Inmates in California prisons receive just 8 cents an hour for cleaning floors, assembling furniture, and paperwork. If they are in the manufacturing sector, the wages go up to $ 1 an hour, or about $ 100 a month. This is why it took 800 inmates at Soledad State Prison three years to raise $ 32,000 ($ 24,000 of their own money and $ 8,000 in donations from outside).
Jason Bryant, now an ex-inmate, was a member of the prison book club in 2016, run by students at a private Catholic boys’ school in Salinas, California. Then he read the book by Ernest Gordon “The Miracle on the River Kwai”, which told about prisoners of war who shared everything they had with each other. Both Bryant and his cellmate, Ted Gray, decided to help the youngsters “get a head start that many of us didn’t have.”
Beginning in the fall of 2016, Bryant and Gray began recruiting other inmates to participate in a charity event aimed at helping the school’s needy students pay $ 1,200 a month for their tuition.
Bryant, convicted of armed robbery, served 20 years behind bars, during which he earned three college degrees. Last year he was released early.
Newspaper headline:
Philanthropists behind bars