Memphis Culinary Academy - Prison Program
Chef Joseph Carey, Director
1252 Peabody St.
Memphis, Tenn. 38104
(901) 722-8892

Classically trained Chef Joseph Carey, who’s held prestigious chef’s posts and owned restaurants in Memphis and the San Francisco Bay area, now runs the Memphis Culinary Academy, a professional chef’s training course in a fine old house in Memphis’s Midtown neighborhood.

Since 1991, however, he’s also run a similar course for a startlingly different clientele. At the request of Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris, he came up with a streamlined but still quite serious version of his cooking curriculum for inmates at the Shelby County Correction Center, an apparently successful effort to cut recidivism by providing inmates a saleable skill and an incentive to make an honest living, literally, when their term ends.

Two years in the planning, the program was initially funded by a $50,000 grant from the Private Industry Council. That ended when the PIC insisted on going over to its standard “performance-based contract,” a strict system in which the job-training provider isn’t fully paid until students are on the job and stay on the job, a worthy goal but one that places an impossibly high barrier on a program for inmates who may not be free to go to work immediately upon graduation! Instead, the county, recognizing the value of the program, picked up its funding on the basis of $1,300 per inmate per class.

Inmates who volunteer for training must pass tests confirming at least a ninth-grade command of mathematics and reading (“you can’t work in a kitchen without knowing basic math and being able to read recipes,” Carey points out), and clear an interview aimed at gauging the student’s interest and potential for food-service work.

A total of 150 inmates per year participate, 25 at a time, in intensive daily courses for six weeks, in which Carey and a hired chef cover classical French cookery techniques in a prison kitchen turned into a (minimal) restaurant facility with a $28,000 county grant.

With the enthusiastic cooperation of the Memphis Restaurant Association and Carey’s friends in the restaurant business, they’re placing 58 percent of students in restaurant jobs, and by all accounts, most of them seem to be keeping those jobs. Better still, according to county records, the program virtually halts recidivism; a scant 5 percent of graduates since 1991 have later returned to the county jail.

This is not a non-profit organization -- not intentionally, anyway. Carey’s an entrepreneur who contracts with the county in a public-private partnership to do this work. But it’s clearly a labor of love, and not one, he admits with a laugh, that’s calculated to turn a profit.

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