Working in corrections wasn’t how Harold Little planned to spend his working years.

In his native Lee County, there are plenty of jobs in the corrections industry between Three Forks Regional Jail and Lee Adjustment Center, a private prison.

Seventeen years later, Little has found his niche working in corrections.

“I’m from a rural area and there aren’t many jobs,” Little, now a lieutenant at the Clark County Detention Center, said. “I fell in love with it after I started.”

Little has worked in the Clark County jail for about eight and a half years and commutes daily fro Owsley County.

“I’d met (former jailer) Bobby Stone) at a conference in Owensboro,” he said. “We became good friends and he asked me to come up here.”

Little serves as the coordinator for the jail’s class D program, where it holds state prisoners and generates revenue for the facility. The Clark jail typically keeps a state inmate population of around 120, he said.

“For the most part, I’ll call around to jails and they’ll have someone they can move,” he said. “I assist with all the workers. I get them classified with the (Kentucky) Department of Corrections” so they can work outside the facility in a number of capacities from picking up litter to mowing the grass outside the courthouse.

“We work about 65 to 70 inmates a month,” he said. “That’s inside (the jail) and out. You have to have a certain certification to work. There’s always something to do.”

In exchange, inmates earn a little bit of money and can work time off their sentences.

Inmates can earn up to $1.25 a day, which they can use to purchase items through the jail commissary, and get four days of credit off their sentence per month, he said.

As with many government programs, there is a volume of paperwork and reports to complete, and Little handles those for the state prisoners, including discipline reports.

The job can be demanding and dangerous, but the reward is seeing people turn their lives around.

“It’s something different every day,” he said. “You get to try and help people get pointed back in the right direction and on the street. (The jail) is a revolving door and it always has been. you get a few that try and take the help and don’t come back.”

Working in corrections takes a couple key traits.

“You’ve got to have a thick skin,” he said. “You’ve got to be dedicated. Not everybody can do it. It takes someone that’s dedicated to it.”