VADOC Hosts Shared Voices Dialogue at Goochland Training Academy

Thirty-seven corrections professionals and stakeholders gathered at the Academy for Staff Development in Crozier on April 2 for the Virginia Department of Corrections' "Changing Systems Through Shared Voices" dialogue, a structured forum aimed at surfacing front-line perspectives on training, staffing, and reentry outcomes.

The Crozier campus at 1900 River Road West is VADOC's primary central training hub for corrections personnel across Virginia. Jerry Eggleston, the academy's contact director, oversees a facility where curriculum is evaluated, e-learning programs are administered, and reentry training is developed before it reaches any of the state's prisons. Goochland County hosts two additional VADOC operations: the Virginia Correctional Center for Women and the State Farm Correctional Complex, which spans the Goochland-Powhatan county line, making the county a central node in Virginia's corrections infrastructure.

The dialogue came three months into a leadership transition. Director Chad Dotson, architect of VADOC's Virginia Model reform initiative, stepped down at the end of January 2025 ahead of Governor Spanberger's incoming administration, and the April 2 event was likely held under new or interim agency leadership.

Dotson's Virginia Model, launched at Lawrenceville Correctional Center in 2024, had already produced measurable results by the time participants convened in Crozier. Through June 2025, Lawrenceville logged a 100% reduction in confirmed drug overdoses, overdose deaths, serious inmate assaults, and total fights since the program began. VADOC expanded the model in September 2025 to Buckingham, Dillwyn, and Greensville correctional centers.

In May 2025, VADOC announced Virginia's three-year re-incarceration rate had fallen to 17.6%, the lowest in the nation and the lowest in more than 20 years, extending a 12-consecutive-year run at or near the bottom of national recidivism rankings. The sharpest figure from that data: inmates who completed Career and Technical Education courses through VADOC posted a recidivism rate of 9.5%, less than half the overall cohort rate.

Because the Crozier academy shapes the training pipeline feeding Goochland's own correctional facilities, what participants discussed on April 2 has a direct line to how those numbers move in the years ahead.