Optical Lab
Where: Ohio Reformatory for Women at Marysville
Inmate employees: 24
2009 production: 8,000 pairs of glasses
Opened: 1987
MARYSVILLE — Kim Prater waited tables for 21 years and later owned her own business: The Art of Pain tattoo parlor in Fairborn.
But these days the 45-year-old Springfield native is making a career change: getting trained as an optical lab technician.
It isn’t the lousy economy that’s prompting the switch. Prater is 3½ years into a 12-year prison sentence for drug and weapon possession.
Wearing an apron, green earplugs and pink-rimmed safety glasses, Prater operates a machine that grinds plastic or polycarbonate lenses to the prescribed curvature. She uses a cotton diaper to wipe the lenses smooth and clean.
“It keeps me busy and, second of all, it’s a marketable skill for when I get out of here,” said Prater. “I’m getting kind of old and I don’t think waiting tables is in my future anymore.”
Prater will be 54 by the time she is released in 2018. By then, she’ll have had more than enough time to finish an 8,500-hour optician apprenticeship program under the U.S. Department of Labor.
“They’re very skilled and easy to place in jobs,” said Becky Kandel, product manager for the optical lab at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. An ex-con trained at the lab in Marysville now manages the second shift crew at a lab in Cincinnati, she said.
The 22 inmate-employees in the lab make about 525 pairs of glasses a month for inmates in the Ohio prison system. Last year, they cranked out 8,000 pairs of glasses. Still, the frames cost the state an average of $4.25 and lenses between $18 and $75, depending on the material and prescription. Buying those from an outside vendor would have cost the state an estimated $1.3 million to $2.64 million.
The lab offers several frame choices for most prisoners, but just one choice — black plastic ‘Buddy Holly’ frames with no metal parts — for high-security inmates.
Adjacent to the lab, inmates sew socks and flags in another Ohio Penal Industries shop. They also use scrap fabric to make eyeglasses cases, which the state used to buy from an outside vendor for 40 cents apiece.
The inmate workers in the optical lab seem to appreciate the chance to learn.
“I love my job. It’s educational and it’s something I never thought I’d be able to do because for me, it’s like a college course,” said Vickie Anderson, 55, of Massillon in Stark County. Anderson is serving life without parole for killing her husband and setting the house afire. “I’m learning things here. I don’t feel stagnant here.”
Alysia Barker, 40, used to work as a bricklayer, concrete finisher and pastry chef in Cincinnati. But inside the Reformatory for Women, she sits at the end of the line in the optical lab, making the last quality check on each pair of glasses.
She double checks the lenses against the prescription, makes sure there’s a match between the inmate number inscribed on the frame and the inmate, and examines the frames to see if they are warped in any way.
Barker, a mother of three and grandmother of one, is serving 12 years for robbery and complicity to involuntary manslaughter. She gets out in 2014 but has already started networking with optical labs in the Cincinnati area. “I keep them updated on me,” she said.
Barker said she is happy to learn the new skills and for the chance to be more marketable when she is released.
“We can’t go back out the same way we came in,” she said.
Contact this reporter at (614)224-1624 or lbischoff@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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