CHICAGO (AP) – How can you get a gourmet Italian pizza delivered right to your door for no more than $7? Get locked up at Cook County Jail in Chicago.
Inmates in the jail’s medium-security Division 11 can now order pizzas made with the finest ingredients in the kind of ovens found in pizzerias. It’s all part of Sheriff Tom Dart’s ongoing effort to make jail a bit more humane while providing inmates skills that might help keep them from returning once they’re set free.
Pizzas have been served and prepared behind bars before. A few institutions allow inmates to order from nearby restaurants. At one Massachusetts jail, inmates make pizzas that guards can buy and take home and heat themselves.
But it’s safe to say Dart is the first jail administrator to bring into his facility an Italian chef to oversee an operation in which inmates bake a couple hundred pizzas a week in a $16,000 oven and deliver them piping hot to the cells of captive customers.
“We’re teaching skills to make them more marketable when they get out of here,” Dart said.