Bragging rights

If you drive through Terrebonne Parish it’s a common sight, the van with the blue lights flashing, maybe some ice chests set on the side of the road nearby.

And then there are the workers, the men in red shirts, engaged in various tasks, often – as this week – in blazing heat. Some smile, one or two actually wave.

Hopefully when it’s on the roadside that work is done people slow down a little bit and don’t act the fool, since we live in a society that is too quick to meanness, and inmates, even when in engaged in a public works endeavor, are easy targets for the people who always were and always will be bullies.

This is a bad thing, especially because they often have deputies right there with them, and the ones who don’t slow down endanger those in the blue uniforms as well as those in the red.

Inmate labor is nothing new, not in Louisiana and not in a lot of other places. Even the U.S. Constitution’s ban on slavery includes a phrase that permits uncompensated labor for inmates.

In Terrebonne Parish, Sheriff Jerry Larpenter long ago developed the inmate labor program to a new level, using the men for a variety of tasks, very much out in public view. But just passing by on the road it is impossible to gauge the enormity of the tasks that are done.

Saturday, with a heat index of 106 degrees, they were out there working at Terrebonne High. On the field where games are played and schools are cheered, there they were, a half-dozen men, pressure-washing and cleaning the stands and making the field just so. High up in the bucket of a cherry picker, in between Houma Jr. High and Terrebonne High, a steady stream of high-pressure water issued from a wand wielded by a man in a blue shirt and sunglasses.

He wasn’t an inmate.

Col. Tommy Odom, who operates Larpenter’s Motor Pool and Water Patrol operations, has been supervising inmates on these jobs for some time now. What is interesting about Odom is that despite his high rank, you can see him routinely doing some of the hardest work at the churches, schools and other public structures where the inmate labor teams are found. Saturday, with the help of an inmate, it was the high-up pressure washing. A few months back at a cemetery in Dulac it was Odom who wielded the chain saw, cutting the stump of a broken tree, sweating along with his charges.

I’ve gotten to know the colonel over the years, and you have never met such a humble individual. He is proud of the work that gets done, no doubt, and he often calls to let me know where the inmates are working. The pictures don’t always make it into the paper. The fact is that Larpenter’s program and the work done by those supervising out in the field is so common as to not be news.

Col. Odom gave me a breakdown of recent work the inmates have done, and it is astounding.

No less than 20 schools, public and private – the private ones are permitted, the Sheriff says, due to specific exemptions in the law – have received or are about to receive services that include pressure-washings, floor waxing, painting and other fixing-up.

Within the next couple of weeks the inmates will be cleaning the tunnel in Houma that runs under the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway. Public pools and other buildings have been cleaned and repaired as well.

Larpenter and other sheriffs who utilize inmate labor say the benefits are two-fold.

Public works are performed – Larpenter estimates the value to Terrebonne at this point to be $100 million or something close to it – at low or no cost other than meals and salaries to supervisors already being paid.

For the inmates themselves there is the knowledge that a job has been well done, and the potential of learning some skills. Larpenter also has a personal aversion to inmates sitting around with nothing to do.

So the next time you pass by a crew of inmates in Houma or Dularge or Chauvin or wherever else they may be, maybe take a minute to observe what’s happening.

Some people say Larpenter crows about this program every chance he gets, and those are usually people who haven’t spent time looking at what is actually going on.

Sometimes, even public officials make things happen that give them every right to brag.