East Lyme ― A garage on the grounds of York Correctional Institution has been transformed into a $4 million advanced manufacturing center giving women a chance to leave the prison with a well-paying job and hope for the future.

The manufacturing site is the newest for Pursuit Aerospace, a producer of aircraft engine parts with locations in four countries and a roster of 3,200 employees.

The collaboration with the state Department of Correction, which will employ 32 incarcerated people when it’s fully operational, is the first of its kind in Connecticut and a rare example of skilled trades being plied behind prison walls. The women are guaranteed a job when they leave prison.

The program was hailed Friday at a dedication ceremony as an extension of a work-release program that since 2022 has given women at York the chance to train for lucrative jobs at Pursuit’s Plainville site.

Putting manufacturing sites in prisons ― with more to come at Carl Robinson Correctional Institution in Enfield and Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers ― means incarcerated people don’t need to leave the prison to gain the skills necessary to secure high-paying jobs on the outside.

Sydni Damato was 22 years old and incarcerated when she began training at Pursuit as part of the work-release program. Two years later, the now free woman makes $28 an hour as a lead machinist.

Four women, including Damato, were transported each day to Plainville as part of the prison’s first on-site crew. Three of them remain employed there after being released together from the prison and then from a Hartford halfway house.

“That company doesn’t care that we were in a totally different uniform than everybody else at one point,” she said. “Now that we’re out [of prison] and we show we’ll work, they’ll give us the work.”

Damato pleaded no contest to charges of second-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to almost four years in prison and three years’ probation in 2020. The Hartford Courant reported she was 17 year old when she lost control of her car in the summer of 2017, resulting in the death of a 19-year-old woman. Hospital records revealed marijuana and Xanax in Damato’s urine.

She was released from the halfway house in May 2023. That’s when she began training to lead three milling flow lines.

“Promoting me to lead, it just shows that none of this is for show,” she said. “They don’t look at your past. It’s not like ‘Oh, remember when she was in jail? Remember when she was an inmate?’ I’m not even looked at like that.”

A joint effort

The public-private venture was first forged in 2018 by Trina Sexton, then a deputy warden at the Willard-Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield, and Pursuit Executive Vice President Jacqueline Gallo.

During Friday’s dedication ceremony, Gallo said the manufacturing facility on the York grounds will allow the company to help set up many more women for success when they leave the prison.

She credited Sexton and the correction department with investing in the future of incarcerated people without the promise of an immediate return.

“There is a return on investment long term because our communities will be better,” she said. “I hope that people look to it as a best practice and example, and that it multiplies so that we can reform the way we are rehabilitating people.

State Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, was instrumental with Appropriations Committee Co-Chairwoman Toni Walker, D-New Haven, in securing $20 million for the Vocational Village program behind the aerospace partnership and other efforts to provide training in the skilled trades.

Osten and Walker at the prison Friday said efforts to reduce the number of people incarcerated in the state have been successful. But they pointed to high levels of recidivism among those who remain.

Osten called on her experience as a corrections officer for 21 years at seven facilities across the state. That’s where she said she’d run into people who’d been released from prison only to return.

“I would say to the people that came back, ‘Why come back?’ They’d say ‘I can’t get a job. I still have a family to support. So I start doing the same things I was making money at,’” she recounted.

Osten said having a program like this at a correctional institution for women is unusual. It’s why it’s so important.

“Most of these people who are incarcerated have children and families at home, and this will keep them at home with their families,” she said.

Pursuit CEO Doug Folsom at the dedication ceremony acknowledged initial reservations about partnering with correction departments to employ incarcerated individuals. But they proved to be more than good employees, he said.

“I say this and I mean it honestly: They are raising the bar in terms of performance for all the employees in our facilities, in terms of their attention, in terms of their ability to learn, in terms of their go and hustle when they are on the job,” he said.

Correction department Commissioner Angel Quiros put numbers to the success of the partnership with Pursuit when it comes to setting people on a path that doesn’t end up back in prison.

Ninety one people have gone through the program since 2019 and been released from prison, according to the commissioner.

“Only 13 have come back,” he said.

In the machine shop Friday, three women were operating the machines worth millions of dollars. They made drill bits to be shipped out to Pursuit locations worldwide after being cut, drilled with tiny holes to let coolant through and then ground down with a helix shape at the tip.

Site manager Josh McPhail, three weeks into the burgeoning program, said the women “give 110% every day” on shifts that currently go from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., five days a week. They are paid minimum wage while serving their sentences.

The goal is to expand to round-the-clock, 8-hour shifts, according to McPhail.

Gallo, the one behind the program with Warden Trina Sexton, was hopeful the shop can grow more than that.

“I would love to see this be successful so we could expand here, have more machines, more women,” she said. “It’s a modest start.”

e.regan@theday.com