A recent report by the Solano County Grand Jury opined that the Rourk Vocational Training Center, offered by the Solano County Sheriff’s Office, was “underutilized” given the amount of classroom space it offers.
Undersheriff Brad DeWall acknowledged that there have been challenges along the way but said the facility is on the path to growth.
“We’ve been faced with some challenges in implementing some of these classes and students, but we’re gonna get there and we’ll start creating more relationships and get it more operational (with) more students,” he said.
The Rourk Vocational Training Center opened last year adjacent to the Stanton Correctional Facility in Fairfield to provide vocational skills to inmates who volunteer for the program. The center was funded with $23.04 million from Senate Bill 1022’s Adult Local Criminal Justice Facilities Construction Financing Program, $2.66 million from county funds and a $1 million in-kind contribution.
With the goal of reducing recidivism, the center offers classes in operating forklifts, welding and employment soft skills. The center has 9,940 square feet of classroom space, including seven classrooms and training bays intended to house pre-apprenticeship programs like welding, carpentry, automotive maintenance and more.
The Grand Jury had toured the facility on Sept. 17. Based on the visit, the Grand Jury authored a four-page report that was released on Feb. 14 which wrote that the center was “new, well-designed and clean, with many resources available,” but added, “It is unfortunate that classrooms are empty and learning/training spaces are not utilized.”
The Grand Jury wrote that the center was designed to provide training for more than 100 inmates, but at the time of the tour, there were four being trained as forklift operators. In the previous month, the center had graduated its first group of seven students from the forklift program.
The report issued three recommendations: for the Sheriff’s Office to “fast track the development of plants to utilize the facility to its full potential,” use data employment trends for the future to plan and implement offerings and seek additional partners and entities to utilize the center.
DeWall said he understood the Grand Jury’s concerns.
“We understand they would like to see it more occupied,” he said. “So do we. We’re all working toward the same thing. It just kind of emphasizes the fact that we need to work hard to get more students in the center and create more relationships to get that done.”
Capt. Bill Hornbrook, division commander of the Custody Division, said Rourk was one of several programs available for inmates, including Health Right 360 for substance use disorder treatment, a chaplaincy services program, a library for self-education, the Five Keys Charter School program which has given out 70 high school diplomas since 2016, the PEAK Parenting Program, Women’s Re-entry Achievement Program and Veteran’s Justice Outreach Program.
Excluding Rourk, DeWall said there were 1,940 inmates who went through some type of program offered by the jail system in 2019. Last year, 13, 270 inmates were booked and had an average length of stay of 20.2 days. The average daily population for 2019 was 733 inmates, but Hornbrook said not everybody stayed.
“The bulk of those people either bail out in the first couple hours, or they get cited out for their misdemeanor,” he said. “If you have 13, 270 people that get booked, if you divide that by the days that the inmates stayed, the average length of stay is only 20 days.”
Hornbrook said the sentenced population, whose average length of stay was 55 days, was focused on programming. However, he said they represented only 20 percent of the daily population.
“The concentration of programs ends up being a small percentage of actual inmates that are coming through the jail that see all this stuff,” he said.
Rourk held its first class in March 2019 with 11 women enrolled in the Health Right 360 class. From there, DeWall said began offering the forklift class for men and women, the welding class and an employment soft skills class to provide further skills for students who went through one of the vocational classes.
“The men who went through the welding class and graduated went through a second class (for) employment soft skills, so they know what to expect and how to prepare themselves for the workplace,” DeWall said.
DeWall said there were 40 students who went through Rourk last year. One of the challenges he noted was bringing in faculty to teach these courses. The department has an open contract with Solano Community College where the department has to agree on a training it can host within a certain timeframe.
“The average stay is 55 days, so we’ve gotta find courses that will fit within the parameters of that or at least be able to offer a transition plan where they could finish it,” he said.
Hornbrook said one student had started taking welding, but his time in custody ended before he could finish the class. The student was able to take the class at Solano taught by the same instructor and finish the course.
“That’s exactly what we want,” Hornbrook said.
DeWall said the center is about to host its second welding class, an advanced welding class and offer automotive technology in the fall. Other planned courses include scissor lift operation, a safety harness course, truck driving and a potential cosmetology class. The center also has a contract through the Workforce Development Board of Solano County to offer labor apprenticeship programs.
“There’s a lot of challenges with not only developing and establishing the course work and the instructors but with our current population,” DeWall said. “From the inception of the whole Vocational Training Center, the laws have changed that have created some of these challenges that we’re working through, with AB 109, Prop. 47 — they’ve created some of the challenges that we face to get try to get our inmate population here and in training.”
Hornbrook also said inmates from other programs will eventually be moved over to Rourk, but it will depend on the security and mental health levels of the inmates.
Nonetheless, the department remains optimistic about the growth of the center.
“Now that things have gotten going in 2019, this is the year we build on all that we started,” Hornbrook said. “We tested a lot of things out in 2019: how we get inmates in there, the equipment that’s there…a lot of that was happening in 2019, and I think 2020 is the time where we build and make it bigger and get some of these other programs over there and into the classrooms.”
DeWall agreed, noting that there were challenges with construction and providing equipment in the planning phases.
“In 2020, the focus is we know some of the challenges,” he said. “We just gotta get these classes (and) relationships on line with contracts and courses and get them on the calendar, and then we have to get the relationships to get the students in play.”
“I think we’re moving in the right direction,” he added.
February 27, 2020
Vacaville Reporter
By Nick Sestanovich
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