Prison C.E.O. Says Society Should Accept Prisoners Rehabilitated and Released

Virgilio Murillo

Yes, you heard right. While the Kolbe group is committed to rehabilitation and turning inmates into productive citizens, the less inmates they have, the less money they get from government and the harder it is to make ends meet. That’s a dilemma that won’t be solved anytime soon. But financial woes aside, Murillo still insists that just as the mindset of inmates must be changed for them to be assimilated back into society, society’s collective mindset must be changed to allow acceptance.

Virgilio Murillo, C.E.O., Belize Central Prison

“That is one of our biggest challenges. Like I said earlier in my speech. We have success stories. We can’t prove it scientifically at this point in time because we don’t have the statistics, so to speak. But if you look at the head count like I said earlier – the head count a year and a half ago, for argument’s sake was hovering at one thousand five hundred and sixty-two. Today, we are seeing an average of one thousand four hundred inmates. So if you do the Math, you are looking at one hundred and sixty-two inmates that it had reduced by. I always believe that whenever a person finds prison as the most comfortable place to be, then there must be a problem with society. I agree that there are workers that go looking for jobs after they have left prison – ex-inmates that go looking for a job after they have left prison and that criminal record is certainly their death certificate, so to speak. They bounce around and knock around trying to get a job. Some of them end up lying about not having a criminal record just to get a job, and it really hurts them. I am hoping that society would start looking at these guys a little bit differently. I know for a fact that quite a number of them genuinely made mistakes in their lives and they have gotten their act together. If you would use the headcount as a tell-tale sign, the handwriting is on the wall. You can see it. Society needs to take a different approach by making sure they grab this concept that people do make mistakes and they do need to be given a second chance. I have heard instances where people were hired, given a job, and just because they found out a couple of weeks later that they had a criminal record because they lied to get that job, they are released – despite the fact that the employer is saying the man was excellent otherwise, but he just did not tell me he had a criminal record. To me that is outrageous.”