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Open Water Prisoner Diver? A landlocked California (PADI home state!) men’s prison aims to keep inmates from returning to jail by putting them in deep water – training them for undersea construction and dam repair.
A landlocked California men’s prison aims to keep inmates from returning to jail by putting them in deep water – training them for undersea construction and dam repair.
The California Institution for Men in Chino sits on a stretch of former farmland some 40 miles east of Los Angeles and just about as far away from the Pacific Ocean.
But it houses a prison-based marine technology training program where inmates serving sentences of 14 months to 4 years learn skills authorities hope will help them find jobs when they return to society.
At a training open to reporters on Friday more than a dozen inmate divers demonstrated their techniques in two seven-metre, 114,000-litre dive tanks.
One diver donned a 60-kg suit for heavy underwater construction, and sunk to the bottom as one of the other inmates monitored his equipment up above.
No more than 12 per cent of the more than 1,600 inmates who have participated in the program have returned to prison – far below the average recidivism rate of 50 per cent in California prisons, officials said.
