Inmates build new lives from the floor up: Anderson Hardwood Floors' partnership with a South Carolina prison gives prisoners a chance to gain woodworking skills.

The scene looks like any large shop that works with hardwoods. Veneer is graded and glued; planks are cut. Employees lift and load sheets of veneer into presses, push buttons and check the results.

Instead of jeans or khaki, however, these employees wear uniforms emblazoned with SCDC on the backs, short for South Carolina Department of Corrections. Barbed wire and guards surround their workplace. When the workday ends, they head for a cell instead of a home.

The Tyger River Correctional Institution of Enoree, SC, serves as both a prison and a factory. It is a medium-security institution that also houses an operation of Anderson Hardwood Floors, based in nearby Clinton, SC. Anderson's operation, with 250 employees, is the largest of seven mini-factories run within the state's prisons by corporations.

"The idea was to put inmates to work in a real-world working environment," says Tony Ellis, the state's director of prison industries. "They learn how to maintain production, job skills and quality control. They learn to be responsible for completing a job.

"You want to incarcerate them and let them pay whatever penalty is imposed on them by society, but you want to hopefully change the behavior that got them there in the first place," Ellis says.

South Carolina prisoners' participation in the federal program called PIE (Prison Industries Enhancement) is entirely voluntary; according to Ellis. The jobs are highly coveted by the inmates, he adds.

The $7- to $10-an-hour wages that Anderson pays for the inmates' work is divvied up in several ways. Some of the pay goes to the state for room and board, some helps support prisoners' families, a portion is earmarked for crime victim reparation and some of it is placed in savings accounts established for each of the prisoners participating in the program. Since 1996, Anderson has paid $7.3 million in wages.

An Industry Leader

Family-owned Anderson Hardwood Floors is the third largest engineered-hardwood flooring manufacturer in the United States, according to Don Finkell, president and CEO. It got its start in the 1940s, when L.W. "Andy" Anderson, the grandfather of Finkell's wife Nancy, pioneered the concept of cross locking thin plies of wood together for flooring. The material is less vulnerable to moisture than traditional hardwood floors, and can be nailed or glued directly to concrete. Houses built on concrete slabs after World War II provided a ready market.