It’s a little intimidating being in a working jail. All the doors must be buzzed open, one by one. They slide open slowly on reinforced rails. But as I turn a corner, I find familiarity: the clatter of a kitchen and the scent of baking bread.
“Yesterday we added the yeast, the flour, the salt, water, and then we let it sit overnight,” says Kori Vandewalle, whose uniform says “sheriff’s inmate” on the back. She’s in the community cooking program here at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility in Bourne.
It’s not a hardcore prison.Most of the inmates here are serving relatively short sentences—offenses that are often connected to alcohol or substance abuse.
“This is my first time baking, so they're all being super kind,” Vandewalle says. “It's just one big baking family.”
Fellow inmate Amy Douglass just put a few hundred dinner rolls in the oven. She says learning to make bread has taken patience.
“At first, you get frustrated and then you're like, ‘All right, we don't want to do this anymore,’” Douglass says. “But then you’ve got to try again. Kori's new and she's trying to learn how to make the rolls. It’s frustrating at first, but you'll get better.”
The program got started last year in part as a response to cuts in federal food assistance. The owners of Moto Pizza in Falmouth and Pie in the Sky in Woods Hole shared their knowledge to get things running. Most of the baked goods go to food pantries and Belonging to Each Other, a nonprofit helping those experiencing homelessness.
But some of the tastiest items also stay right in the building.
“We make chocolate chip cookies on Mondays,” Douglass says. “We bring back treats to the unit.”
She says she doesn’t know what makes them so good, but she’s never tasted a better chocolate chip cookie than the ones she makes in jail.
The bread rolls in the oven are destined for an event the next night called a “Frederick Douglass Dinner.” It’s held at the jail, and members of the public sit, eat, and talk with selected inmates.
“And they bring people in so that you can see that we're just like people on the outside,” Amy Douglass says. “You know, even though we're incarcerated, we're not monsters. We're just like everyone else.”
“It's human conversation,” says Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley. “It's not about why people are in here. It's about who they are as a person.”
The Frederick Douglass Dinner concept originated at Georgetown Law School. Buckley turned it into a popular event here on the Cape.
“There's a huge interest from the public in understanding incarceration,” Buckley says. “You never look at someone the same when you have shared a meal with them.”
Ultimately, Buckley wants the program to equip inmates for employment when their sentence ends.
“We're in the business of helping people stay out of jail,” Buckley says. “Every aspect of this organization, everyone is focused on: how do we make sure we have no repeat customers.”
Officer Kevin Doherty spent much of his life working as a chef, then found a career in the correctional system. Here in the kitchen, there’s no doubt he is in charge– but he kind of comes off more as a caring older brother figure.
“I try to make it enjoyable,” Doherty says. “Whatever has happened inside the jail, or any drama, that's where it should be left. I find the kitchen a very freeing and wonderful place to be.”
Kori Vandewalle told me she looks forward to baking for her five-year-old daughter one day when her incarceration eventually ends.
And as for Amy Douglass: she is set to be free in a matter of months. For the time being, she’s happy to feed those who need it most.
“It's nice that we feed the homeless,” she says. “A lot of us have come from a background where we were homeless before we ended up in here. It hits close to home.”
