Business Bouncing Back at Belize Central Prison

Virgilio Murillo

The prison population is currently a thousand and fifty and the facility is constantly looking at ways to cut costs and earn income to help feed its population, which in turn also helps the prisoners to make some money. But since COVID, the crafts and other things the prisoners made lost their markets. Now there’s some effort being made to re-establish some of that business, while others have taken off, as Kolbe C.E.O Virgilio Murillo alluded to.

Virgilio Murillo, C.E.O, Kolbe Foundation

“When the pandemic was on, we lost a lot of sales as it relates to blocks, as it relates, as it related to woodworks and, and those other projects, right? But remember at one point the prison went into producing face masks because everybody was in need of face masks and we made these cloth masks and we sold quite a number of those. So that sort of offset some of the seals we lost in the other areas. Remember again, too, we had launched that tire arts program where we made these beautiful arts from tires, the chickens and Nemo and the well and all of that, and we got quite a number of sales for those to sort offset the losses we had experienced with those other programs. The sales from the tire arts have dropped drastically, but if we get a little order from a customer, then we will go into the shop and make what they’re requesting and sell it to them but you’d have to special order it, if you want to put it that way. Similarly with the face masks, there’s no demand for face masks right now, so we’re back on track right now in terms of woodworks and, and block factory, and other areas, poultry, pry, the farming, etc.. We’re back on track with those.”