‘I can walk out a person’: Inside the college program giving Nevada inmates a second chance
Monday, July 27, 2026 | 2 a.m.
Editor's note: Este artículo está traducido al español.
When Jasmine Cumbow leaves prison this fall, she'll have the kind of employable skills in air-conditioning repair that could keep her from returning to crime.
"I came to prison broken. I hit rock bottom," she said in a College of Southern Nevada classroom at Florence McClure Women's Correctional Center in North Las Vegas. "I get to leave prison with a foundation."
"I'm much more capable than I had thought," she added.
The College of Southern Nevada's prison education program brings in-person academic and vocational coursework into the region's state-run correctional facilities.
Over the past two years, more than 80 inmates have graduated with a skills certificate. One inmate completed an associate of arts degree, marking the first time a student had earned a CSN associate's degree while incarcerated.
Cumbow earned a certificate in air-conditioning technology in May.
At Florence McClure Women's Correctional Center, a large former storage room has become a college classroom lined with air-conditioning units built by students and cabinets full of supplies for anthropology and art classes.
Cumbow, who now wears an easy smile, came to McClure two years ago for battery, a result of a cycle of anger, abuse and addiction, she said. A one-time horse trainer, she said HVAC appealed to her as a hands-on person who had worked around farms.
She's reinforced what she learned as a prison maintenance worker. She likes the idea of owning an HVAC repair company — "JC's ACs," she said. She said she feels empowered.
"We're called a correctional center," she said. "We need to correct something."
That gets to the core of what CSN Prison Education Program Manager Genevieve Minter is trying to accomplish.
"We've used what they call the punitive model of prison," said Minter, a criminologist by education. "That's where we made it really awful."
But research shows that both the punitive and rehabilitative models, which lean toward therapy, don't do much to prevent recidivism, she said. An educational model shows offenders another way of life that is concrete, Minter said, as most inmates come from poverty and limited opportunity.
CSN comes to McClure, Nevada's only women's correctional center, and High Desert State Prison, Southern Desert Correctional Center and Three Lakes Valley Conservation Camp, which house men near Indian Springs. Depending on location, students can earn certificates in culinary arts, hospitality, construction estimating, welding and HVAC. The associate's degree track offers a relatively more traditional academic path with class credits that can transfer to a university or four-year college.
When students complete their programs, they have an onsite graduation.
Northern Nevada prisons have partnerships with their area community colleges, but CSN's program is the biggest in the state, Minter said. And she works with the Clark County School District, which helps inmates earn high school equivalency diplomas, in hopes that some of those students continue with CSN.
Though the associate's degree program has so far only graduated one student, who also came from McClure, 49 students across the region are enrolled in fall classes that count toward an associate's.
Students are vetted — only those who have shown good behavior and don't have convictions that would preclude them from working in the fields outside of prison are admitted.
Similarly, CSN doesn't bring programs to the prisons that won't hire felons.
The program is tuition-free and funded by grants — an award that came through the Nevada Office of Workforce Innovation launched the HVAC program, a two-semester course available only at McClure that is about to start its third year.
Certificate graduate Debra Drury hopes to find part-time work in an HVAC company office doing dispatch when she completes her driving under the influence sentence in 2029. She previously worked as a nurse so she already has a degree, but at 69, she likes to keep learning.
HVAC makes sense as a vital industry, Drury said: "I have an air conditioner at home. I have five children. They all have air conditioning."
Her father was handy and never called repair technicians to the house because he could do it himself, and she became handy too.
"I can't wait to do those things again," she said.
Keyosha Bolin, 40, never attended college. A Las Vegas native, she said she grew up in poverty, which led to gang life and selling drugs.
Due for release next summer, this is her second bid at McClure. Fewer education opportunities existed inside when she was first incarcerated. Now that she has a certificate that shows she knows how to fix something Southern Nevadans can't live without, she doesn't intend to come back to prison. Crime, she said, is now a choice she doesn't want to make again.
"I walked in a number," she said. "I can walk out a person."