Women Inmates Gain Skills While Upgrading Town

LIMA, Ohio —  Inmate Dora Teeters used to spend her days at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville dreaming about life outside prison walls.

She is still serving time for manslaughter, but now she spends her days in this city 50 miles from prison renovating dilapidated houses with other inmates. The work is done under the supervision of trained carpenters, not corrections officers.

“It’s a nice feeling to be trusted like this,” she said recently, sitting on the front stoop of a house she is helping rebuild. “It’s a good feeling to work with your hands. One day there’s nothing there. Soon, the job is finished, and you’re proud of what you’ve done.”

Teeters, 29, who was convicted in 1984, is one of about 120 inmates from the women’s reformatory and Lima Correctional Institution who have worked for Lima’s Rehab Project.

Project’s Mastermind

David Berger is the mastermind behind the project, a nonprofit organization founded in 1977 that buys and renovates 15 to 20 abandoned houses each year. The homes sell for $25,000 to $35,000, usually to low- and middle-income families.

Berger started using work-release inmates in 1983 with minimum-security male prisoners from the Lima prison. That was interrupted when the state changed the rules for honor inmates, said Berger, the organization’s executive director.

He called officials at the women’s reformatory, and they agreed to participate, marking the first time female inmates were used in such a project in Ohio.

“The whole purpose was to teach fundamentally untrained people how to build housing,” he said.

Under the guidance of the five full-time Rehab Project employees, the women do all the carpentry, from gutting to finishing. They don’t do electrical work or plumbing, both licensed trades, or major excavation or floor covering.

In the last 11 years, the project has helped rehabilitate 160 houses.

Move Among Neighborhoods

In his office in an abandoned church, Berger, a former seminary student, said about 7,000 of Lima’s 18,000 houses need extensive repair. Rehab Project targets houses in different neighborhoods, hoping that other residents will spruce up their houses themselves.

When the program began, Rehab Project bought abandoned houses, bid repair work to contractors and then sold the houses. That changed in 1979 when the organization became dissatisfied with the quality of the work and realized that it could not recoup the cost of the extensive repairs needed.

So for the last nine years, it has used volunteers.

Commitment to Expand

The program currently uses 20 inmates.