Delaware Governor Jack Markell announced plans Tuesday to create a new culinary training facility within the state’s largest prison.
The Department of Correction is converting an unused dining hall at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center -the state's largest adult, male correctional facility- into a restaurant style kitchen with an attached classroom.
The training facility will be used to prepare inmates for culinary careers by teaching them how to cook.
Markell said skill-based training programs like this one will cut the state’s high recidivism rates, which the Delaware Criminal Justice Council puts around 66 percent.
Markell said he sought a culinary training facility because the restaurant industry is the number one employer of people who have formerly been incarcerated.
The Delaware Restaurant Association has partnered with the state to help inmates find jobs once they leave the training program. Some prisoners in the current culinary training program at JTVCC have already secured jobs in the food industry.
The Department of Correction expects between 300 and 350 inmates a year will benefit from the culinary training facility, which is similar to one already in use at Baylor Women’s Correctional Institution.
The new facility will be named the Matt Haley Culinary Training Center in honor of the late Sussex County restaurateur and philanthropist who died in 2014 at the age of 53. Haley - a recovering addict - used a culinary career to rebuild his life after being released from prison and a rehabilitation facility in 1994 - and often gave others a similar opportunity.
He died in 2014 at the age of 53 when he crashed his motorcycle while riding in India.
Haley’s former girlfriend, Michelle Difebo-Freeman said he learned how to cook while he was incarcerated in his 30’s for drug-related issues.
“You’d open his garage and it’d be full of cooking equipment coming to the prisons. He always felt the need to go back and really give back to the programs in the prisons that had really changed his life,” Difebo-Freeman said.
The training facility is expected to cost the state $1.2 million and be completed by the end of the year.
