"I've gained a lot there," said Moore, explaining that the job has helped her deal with anxieties she once had over working with or talking to people.
Moore participated in an innovative program developed by the Colorado Department of Corrections in which a handful of female inmates from the nearby women's prison have been working on the agency's IT help desk since 2005. Corrections officials came up with the idea in the face of planned IT cutbacks.
"We were trying to support 6,500 staff with very few of us at the [IT] support center," said Karen Danley, support center manager for the agency. Danley and her team screened, interviewed and picked a handful of female inmates who were then trained as "first responders" for the agency's IT help desk.
Logistically, the arrangement worked out well. The female correctional facility is located just two miles from the IT support center, so female inmates who work on the help desk are picked up and dropped off after each six-hour shift. The inmates are strip-searched each time they re-enter the correctional facility for security purposes.
Still, the transition wasn't entirely smooth, noted Kim Withers, a help desk supervisor for the agency. "It was a big obstacle in the beginning for the staff to call [the inmates] and ask for help," said Withers. Some corrections workers were also concerned about how much information inmates would be allowed to see on their screens during a help desk call.
But the IT support center, through the use of Numara FootPrints, a Web-based service desk tool, has been able to limit what information inmates on the help desk can see. The agency's help desk uses Numara Footprints to provide support to 25 correctional facilities throughout Colorado, said Mark Krieger, vice president of product development for Numara Software Inc. in Edison, N.J.
So if an inmate is able to resolve, for instance, a desktop software glitch that a corrections officer is experiencing, she uses her version of the FootPrints software to close the file. If a staffer encounters a technical problem that an inmate can't resolve, a copy of the "project" is sent to other more experienced support center workers with detailed information about a staffer's technical configuration that an inmate isn't privy to, said Withers.
That information is gathered using Numara Asset Manager, an asset discovery tool that provides qualified users with specific information about an end user's hardware and software configuration, said Krieger.
Training varied for each of the inmates working on the help desk, since many prisoners don't have basic skills, such as the ability to type, or lack high school diplomas, said John Jubic, a desktop supervisor at the agency. As a result, the amount of time spend in training for the program can vary from a couple of days to a few weeks, said Danley.
At the moment, five inmates work in the IT support center at any given time, said Jubic. Three inmates provide telephone support while one does PC tracking and the other handles PC imaging and repairs, he said.
So far, the inmates' contributions to the support center have been "absolutely excellent," said Jubic. In 2006, the support center fielded a total of 46,000 work orders. The inmates on duty handled 16,000 of those orders and closed 8,000 of them, said Danley. "Those numbers are quite helpful to our staff."
The program has also benefited Lorene Cardenas, an inmate who has worked in the IT support center for the past 17 months. "I have a lot more self esteem and self confidence since I've been here," said Cardenas, who has two and a half years left on a five-year sentence for attempted escape from parole. "I know I can go out there and hold my head high in an office environment," she said.