I just had an incredible gourmet meal -- in this Michigan prison

May 22--It was one of those unforgettable lunches -- a wild game feast with a menu that read like something out of a Jim Harrison essay.

We devoured duck confit salad wrapped in lettuce, oven-roasted pheasant resting atop a Calvados-infused sweet potato puree, braised rabbit ravioli adorned with pickled blueberries swimming in cardamom cream sauce and tender slices of seared bison loin laid across deep purple mashed potatoes and carrot-ginger puree.

Servers delivered plates to tables in choreographed silence across eight masterfully prepared courses that could've come out of any number of high-end restaurant kitchens in metro Detroit.

Sommelier Adrian Evans presented a thoughtfully paired Michigan wine with each dish, describing flavor profiles and vinification methods before personally pouring a taste for each guest.

If our cups hadn't been filled with nonalcoholic sparkling grape juice instead of the wine Evans so charismatically described, and had we not been forced to cut our tender bison with hard plastic spoons in place of knives, and had the outdoor garden that produced the freshly picked asparagus not been surrounded by an imposing razor-wire fence, we might've forgotten we were in a prison.

That's not an uncommon phenomenon in this bright, yellow-walled room inside Lakeland Correctional Facility in Coldwater, where a handful of food service professionals recently participated in a panel discussion and the aforementioned lunch -- cooked almost entirely by inmates.

"From the time I get here at 8:15 to the time I leave at 4 o'clock, it's like I'm not even in prison," says sous chef ZaJuan Nenrod, who's serving out the last few months of a drug charge that landed him behind bars for more than seven years. "Ending up here was probably the best thing that happened to me on the route that I was on. ... It taught me a whole lot and it made me a better thinker."

"It's a totally outside of prison setting," echoes Marcus Millard, who has just three months left to serve of a three-year sentence for home invasion and evading police. "I feel like a free spirit when I'm cooking."

The words "prison food" haven't historically conjured up images of anything remotely delicious, particularly over the last few years in Michigan, where a failed experiment to privatize prisoner meals led to deplorable conditions and meal shortages. (The state is ending its privatization effort on July 31.)

But Lakeland's Food Technology program -- one of 11 like it around the state that teach inmates the ins and outs of food service -- has been a quiet success story for the Michigan Department of Corrections for 30 years.

Executive Chef Jimmy Lee Hill has been guiding it for nearly 29 of those years, teaching inmates eager for a second chance the value of both knife skills and life skills.

"When they come to prison, they come with this image that society has put on them that these are just guys that need to be locked up," says the soft-spoken Muskegon native. "Society is done with them. This is where you go when you can no longer handle society. But really the important part about this is that everybody that's here, they don't have to be here. They can obtain a trade. They can change their lives."

Lakeland is a Level II corrections facility, meaning it's one step above the lowest security prisons. But that doesn't mean there are no violent offenders here. Some are serving life sentences for heinous crimes.

To get into Hill's program, prisoners must be at least five years removed from their last violent incident, have a GED or high school diploma and be able to read at least at an eighth-grade level. And the knives they use in the kitchen are tethered to the cooking stations.

Remarkably, Hill says he has only had to write up two students during his career, a sure sign of the respect he commands in class.

"I tell them when they first come in: 'It's not my job to punish you,' " he says. "'When the judge hit the gavel, that was your punishment. Now that you're here you need to be about the business of food tech while you're in this class.'

"If you treat them like humans, they act like humans."

Hill runs his program like any other culinary arts school, beginning with the importance of safety and sanitation and teaching every skill all the way through catering and front-of-the-house service. He says the program comfortably takes anywhere from seven to 12 months to complete, by which point students will have earned three nationally recognized food-service certificates -- the kind of edge that can prove crucial for those about to return to society.

Darren Conerly served 22 years for a pair of second-degree murder charges before his release in 2011. In June 1990, just two days shy of his 21st birthday, Conerly burned down a house, resulting in what he describes as two drug-related homicides.

He completed Hill's program during his first stint at Lakeland and became a mentor in the program for the final five years of his incarceration. After he was paroled, Conerly enrolled in the nationally respected culinary arts program at Schoolcraft College in Livonia to continue his education.

"When I got to Schoolcraft, it was like I was so far ahead of the class that the chefs there would call on me to do other things," Conerly recalls. "They couldn't believe that I just started. Pretty much everything that you can learn in today's culinary arts class out here in society, Chef Hill had already taught us."

Conerly completed the three-year program at Schoolcraft and now runs a catering company in Northville. He dreams of owning his own restaurant one day.

"I've got people that believe in me now," he says. "Because they see that I know what I say I know. They've seen me at work. I've been staying in the culinary field because I know that this is not my job but this is my career. Culinary is my life."

Conerly, who has had no brushes with the law or employment issues during his seven years of recent freedom, is the kind of success story that's becoming more common among parolees thanks to programs like Hill's, says Chris Gautz, a spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Corrections.

"Overall in Michigan, our recidivism rate currently is the lowest it's ever been in state history," Gautz says, citing internal statistics that put the number of offenders who return to prison within three years after release at 28.1% -- one of the lowest rates in the nation -- down from a high of 45.7% in 1998.

"Programs like this definitely are beneficial in helping toward lowering that rate," he says. "The whole goal that the department is focused on right now is called offender success. The basic premise, which is pretty simple and obvious, is that you want to take these prisoners and return them back to society better than what they came to us as. That's why we're the Department of Corrections and not the Department of Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Key. Our job is to correct their behavior. And so our focus is on programming, rehabilitation and education. This restaurant piece is a big part of that."

It's also filling a gap in a rapidly growing industry.

"Projections for the state of Michigan show that in 10 years our industry will be short 40,000 workers," Michigan Restaurant Association COO Amanda Smith told the inmates during the panel discussion. "We're hoping some of you will join our industry once you're on the other side."

The group of 50 or so men -- some in their prison blues, others in their kitchen whites -- asked questions and listened intently as the restaurant veterans on the panel detailed the challenges of balancing family life with restaurant hours and the importance of passion, loyalty and showing up.

But this was more reinforcement than education. All those topics had already been covered by Hill in class.

"Jimmy didn't just teach cooking," Conerly says. "I put into practice everything that he taught me. Not just the cooking, but the life skills: how to treat people, how to respect people, how to be a better person overall. At least once a week he would have that heart-to-heart talk with the entire class. It was like a father talking to his son. A brother talking to his little brother. You couldn't buy the things that he taught. I feel getting choked up about him because he saved my life."

Our lunch at Lakeland ended with an elegant dessert duo: a tangerine "creamsicle" with coconut crumble and a triple-chocolate mousse cake with candied pecans.

Redemption never tasted so sweet.

Contact Mark Kurlyandchik: 313-222-5026 or mkurlyandc@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mkurlyandchik and Instagram: curlyhandshake.

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