by Mike Rosso
There was a big news story this past month that hit close to home. The national grocery chain Whole Foods, after protests from a small but loud group of customers, decided to stop carrying products grown and processed by Colorado inmates through a work program run by Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI).
Here at Colorado Central, we’ve been working with CCI for at least five years as our contractor for printing the covers of the magazine. It was through a story we ran on CCI in our August 2010 issue that we first made contact with them. At the time, we were getting erratic service from a commercial printer in Denver and discovered CCI had a print shop as well, operated by female inmates through the rehabilitation program in Denver.
[InContentAdTwo]
We received a bid on services from them and found it to be competitive, so we decided to try them out. Five years later we are still using their services, and for a number of reasons – not the least of which being the consistent quality of the work. In this business, deadlines are king and CCI is always accommodating, even under the worst circumstances. One time, the covers did not make the FedEx shipment on time and the local printer could not hold their presses for us, so the CCI print shop supervisor, Ron Diller, drove them down to Fairplay, on his own time and off the clock, where we met and did the exchange. Covers in tow, I made it back to Salida to meet the local printer’s deadline.
Often, CCI will drive them to the bus station if we get in a time crunch and put them on the bus to Salida, where they arrive the same day. In fact, the cover to this issue came down U.S. Hwy. 285 on the bus.
I wish that we could get this kind of service with all of the businesses we work with. It is consistent and reliable, and there is the knowledge that these offenders are getting an opportunity to learn a trade that just might help them upon release to reincorporate into society. With the highest prison incarceration rate in the world, the U.S. must do more to decrease its rates of recidivism. Programs such as these are invaluable to both the inmates and the taxpaying public that foots the bills.
Hopefully next year, we’ll go up to the CCI print shop and interview some of the folks who get to see the covers long before any of our readers, and tell their stories. Meanwhile, shame on Whole Foods for abandoning the program because of a handful of so-called do-gooders.
