FLORENCE — Everyone is guarded in prison. It’s a matter of self-preservation. Sidelong looks arouse skepticism and new opportunities are treated with suspicion.
“Prison makes you standoffish,” said Jeremy Hodges, an inmate at Fremont Correctional Facility. “You feel like everyone’s trying to take advantage of you. There’s a lot of predators. Not everybody, but they’re there.”
But catching a glance from an inmate with a coveted job at the prison’s leather shop, an echoey warehouse where inmates design saddles, purses, belts and dog leashes, means something completely different.
The leather shop workers are keeping eyes out for people who are “doing the right thing,” said Freddy Aguilera-Zamora, who has spent over a decade of his sentence working in the leather shop. “We know right away. You learn to see patterns in people. The good patterns, we focus on the good patterns. The little things that tell you a lot about a person.”
They’re not looking for skillsets, they’re looking for qualities. They’re looking for inmates who are motivated, respectful and who won’t upset the balance of personalities in the roughly 20-person shop. Someone with a strong work ethic and a long sentence.
Hodges is serving a 40-year sentence for second-degree murder. Aguilera-Zamora is serving 48 years for first-degree murder.
“We can’t have issues, basically,” Aguilera-Zamora said, gesturing at a tool bench full of knives, blades, rotary cutters, hole punches, scissors, creasers and chisels. “We have too much to lose.”
LEFT: An inmate preps the horn of a saddle for hand sewing with a jerk needle. RIGHT: Tools at a work bench used by inmates to ply their leather craft. The shop has a well-earned reputation for producing quality hand-crafted leather goods, from belts to saddles. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Recently, the leather shop was certified as a registered apprenticeship program by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, part of a broader effort to expand career training for incarcerated individuals, according to a labor department spokesperson. Hodges and Aguilera-Zamora will be among the first “journeymen” — the term CDLE uses to describe trainers — certified to supervise apprentices.
The certification means that after 4,000 hours of training, an inmate will receive a certificate, signaling to potential employers that they’ve stuck with the training program. It also codifies something the men have been informally learning over years in the leather shop: that they can, and must, count on each other.
The repetition of days
The shop opened in 1983 at the Buena Vista Correctional Center as an unusual, but practical, partnership between a Denver saddlery and roughly 30-40 inmates who could crank out about 2,000 saddles per year.
Over the past 20 years, inmates have turned the prison shop into a high-end saddlery in its own right, dialing back the quantity and replacing $1,500 saddles with custom orders that retail upward of $4,000 a piece.
The shop has relocated twice in that time, from Buena Vista to the Sterling Correctional Facility in 2021, and from Sterling to the Fremont Correctional Center in Florence in 2024.
Of the original “Bewnie” crew, as the inmates refer to it, six men have stuck with the shop through both transfers, a process that Hodges called “intense, chaotic, stressful.”
“Every prison is its own culture, it’s like moving to a different city,” Aguilera-Zamora said.
“That’s exactly true,” Hodges said. “We were at Bewnie for 13 years before we moved. Everybody knows you, the staff knows you, you know how this person is going to react, that person is going to react. You know who you can approach, who you shouldn’t approach. And boom — all that starts over.”
The shop churned through supervisors during that time, fresh faces starting from square one over and over, while the inmates continued to hone their craft. One spur strap, one saddle swell, one carved flower at a time. “Tink tink tink,” Hodges said, mimicking the metallic sound of a hammer hitting a leather stamp.
Before prison, Hodges was a carpenter. He could build a home but couldn’t draw a stick figure. These days he leads the tooling section of the leather shop, where products get their final decorative elements. He carves intricate, swirling floral patterns and stamps saddle edges with tiny daisies or basketweave patterns. He used to fixate on the patterns. He’d lose sleep thinking about them, he said. But now, it’s muscle memory. The work can take him to a meditative place.
“It kind of amplifies what state of mind you’re in,” Hodges said. “So if I’m in a good state of mind, I have a great day, and time flies. But if I’m having a bad day, sometimes I have to pull myself away, because I’m spiraling: Oh my god, my life sucks, I’m in prison, la la la.”
He’ll step away from a piece of leather if he’s not feeling “congruent” with it that day. “It sounds weird, but there’s an energy you have to have,” he said. He’ll turn to the other inmates for advice or inspiration, or drop down and do a few burpees. “Get the blood flowing. Sometimes that’s all it takes. I know it sounds weird and cliché but it’s true,” he said.
From saddle making to a savings account
Access to the leather shop means access to one of the best-paid prison jobs in the country.
Fremont’s leather shop is a Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, or a PIECP, a federal designation that allows the prison to partner with private-sector clients and offer prevailing wages. Four of the country’s 45 PIECPs are in Colorado.
PIECPs pay prisoners state or federal minimum wage, whichever is higher. That means $15.16 per hour for the leather shop workers, while other prison jobs can offer as little as $1.91 per day for full-time roles.
The paychecks include deductions to pay taxes, room-and-board fees, court-ordered family support and a victim compensation fund, with the remainder dumped into the inmates’ commissary or savings accounts.
Those savings accounts often provide crucial lifelines for prisoners to the outside world. Aguilera-Zamora has drawn down his savings to pay for his son’s college tuition and help his brother check into rehab, he said. Others count on the fund to help them transition back into society once they’re released.
Those who don’t have any money in savings rely on the state for $100 in what are known as gate funds to cover transportation or food.
Old school styles and new techniques
Among the six core prisoners, one name is invoked most often in the shop: Duncan Clark. Clark was the men’s supervisor at Buena Vista and for a short time at Sterling before he retired.
He showed them techniques and taught them how to care for tools. He went to trade shows and brought back items for them to emulate — a spur strap with a Sheridan-style floral decoration, for instance. “I would obsess on it,” Hodges said.
In the middle of an interview, Hodges notices the clanging of metal against a rock. “I want to go tell them, ‘Hey, put that leather under this rock right now.’ Because I can hear what’s happening, and that’s something Duncan used to come tell me.”
Aguilera-Zamora detects the dullness of a knife being sharpened across the shop, a sense he inherited from Clark.
“He taught me everything that I know,” inmate Ryan Krueger said of Clark. Krueger now leads the “saddle side” of the shop, designing and assembling each saddle from scratch before sending it to tooling.
LEFT: Freddy Aguilera-Zamora edges a piece of leather at his workbench in the Fremont Correctional Facility’s Leather Shop. RIGHT: Ryan Krueger explains how a saddle is produced. The shop recently donated the saddle next to Krueger to History Colorado as part of its 150th anniversary of Colorado’s statehood. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Recently, Krueger, Hodges and Aguilera-Zamora were approached by History Colorado to design a commemorative saddle to add to the organization’s collection. (The saddle will be on display for about a year starting in May or June, according to Tara Kaufman, History Colorado’s associate curator of clothing and textile arts.)
Design decisions were left entirely up to the inmates. They settled on a fancy 1800s-style saddle covered in decorative columbines. Krueger wanted the rigging, the section of saddle that straps to the horse, to be “Sam Stagg” style (or Samstag), an old-school method that Clark had once suggested for a client.
Clark retired before he could teach Krueger the method — which requires cutting and looping a single piece of leather around the horse. When History Colorado ordered the special saddle, he seized the opportunity to learn the new technique.
One day at a time
Hodges will be eligible for parole in 2032, Aguilera-Zamora in 2037. Both of them talk about how they’ll use their leather shop skills when they’re released.
Unlike most prison industries, the leather shop workers keep an eye on the books, and have helped make the operation profitable in the past few years. The stress of running a business is something that Hodges, who has been in prison for 18 years, hopes will help him acclimate to the stress of everyday life.
Aguilera-Zamora, who loves crafting custom purses, hopes that he can continue making bags when he is released. He keeps images of purses he’s made over the years — a slouchy canvas duffle, a saddle bag with a University of Denver logo on it, a bright pink Louis Vuitton knockoff.
As for Krueger, who is serving a life sentence without parole for first-degree murder, he focuses on instilling the same camaraderie among the newer shop members that has helped him and the other core members make it this far — surviving three moves, COVID-19 lockdowns and a brief threat of closure when the leather shop wasn’t turning a profit.
He mentors the newer leather workers and has seen his mentees grow into the role themselves. “Literally everybody that’s working in this shop except for (six of) us have been taught by other inmates,” Krueger said.
Day in and day out, the men think about their projects, their tools, the business. When they leave the leather shop, they keep their heads down. Go to the gym. Talk about the shop. Stay out of trouble. All so that they can get back to their work the next day.
“If they’d just build some bunks on the wall, add a shower and a phone over here, we could just stay in here all the time,” Hodges said. “Except these guys would be mad at me because they’d hear me at three in the morning: ‘tink, tink, tink, tink, tink.’”