By Estelle Atkinson
Las Vegas Review-Journal
LAS VEGAS — Inmates at Nevada’s women’s prison transformed the facility into a winter wonderland Thursday, welcoming the community to a graduation ceremony.
Veronica Peterson, 55, will be released from Florence McClure Women’s Correctional Center next week. After walking the graduation stage Thursday afternoon with her parents in the audience, she’ll be leaving with a tourism, convention and event planning certificate from the College of Southern Nevada.
“I’m a repeat offender, so I’ve been out before. This time, it’s so different,” Peterson, who is about to complete her time served for attempted possession of a controlled substance, said. “It’s overwhelming. I feel really good. I feel scared at the same time.”
Peterson said she wanted to change, and she was ready for it. Her certificate puts her mere credits away from achieving an associate degree, an endeavor she began a decade ago. “I’m very proud of myself,” the aspiring paralegal said.
Eight students of the college’s program received certificates Thursday while inside the correctional facility in Las Vegas, and more than 70 inmates worked for months to line the prison’s walls with snowy artwork, craft business plans and models and serve up hot drinks for visitors to the showcase.
“We made mistakes, and we need to do the time for those mistakes. However, there’s going to be a time when we get out,” said Autumn Murry, the showcase’s event project manager. “One day I might be your neighbor, and I want to be the best neighbor possible.”
‘Everyone deserves a second chance’
The walls of the entryway to the event were coated in painted snowscapes, with ski lifts lining the walls and a dusting of snow gathering on the ground. This snowy scene represented a slippery slope, according to Sasha Williams, an incarcerated student in the College of Southern Nevada’s general education program at Florence McClure.
This slippery slopes act as a metaphor for the decisions that people made that led them to incarceration. Walking into the showcase, visitors first pass through a model of a cell at the facility. But beyond that, colorful displays represent the choices that inmates made once there.
“This is a chance for us to change and want to be better,” Williams, 32, said.
She is serving a sentence for robbery with a deadly weapon enhancement as one of four people charged in a deadly home invasion in 2013, when Williams was 21.
“I feel like we should all take advantage of the education so once we are released, we can be productive members of society,” she said.
When Williams is released, she said she hopes to work with at-risk youth and use her experience being incarcerated to “help those kids not become adult offenders.”
Community organizations such as the college’s career services department and the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas tabled the event, offering inmates the opportunity to make connections both before and after release.
“My heart goes to the community,” said Yesenia Trujillo, community outreach manager for the culinary academy, which helps inmates build their resumes and make industry connections. “Everyone deserves a second chance. We’re human beings.”
“Bridging the gap between the institution and the community is extremely imperative,” Williams, 32, said. “A lot of people have preconceived notions of what incarceration looks like and what people look like when they are incarcerated.”
Snowflakes made from trash bags
Rochalonn Chapman, 40, said that she sees herself taking on a leadership role in the hospitality industry after her graduation from the program, having learned about the hospitality industry in depth. “I worked so hard,” she said.
Chapman is serving time after being convicted in the death of her son’s father, who she said in court abused her.
Learning inside the walls of Florence McClure has also taught her resourcefulness. “The little that we have, we turn into winter wonderland,” Chapman said. Inside the showcase, snowflakes were made from trash bags and trees were made from toilet paper rolls.
The creativity needed to successfully transform the facility into an immersive, wintry experience for the community to enjoy is something that Gladys Perez, 43, said she never knew she was capable of before she was incarcerated at the age of 24.
Perez said her creativity has been her “sanity” at Florence McClure. And it all began when she accidentally dropped a toilet paper roll in her toilet. When she woke up the next morning, the paper had hardened.
Perez decided to rehydrate it and shape it into a heart. When it dried, she made paint using her colored pencils to create a pink heart. From then on, she continued to practice painting and building artwork.
“I didn’t know that I was creative,” Perez said. “That’s been the best thing that I’ve learned about myself, that I can make people happy with what I do.”
Perez is serving out her sentence following her conviction, alongside her ex-boyfriend, after the man killed the couple’s young daughter. A judge found them both guilty for the child’s death.
Today, at 43 years old, Perez said her mindset is completely different. “There’s nothing left of that 23-, 24-year-old that ended up in prison. There’s so much growth,” she said. “I’m only growing because I’m supported, because I feel the support of the community.”
The power of education
After walking the stage, the eight graduates held their certificates high in the air as applause thundered.
“No one is going to be able to take that away from you,” said James McCoy, vice president of academic affairs at the College of Southern Nevada. “The power of education unites us. The power of education provides hope for us. The power of education brings a future for us.”
The showcase, for the College of Southern Nevada, was an important opportunity to illustrate the impact of its prison education program, which is managed by Genevieve Minter. The program, according to its website, is designed to allow incarcerated students access to higher education, reducing recidivism.
“Of course, the recidivism rate is high for a reason. There are certain people who get out and do the same things, and that creates an extremely difficult challenge for the people who want to get out and do the right things,” Murry said. “I’m truly sorry for the things I’ve done to create distrust in the community.”
When she was 23, Murry, a former soldier, was sentenced to prison for the fatal shooting of a cabdriver who believed she and a friend were trying to leave without paying and confronted them, according to news reports at the time.
Murry said that her world was rocked when her mom died right before last year’s showcase. One of her friends pushed her to attend, and Murry said she found herself inspired.
“It was a punch in the face to know that I have messed up so bad in my past life and my mistakes were so grave, and so dire, that I couldn’t be there for my family,” Murry said. “I’ve never felt so much pain like that, and all I could do to ease that was to put my best foot forward and show the family that I still have that I’m doing everything I can to get out.”
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