Tazewell County inmates carve soap

PEKIN — The inmates in C Pod at the Tazewell County Justice Center were not sentenced to art class.

They did not have to accept the challenge to turn soap cakes into intricate, even delicate carvings of spider webs, flowers, medieval crosses and — as the World Series unfolded — baseball team logos.

It was their ideas to color their creations with coffee grounds mixed with water into a brown paste and red, green and yellow Jolly Rancher candies melted into a glaze in their pod microwave.

They were in jail because they’re accused or convicted criminals.

Some of them also are artists, with capacity for sincerity and flair that perhaps they haven’t shown since their grade school days.

In October, Correctional Officer Marissa Force gave the men in C Pod that chance.

“They were ecstatic, to be honest,” Force said this week, when she told each one during a head count to start her month-long second shift assignment to the pod that she wanted them to show off their creative side.

“I gave them two weeks,” until Halloween, she said. At the end, she and Jail Superintendent Earl Helm were so impressed with the finished products — and the morale boost that broke the boredom of jail time — that they rewarded the whole pod “with popcorn and a movie,” Helm said.

That sounds nothing like what the public envisions as punishment behind bars, he acknowledged. “Most people think it’s a cell and bread and water, and it isn’t far from that.”

The soap-carving project, however, “was harmless, didn’t cost anything, was productive and caused no problems. And that was the goal,” Helm said.

The good it did for some of the inmates came shining through, Force said. One inmate, facing a possible lengthy prison term for manufacturing meth, “wants to let the public know what it meant to him” to use his “very artistic” talents as he tries to retrieve his soul from the criminal path he took, Force said.

Another etched those sentiments into his carving. “The Old Me — RIP,” is written above a carved and colored rose stem. On the cake’s other side he added, “Thank You Staff of TCJC.”

Given the carving instruments they were allowed to use, their projects required every bit of the two weeks Force allotted.

“They had their fingernails, combs, the flat-end toothbrush we give out as part of our `welcome pack’ and colored pencils,” Force said. The pencils were the only sharp tools they could use.

Of the 38 men assigned to the pod in October, 23 took part in the project, said Force. From a slow start she saw the inmates turn to their individual projects with growing interest and intensity each day. “They’d help each other out,” Force said.

“One came to me three times and said, `Ms. Force, I broke my cake again, can I have another?’ and I’d say, show me the broken one, and I’d give him one.”

That inmate eventually carved a worthy replica of the “T” featured on the baseball caps of the Texas Rangers, who lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in the series played during the carving project’s weeks. Of course, another inmate carved the St. Louis logo.

Force said she got the idea for the project from a TV show that featured an episode about a similar project in a prison. Other pod-supervising officers, she said, stage inmate activities including playing card Spades tournaments.

“I don’t know the rules” for those, Force said.

“And some (inmates) bend the rules,” Helm chuckled.

The soap-carving project featured no winners or losers, Force said, just artists, who celebrated their achievements with popcorn and a movie in C Pod.