Southern Correctional Institution

Southern Correctional Institution houses male offenders in close custody.

The two-story prison sits on a 13.7-acre site. There are two separate buildings connected by a long corridor. The administrative building includes a gym, dining hall, vocational area and medical area. The other building is composed of a school area, various staff offices and five housing units. Each housing unit is divided into three wings that have a dayroom and 32 individual cells divided into two tiers.

Offenders have traditionally performed similar duties in the kitchen, maintenance, janitorial assignments, laundry area, and the warehouse. Some have participated in a special program called the Blanket Recovery Project, which converts donated material into blankets and other items donated to disaster relief efforts, housing authority, State Highway Patrol, public schools, and other non-profit organizations for assisting people in need.

Montgomery Community College provides educational opportunities in the areas of vocational classes in food service, preparation for attaining GED certificates and an opportunity to take college-level classes in Business Administration and Computer Technology.

Southern CI opened in 1983 and was built with a similar design and opened several months following Eastern Correctional Institution in Greene County. These two facilities were the first prisons in the North Carolina system to operate under the unit management concept.

Southern originally served as a processing center for male adult offenders receiving felony sentences of 20 years or less, primarily from eastern North Carolina. From 1985 through 1994, the facility housed close custody youth offenders in one of the five housing units. The housing of youth offenders was discontinued in 1994 with the opening of Foothills Youth Institution. The processing center function of the facility was discontinued in 1996 with the opening of Craven Correctional Institution.

In February 1996, the Montgomery Correctional Center, a minimum security prison operating in Troy since the 1930s, was merged with Southern Correctional Institution to form one facility. This enabled the prison system to reduce administrative costs and provide minimum custody offenders to help perform maintenance and landscaping work at the medium/close custody portion of the institution.

In October, 2004, another major change occurred when the medium/close custody facility was converted into a female facility. This conversion took place due to overcrowding taking place at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women in Raleigh. However, the state prison system underwent a re-missioning project at three facilities in the spring of 2019 and Southern CI was converted back to a male close custody facility.