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UTAH STATE PRISON — Caroline Price always wanted to run a café, and seven years ago she got her chance. Now the lunchtime crowd, lured by low prices, a right-off-the-freeway location and the smell of hot, crunchy onion rings, often lines up out the door.
Price’s small greasy spoon is, however, different than others. She works for the Department of Corrections, and her employees at the Serving Time Café are doing just that — serving time as inmates at the Timpanogos Women's Correctional Facility. The restaurant is located just outside the Utah prison complex’s barbed wire fence.
Customers get breakfast and lunch and the inmates get job experience. They get lessons in “how to do the job, basic come-to-work-every-day, honesty, integrity,” Price says.
Debbie Jensen says she used to do meth. Now, as the café pastry chef, she bakes cookies, lemon bars and mint brownies.
“Well, I’ve been coming to prison for about 20 years,” she says. “I didn’t know how to bake. I never baked a cake.
“I gained confidence because with every little thing that I do that I’m nervous about, I realize it isn’t that big a deal and I can do it, you know.”
Today another inmate couldn’t make it to work, so for the first time, Jensen is a short-order cook, shouting out orders for cheese, fries and Tater Tots from her station in front of the grill.
“She (Price) kind of throws us in there to show that we can do it,” Jensen says.
One of the scariest parts of the job, Jensen says, isn’t learning these new skills. It’s dealing with customers.
“It’s nerve-racking. It’s really nervous,” Jensen says. “It’s kind of weird interacting with society again, you know.”
That’s right — the felons are afraid of the public.
“I’ve had one girl, she goes in the back room because someone actually talked to her when she first started,” Price recalls. “She’s kind of hyperventilating, going ‘I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what to say,’ because she hasn’t had that experience for such a long time.”
“We lose a lot of words in prison,” one kitchen worker says.
“There you go,” Jensen says, “we lose a lot of words in prison. We lose a lot of our vocabulary because … in prison it’s all slang, and in society you’re out here, it’s normal conversation.
“Or maybe we're afraid that we're being judged.”
Jensen knows, statistically, the odds are against her getting out of prison and staying out, but she says she will be successful because of support from her 18-year-old daughter.
”I just want to focus on a relationship with my daughter and my daughter thankfully gave me a second chance,” she says. “I want to prove to her that I can be a mom to her, you know.”
Perhaps, Price hopes, baking a few cookies and flipping some burgers will make all the difference.
