By Deborah Baker
Albuquerque Journal, N.M.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Gov. Susana Martinez and prison officials announced Monday that some gang-affiliated inmates will be working in a new program to refurbish wheelchairs for disabled people in other countries.
The governor said the program will provide inmates with skills they can use after their release, as well as “change hearts” and help keep them from re-offending.
The Department of Corrections will work with the Albuquerque ministry of the Joni and Friends International Disability Center on its “Wheels for the World” program, which partners with churches and missions to provide wheelchairs.
As part of the department’s initiative to reduce the use of solitary confinement, about 80 inmates who identify with prison gangs — but who have not been preying on other inmates — are being moved to the Southern New Mexico Correctional Center in Las Cruces, according to Corrections Secretary Gregg Marcantel.
The goal is to develop new programming for them.
Marcantel said 10 of them have been selected to work with the new program, repairing broken and worn-out wheelchairs — and, eventually, bicycles, which Marcantel said end up discarded or in police department evidence lockers and then in landfills.
The program should get underway in the spring, the secretary said.
Martinez told a news conference that in her 25 years as a prosecutor, “I have come to learn that almost all criminals have a common thread, and that is to be selfish.”
Getting them to be productive citizens and to think of others could give them pause about re-offending and returning to prison, and keep neighborhoods safer, she said.
It’s one thing to provide an inmate with skills as an electrician or a plumber, said the Republican governor, the former district attorney in Dona Ana County.
“But if his heart is not changed, he will simply come to either your home or mine, fix the problem, survey my jewelry, television and electronics, and maybe one day come back and just steal them,” she added.
Once 200 refurbished wheelchairs have been stockpiled, Joni and Friends will deliver them to a Third World country, where volunteers customize them for disabled recipients and deliver them along with Bibles.
The ministry’s Albuquerque director, Paul Faculjak, said the local program collects up to 300 wheelchairs annually, and until now has had to send them out of state to be refurbished.
“The world’s poorest of the poor are those affected by disability,” often literally trapped in their homes by their lack of mobility and the fact that the cost of a wheelchair exceeds a year’s salary in some countries, Faculjak said.
Joni and Friends partners with 14 other federal, state and private prisons around the nation in the wheelchair refurbishing program.
Copyright 2013 the Albuquerque Journal