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Arizona Inmates the Most Generous in the State

By Jeralyn, Section Inmates and Prisons
Posted on Fri Nov 14, 2003 at 04:52:41 AM EST
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Arizona Republic columnist E.J. Montini reports on the generosity of inmates in that state.

... At about the same time that the good-hearted football fans at Sun Devil stadium were drunkenly depositing Iraqi dinar and Monopoly money into collection buckets, a group of inmates at the women's prison in Perryville decided to take up an actual collection for cancer research.

Just about 800 inmates participated, collecting what officials estimate to be about $13,000. These are convicted criminals who make about 50 cents an hour doing prison labor. Their average donation was $16 per person, or five times the average of those attending the football game.

And that's just a portion of inmate generosity. According to Virginia Strankman, who coordinates charitable giving for the Department of Corrections, the state's prison population has donated more than $38,000 so far this year. And that doesn't include the as yet undetermined totals from two prison complexes.

"They are giving to a variety of organizations," Strankman said. "Everything from Make-A-Wish to Special Olympics." A complex in Tucson raised more than $11,000 for local underprivileged children. Other prisons have their own causes. Last year, employees at DOC raised more than $500,000 for charity. But this is the first time that prison inmates have participated.

The generosity is part of the insitution of a "parallel universe" program in Arizona's prisons:

DOC spokesman Michael Arra said that the charitable giving program at the prisons is part of new DOC Director Dora Schriro's concept of a "parallel universe" for inmates. "The program requires inmates to go to work, go to school," Arra said. "But another part of it is doing things that are parallel to what is done on the outside for community betterment. This is an example of that."

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