Last month, seven women at the Chesapeake Correctional Center graduated from the facility’s first reentry program specifically for female inmates.
The men there have had a reentry program for years to teach them about financial literacy, life skills, parenting and mental health. But formerly incarcerated women face a unique set of challenges after their release, and Chesapeake Sheriff Wallace Chadwick said his office sought to fill that gap.
“Some of them are primary caregivers. Some of them have dealt with trauma, they’ve dealt with addiction, they’ve dealt with domestic abuse themselves,” Chadwick said. “So that’s something that’s very separate than what males would go through, for the most part.”…