These are no-nonsense, hardened guys," says Skip LaBarge of the inmates he supervises in the Therapeutic Community at Limon, where male offenders, some built like trucks with tattoos over ninety percent of their bodies, are serving ten years to multiple life sentences under maximum security. Still, they possess remarkable ingenuity; the animals they machine-knit and crochet, like most of the items the inmates create, are not made from patterns, but by canny thinking. "You ain't seen nothing'," LaBarge says, "until a guy doing 800 years comes up to you all proud and bustin' because he just crocheted his first cow."