On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, Farm Road 115 was dotted with men wearing black and white stripes.

As a cool breeze blew across the quiet two-lane road, inmates from the Greene County Jail used weed eaters to clear brush from around a guardrail.

"It's alright," said inmate James Dokes, 125 days into an 180-day sentence for violating his probation. "It's better than sitting inside the jail."

Pickup trucks occasionally passed by, with drivers offering waves to the inmate workers and the deputy supervising the crew.

When the inmates finished their work, they loaded the weedeaters and leaf blowers back into a trailer, climbed into a van and went back to jail $9 richer.

The guardrail on Farm Road 115 is one of 176 in the county the inmate workers are responsible for maintaining. They also do the landscaping around the Greene County Justice Center, pick up trash along roadways and clean up after public events.

With the jail at the center of a financial situation that county officials describe as bleak, Greene County Sheriff Jim Arnott said the inmate work program is a bright spot — and he would like to expand it.

Arnott said he has enough qualified inmates, equipment and potential projects that he could have two work crews instead of one, but he doesn't have another deputy available to supervise.

The Greene County Jail is overflowing, and the sheriff's office transports several inmates a day to facilities in other counties. Arnott said on a given day he has eight to 16 deputies dedicated to inmate transportation, so he doesn't have anyone to dedicate to an outdoor inmate work crew.

So for now, Arnott will have to wait for more funding before he doubles one of his favorite programs.

How it works

The Greene County Inmate Labor Initiative started in 2002 under then-sheriff Jack Merritt, and Arnott said he expanded the program a few years ago when Greene County was scrounging for ways to save money.

Arnott said an inmate crew of up to 10 people now goes out five days a week to do work in the county.

The inmates make $1 an hour, with a paid lunch, and Arnott said most of that money comes back to the county when it is spent in the jail commissary.

"We pay a deputy to supervise them, so you are essentially paying one salary to get 10 workers," Arnott said. "It’s a good deal for the citizens. These people are out there working and cleaning up public roadways and doing things that we have to pay people to do."

Maj. Kevin Spaulding with the sheriff's office estimated that having the inmates maintain the Greene County Justice Center campus one day a week saves the county about $13,000 a year, and the savings go up if you add in the work inmates do along public roadways.

The sheriff's office uses inmates to prepare meals, paint, do laundry and clean the jail. But the most prized, and highest-paying, job for inmates is the outdoor work crew, according to Arnott.

Arnott said there is no forced labor at the Greene County Jail, so the inmate workers have to volunteer. And there are some special qualifications the inmates have to meet to be on the outdoor work crew — they have to be accused of low-level crimes and cannot be sex offenders.

Arnott said he's never had an inmate try to escape from the work crew.

"We try to pick the best inmate that we can," Arnott said. "They would have a lot more to lose if they try to walk away from it than if they stayed in it."

Not everyone a fan

Arnott said the downside of the inmate work crew is that it sometimes makes citizens uncomfortable to see the inmates out roaming neighborhoods in their jail uniforms.

"When people see them out in a neighborhood, there are some people who get really nervous," Arnott said. "They're probably thinking of the old days of the chain gang where there were murder suspects and robbery suspects, and that’s just not the case."

Arnott said about 90 percent of the comments he receives about the work crew are positive, and many citizens request the inmates come to their neighborhoods to pick up trash.

The inmates also seem to view it as a privilege to get out in the fresh air and sunshine, according to Arnott.

There have, however, been some complaints about the program and the trailer which features a sad-looking cartoon inmate with his facing poking through jail bars.

Arnott explained that federal law allows jailers to pay inmates less than minimum wage for their work. He said he believes the sheriff's office pays fair wages, considering the circumstances, but there have been some recent efforts in other parts of the country to increase pay for incarcerated workers.

"It's cheap labor," Arnott said. "Some people take offense to it, but I run the company store."

Arnott said he's never had an inmate injure himself doing yard work, but there have been a few close calls — particularly when he sent inmates out with chainsaws to clean up after an ice storm.

"That was one of the lessons I learned early on, that that’s probably not the best idea," Arnott said. "I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but we have not done a whole lot of that since then."

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