Prisoners make gourmet pizzas for fellow inmates

(30 May 2017) LEADIN
Prisoners at a Chicago jail are serving gourmet Italian pizzas for their fellow inmates.
It's part of a training programme to provide them with skills to get jobs after they are released.
STORYLINE
From the barbed wire and security gates on the outside of Cook Country Jail in Chicago - you might not expect to find gourmet food on the inside.
But step inside and you'll find inmates from the medium security division hard at work creating fancy Italian pizzas.
Using a 16,000 US Dollar oven and with guidance from top chefs, the prisoners then sell the food to their fellow inmates for no more than 7 US Dollars.
For Jonathan Scott, who's awaiting trial on an armed robbery charge, it's about creating a sense of what life was like before he and the others ended up in jail:
"It's about bringing back memories and feeling... bringing back memories of when you was free and you was having a good time," he says.
As well as bringing back memories the project has been designed to give the inmates skills that will help them find jobs when they are released.
"The chef makes us feel like we've got have a plan when we get up out of here to stay out of trouble and not come back to this environment," explains inmate Shaquille Slater.
It's not the first time pizzas have been prepared and served behind bars. A small number of US jails allow inmates to order food from nearby restaurants.
And in Massachusetts one jail enables inmates make pizzas that the guards can take home.
But Cook County Jail is the first to bring in an Italian chef to help the inmates perfect their skills and create gourmet pizzas.
Thanks to Chef Bruno Abate the prisoners bake around 200 pizzas a week and deliver them piping hot to fellow inmates.
Abate runs a programme called "Recipe for Change" and the prison pizza delivery service is an off shoot of this.
He believes that giving prisoners a break from the bland food they're used to can have a positive effect on their behaviour.
"The quality of pizza here is the same quality (as) the best pizzeria in America. Italian pizzeria," explains Abate, adding "through food, I try to teach, you know, how to change in life."
The money raised from the pizza delivery scheme goes back into the programme. Inmates can already use their own money to buy things like chips, so this was extended to include the pizzas.
Organisers now hope they can get a food truck to sell the pizzas outside the jail and a nearby courthouse.

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