Daniel Rubin: Behind bars, a Pa. think tank

Getting Ed Rendell's attention isn't easy in these days of multibillion-dollar budget wars, which is why the cost-cutting suggestions of an unlikely group of constituents is to be commended.

They're eight college students whose ideas for saving the commonwealth money have to do with preventing waste - and wasted lives.

They're all serving time at Graterford. Among them, they've got 134 years of experience behind the walls at the state's biggest maximum-security prison. Usually, no one asks their opinion.

Most are serving life sentences. They have no illusions about why they're there. They did what they were convicted of doing, but that doesn't mean they don't have some ideas about making their time more productive - and cheaper.

Their ideas range from reestablishing a farm on the 1,700-acre Montgomery County property to curbing the colossal amount of flavorless food tossed each day.

That last one was Joey Vidal Gonzalez's idea. The New York native has worked in the kitchen at the prison, where he's doing time for providing a gun used in a murder. "Trying to eat pinto beans is similar to chewing on rocks," he wrote. Meat is either overcooked or undercooked. Carrots and peas are steamed into mush.

Since inmates must take what they are served and cannot make trades, he wrote, Dumpsters of food are wasted each day.

"When talking food to a guy like Ed Rendell, he gets it," observed their teacher, Clark DeLeon, the former Inquirer columnist.

DeLeon shared his class' papers with me this week at Dirty Frank's, where he drained a Rolling Rock while dressed in the red, white and blue linens of a Revolutionary-era patriot. He had just finished a day of giving colonial walking tours.

This spring, his bosses at Montgomery County Community College asked if he wanted to teach a course in business English.

This gave DeLeon pause. "It's got to be communication. So, who do business people write to? Bosses and customers. They're trying to get attention from someone for a specific purpose."

Whose attention, he wondered, would his students most like to get? Gov. Rendell's.

Their initial letters to him read like a list of grievances. Out those went. So did a suggestion from Harry King that male inmates be encouraged to talk more with female prison workers. "Having a healthy conversation with a woman will have a man doing whatever he can to better himself in order to get out," he wrote. Nice try.

Each student worked for weeks, researching books and magazines in the prison library. They had no Web access. Useful ideas emerged.

Don Shea asked the governor to look into renting prison land to farmers and building wind turbines to generate power to be sold to utility companies.

Others touted mandatory exercise and making information available about chronic killers such as diabetes and hypertension. They suggested mentorship programs and having the whole prison read one book.

In March, DeLeon cut and pasted his class' ideas into a single plea that he mailed to Rendell's office. In May, the governor's staffers replied that Rendell was intrigued. May 5 was the group's last class.

That night, as DeLeon was driving to Graterford, his car broke down three miles from the gate. He called the prison, identified himself, and said there was a chance the governor would show that night to meet with the students.

"Where are you?" was the reply. They'd send someone for him.

"That's when I knew."

Rendell spent 90 minutes in the classroom, surrounded by aides and guards and no media, DeLeon said. The governor wanted to know how long an incarceration each man faced. He said he was impressed by how selfless their suggestions seemed.

"It made them feel like they were a part of life," DeLeon said. "Like they're not forgotten."