Giving Charlotte Correctional Institution inmates a second chance

The goal of jail is to rehabilitate inmates and give them a second chance of reform after serving their sentence, and inside the Charlotte Correctional Institution, inmates are allowed to earn an education and enhance their resumes, giving them a chance to land a job post-incarceration.

The correctional facility can house as many as 1,291 men and there are currently 260 inmates enrolled in the prison’s education programs.

WINK News spoke with Warden Derek Snider about how the Charlotte Correctional Institution provides inmates with programs to help better themselves.

“Whether it be getting their GED, whether it be through the clergy through, you know, chaplaincy and religious experience or if it’s just through education, they realize that with their actions, there’s a victim out there, and I think that that’s a huge portion of what changes their way of thinking,” said Snider.

The facility offers a classroom setting for inmates, and with pencils and textbooks at hand, they begin their work on earning a GED.

“When they go back out, they could say, ‘I was in prison, but while I was in prison, I achieved my GED, achieved a vocational certificate, I have a resume, I may have worked as landscape engineer,’ they work on as the job assignments,” said Education Supervisor Barbara Bell-Francis. “They have different job assignments, so they’re going to go out there and say, ‘I was here but while I was here, these were my accomplishments.'”

The goal is to teach inmates the importance of if they did something to someone, it’s essential they do not do it again.

“We want the victims out there to understand we think of them, and we care for them. We want to make sure that they’re not victimized, and we want to make sure there’s no more victims that come from an inmate that comes out of the Department of Corrections,” said Snider.

Snider and Bell-Francis have convicted criminals at CCI value education, in hopes of getting out and staying out.