Prison cell doors at the soon-to-be Adams County Correctional Center will one day open to freedom and a future.

The prison, owned by Corrections Corporation of America, is planning to give Hispanic illegal immigrants a chance to educate themselves before they are released and deported.

“When they get sent back to Mexico, we want them to get a good job and earn a living so they won’t come back,” Warden Vance Laughlin said.

The first step in educating the inmates will be for them to get a General Education Development certificate.

“Most of them that come in will not have a GED,” Laughlin said. “The GED is always going to be the most important thing.

“There’s work for these guys, they just can’t get (jobs) without GEDs.”

For the illegal immigrants, CCA clued in to a problem in the system a few years back, CCA Vice President of Marketing and Communications Louise Grant said.

“Typically in a standard prison that you may find in the state or federal system, illegal immigrants are housed among general populations, and so when they were getting a GED it would be an American-based GED,” she said.

Basically, taking an American GED back to Mexico was worthless, she said.

“So we said, ‘Why don’t we partner with the Mexican government and the department of education in Mexico and offer these offenders a Mexican GED program?’” Grant said.

And for the last several years, that’s what CCA has been doing in its prison systems in New Mexico and California, where nearly 99 percent of the inmates are Mexican illegal immigrants.

The Mexican GED is provided through a Federal Bureau of Prisons contract, which Adams County Correctional Center is vying for, but has not yet received.

Laughlin said even if the now empty prison doesn’t receive the contract, illegal immigrants will still make up a portion of the prison’s ultimate population.

Laughlin said once the GED program is completed, the immigrants would then move on to vocational classes.

More than likely, the vocational classes at the Adams County Correctional Facility would be carpentry, horticulture and computer skills.

Laughlin said the vocational skills are fairly broad based.

He said it would be fruitless to teach an immigrant from a third-world country auto mechanics. The skills taught are ones that can be used even in the most minimal environments.

The inmate’s journey through the education programs in prison first begins with a test that is administered as soon as they arrive at the prison, said John Lanz, director of industry and special programs in inmate programs at CCA.

This places the inmate in the proper class in order to get their GED. Four levels of adult education are categorized, one through four.

The length of the entire program depends on how the inmate tests.

Lanz said, for example, if an inmate is placed at the fourth, and highest, level, it will only take three to six months for him to complete the course.

“The inmate who’s quite literate and scores high, the amount of time is a whole lot less than someone who scores low,” he said.

But also self-motivation and drive play into how quickly an inmate can complete a course.

Education courses are not new to prison systems.

“As long as we have been operating, we have been offering offender programming,” Grant said. “CCA has a very, very strong commitment to programming.”

The purpose of this is two-fold.

“We don’t want offenders to be idle when they are in the facility, we want them spending as much time as they can to rehabilitate themselves to be more productive in a free society,” Grant said. “Second, we certainly know that when you can give them an opportunity to improve themselves, they have a greater likelihood of not returning to a lifestyle of crime.”

Indeed, Laughlin said prisons work not just to lock up criminals, but to help inmates become upstanding citizens when they leave the jail.

“All you can do is provide the tools to change the direction of their lives,” he said.

For non-illegal immigrant inmates, Grant said courses in Microsoft Office, plumbing, carpentry, masonry, electrics and more will be offered.

She said it’s all about giving the inmate usable skills.

The prison benefits, the inmate benefits, but Grant said the community will also benefit from the educational programs.

“The good news for a community is when you have a facility that does have an emphasis on programming, you’re hiring not only security-related positions, but you’re hiring teachers, principals, vocational positions, counselors, other academicians,” she said.