Whats It Really Like To Work In A Prison Goat Milk Farm We Asked Inmates The Salt NPR. The goats are kind of cool, says former inmate Chad Redding. The females are like dogs they just want your attention. Note The link to the application is located at the bottom of this page. If you are considering applying, it is strongly recommended that you first read all of the. Breaking news articles on inmate topics, many fulltext articles, discussing topics such as inmate searches, sex offender searches, prison conditions, prison suicides. Two students at Kings Fork Middle School have been suspended after officials say they punctured their classmates with push pins. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. The goats are kind of cool, says former inmate Chad Redding. The females are like dogs they just want your attention. Dan CharlesNPR. Jim Schott had one goal when he abandoned academic life to start the company called Haystack Mountain He wanted to make some of the finest goat cheese in the country. With cheese in hand, he visited supermarkets, trying to persuade them to sell his product. Some didnt take him seriously. But Whole Foods did. From the very beginning, they wanted to taste it, Schott recalls. Finding a job is frequently the No. Once an inmate has served his or her sentence, the time to reenter society comes. This transition is very difficult regardless of the amount of time served. And they wanted to know the story. They wanted to know where the cheese came from who was making it where it was made. Jim Schott had a great story to tell. Hed walked away from a university job, mid career, to raise goats on five acres of land. I didnt want a compartmentalized life, he says. I wanted a life where the work that I did, the people I saw, the family I had, that it was all of one piece, and that it was connected to the earth, and to. He pauses. To real things. Net Tools Lag Switch Xbox. Whole Foods loved his cheese. His company grew. It also changed. Ten years ago, Haystack Mountain started buying milk from a farm in a prison. Schott doesnt recall telling Whole Foods or his other customers about that change in the Haystack Mountain story. In any case, Schott felt that it was a good thing a model of good prison management. Some of the cheeses that Haystack Mountain makes at its facilities in Longmont, Colo. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. Then, in 2. Michael Allen sent a letter to John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods. Allen demanded that Whole Foods stop selling Haystack Mountains cheese because it was made, in part, using the labor of prisoners earning pennies per hour. The way Allen sees it, Haystack was taking advantage of helpless, powerless individuals. Work After Prison Programs' title='Work After Prison Programs' />Jan Petter Vala, who is serving a prison sentence for murder, has hands the size of dinner plates and shoulders like those of an ox. In an alcoholic rage. Prison Fellowship Speaks Out After Amanda Knox Claims Brainwashing Cult Tactics Used on Inmates. Theyre fair game for corporations to make money off of. And I just told Mackey that we wanted him to get out of that business. Many things besides cheese are made in prisons. Across the country, tens of thousands of inmates work for businesses that have set up operations inside prison walls. They make flags and furniture. Most of the time, they attract little attention. People may feel differently about something they eat, though, especially a boutique food like goat cheese. To Allens amazement and delight, Whole Food caved to his demands. In a statement, the company said that some of its customers werent comfortable with products made by prisoners, so it would no longer sell them. The inmates are still milking those goats, though. I was curious about this farm, and set up a visit. The goat dairy sits inside a vast complex of incarceration, with several different prisons, near Caon City, Colo. But the farm itself is a five minute drive from the buildings where inmates live. In fact, when youre there, you can almost forget youre in a prison. The goats, in their pens, look out over irrigated corn fields, the Arkansas River in the distance, and barren hillsides on the other side. To be perfectly honest, its beautiful. The goat dairy at Skyline Correctional Center is set on a hill overlooking the Arkansas River. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. Joey Grisenti runs this farm. He works for Colorado Correctional Industries a state agency that operates businesses inside Colorados prisons. Those businesses are supposed to make money to help fund the prison system and also provide work opportunities for prisoners. Right now, were milking about 1,1. Grisenti says. Our total herd is about 2,5. Theyre pretty pampered. A lot of them have names, and if you call them, theyll come running to you. Most of the inmates here are near the end of their sentences. Theyre in a minimum security facility called Skyline Correctional Center. But its still a prison. Carl Rodwell, an inmate at Skyline Correctional Center, holds a baby goat as Logan Otis looks on. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. Workers on this farm get strip searched. If theyre caught with drugs or tobacco, or get in fights, they could lose this job and be sent to a higher security facility with a lot less freedom. And then theres the pay. It varies, depending on the job, but most inmates on the farm earn a few dollars a day. Thats better than most prison jobs, which typically pay less than a dollar a day, but still, its cut rate labor. And thats a big reason why the farm is here. In the years after Haystack Mountain started making cheese, one of the companys biggest problems was finding a reliable source of goat milk. Jim Schotts small farm couldnt produce enough on its own, and every outside supplier eventually went out of business. In 2. 00. 7, the company reached a crisis. Another supplier had decided to shut down his goat dairy, and Haystack had no other options. A couple of weeks, and we werent going to be able to supply our customers with cheese, says Chuck Hellmer, who by that time had replaced Schott as Haystacks CEO. At the moment, Hellmer got a call from one of the top managers at Colorado Correctional Industries. Hed heard about Haystacks problem, and proposed a solution. CCI was ready to set up a goat dairy inside the Caon City prison. Nobody wants to have a big goat dairy, so we did it, Joey Grisenti says. This farm, with its guaranteed supply of low cost workers, can survive when other farms cannot. A lot of people just cant afford to have the manpower that we have here, he says. Of course, that cheap manpower is exactly what made the shoppers at Whole Foods uncomfortable. Jeremiah Pate has been in prison for the past eight years. Hes hoping to get out on parole this year. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. Jeremiah Pate has been in prison for the past eight years. Hes hoping to get out on parole this year. Dan CharlesNPR. But what do the workers themselves think I find Jeremiah Pate in the milking barn, attaching milking machines to the goats udders. This job, how do you feel about it I ask him. A bad thing Good thingIts a great thing, Pate tells me. It beats the alternative. Rather than sitting in your tiny little cell, you get to come out here. Every man I meet echoes that thought. They arent thinking about what was fair on the outside. They were just thinking about their options in prison, and in that perspective, the farm looked pretty good. Several of them told me that its nice just being around the animals. Jason Rowell, who is most of the way through a 2. Like the other day I hit my head in pen 1. I had a goat come over, and she stuck her head underneath my chin and picked my head up. She was like, Are you all right he says. I wasnt sure if I was getting the whole story from these inmates. In their position, criticism of the prison would do them no good. So I tracked down two men on the outside whod previously been in this prison, and worked on this farm. And they told me pretty much the same thing. Former Skyline inmate Duwane Engler and his daughter Arianna now raise goats at their home in Pueblo, Colo. Dan CharlesNPR. Dan CharlesNPR. I think its a good thing, all in all, says Duwane Engler. Engler spent four months at Skyline, five years ago. Today, he lives in Pueblo, Colo., with his wife and two young daughters. Interestingly, they have a small herd of about a dozen goats living in the back yard.