Published: April 17, 2008 10:13 am      

Cleaning up

Whitley inmates, fire department team up for cleanup effort

By Sean Bailey / Staff Writer

For inmate Jack Franke, picking up mangled trash and dumping stale beer out of neglected cans is far from fun, but it beats the walls of the Whitley County Detention Center.

“It’s pretty nice to get outside, it relieves a lot of stress,” Franke said. “It really learns us all a lesson about what we’ve done to get here, but the bigger lesson is not to litter.”

The large orange garbage bags dotting the ditches of Whitley County roads Wednesday marked the inmates progress as they cleared litter along county and state roads.

Whitley County Corrections Officer Ralph Childress, who heads one of the crews, said the inmate crews clean the roads three times a week, all year long.

On average, the inmates collect 150 to 200 large orange garbage bags of trash per trip, each bag weighing in excess of 45 pounds.

“We’ve had a lot of praise over this,” Childress said. People have stopped and thanked everybody for doing the cleanups.”

On Wednesday, Childress and the crew teamed up with the Patterson Creek Fire Department to pick up a stretch of Kentucky 904 near Williamsburg.

Childress said the Patterson Creek Fire Department’s help doesn’t only speed things up, but keeps everyone safe.

“I think it’s good to see two community pieces working together, like the fire department here and the detention center working hand in hand,” Childress said, “Patterson Creek [Fire Department] is taking care of the traffic force ... they stop traffic and move it down to one lane ... we get pretty good sized coal trucks coming through here and it gets a little hairy at times.”

Childress said the crew would most likely get about a five-mile stretch between Kentucky 92 and the Patterson Creek Fire Department cleaned Wednesday. Usually the crew can cover 12 to 15 miles per day, according to Childress, but Wednesday’s stretch was particularly dense with trash.

“The bad part is that the roads we clean up will sometimes be a mess a week later. Sometimes people driving by will throw bottles out of the window right in front of us,” Corrections Officer Joe Davenport said.

Chief Deputy Jailer Bob O’Neill said only inmates detained on non-violent crimes are allowed on the work crews. The inmates are what O’Neill describes as level one and level two offenders — inmates that have five or less years to serve on non-violent crime charges.

Besides getting fresh air, the inmates on work crews benefit in other ways from their work, according to O’Neill.

“For every 40 hours inmates work, they get one day knocked off their sentence, and in turn are giving back to their community,” O’Neill said.

Inmates are also paid 63 cents for every eight-hour day they work.

Normally inmates wear bright orange shirts from the detention center, but on Wednesday they were in street clothes. O’Neill said the end of the budget year had come and orange shirts were on re-order. He said the inmates aren’t considered flight risks, so the brief lapse in shirts wasn’t a large concern.

The bigger concern, at least for Childress, was the safety of the inmates and officers.

“We’d like to ask people if they see our signs on our vans and trucks, we’d like them to slow down because it’s your trash we’re picking up,” Childress said, “Please give us enough respect to slow down when you see us.”