said. “I am not blaming them (the Legislature). Rentry and Reform took a hit along with the rest of the country.”
‘The women like the idea’
On any given day New Mexico has more than 6,000 men and women in custody across 10 facilities, six of which the state operates and four that private companies like CCA operate.
Roughly one-tenth of New Mexico’s inmate population lives in the Grants Women’s facility, which has an average daily population of just below 600 female offenders.
The idea for a cosmetology school came from a program at a Florida prison that CCA operates, company spokesman Steve Owen said.
“They could do every thing except get a license,” Owen said of the women prisoners in Florida.
CCA already has approached the New Mexico Cosmetology Board to “bounce the idea off them and they were enthusiastic to the idea,” Owen said.
That would mean that “in New Mexico the inmates can obtain licenses,” Owen said. “That is a huge plus because they would already have a license in hand and have on the job training.”
At least one prisoner advocate and frequent critic of the New Mexico corrections system has embraced the idea.
Angie Vachio of the Women’s Justice Project told the Independent that she supported the cosmetology school. “This is one of a few jobs that doesn’t have a barrier in place,” Vachio said. “There are so many jobs that have barriers to convicted felons.”
State law empowers boards or agencies responsible for licensing professions or trades to refuse to grant or renew licenses to individuals convicted of certain types of felonies.
Besides, the women like the idea, she said.
“I just think women’s motivation is so important. This is something they really want to do,” Vachio said.
The school hasn’t opened yet, but Williams said plans are moving forward.
“We are trying to locate where to place it in the facility,” the corrections secretary said. CCA staff are trying to figure out if there are enough drains.
“How great would it be to get them started and then hook them up to a school and learn a trade,” Williams said.
