60 Days In: From Inmate to Officer

The inmates taught her the camera angle.

Sheri Ray's first rounds as a trainee at Clark County Jail, she clocked a cluster of women standing wrong. The other officer walked past. She did not. "The only reason I noticed it and he didn't is because I could tell the way the inmates were standing. It's a certain angle that the inmates trained me to stand when I was an inmate so that the cameras couldn't see," she told Business Insider in May 2017. Behind the huddle they found hooch, latestnetflix.com contends, fruit and sugar left to ferment in a jug.

A year earlier she had been the one in the huddle, sort of. Season 2 of A&E's 60 Days In sent Ray and seven other civilians into Jeffersonville, Indiana, under fake names and fake charges, cameras rolling while staff and inmates were told they were real. She already had six years in corrections. After the season aired, Sheriff Jamey Noel offered her a job. "It seemed like the normal thing to do. Nobody would be better fitted to come in there than me at that point," she said.

The spin-off is 60 Days In: From Inmate to Officer. Eight short web episodes. TMDB dates the first drop to 3 May 2017 and the finale to 21 June. TheTVDB lists episode one, "Sheri Returns to Clark County Jail," at ten minutes, TV-14. Business Insider, writing 18 May, said the run would sit on A&E's site that Thursday night. The catalog still files it as a series. It is a follow-up tape of one volunteer putting the uniform back on in the same building. , ,

He hired her in the exit interview.

Noel told A&E he had floated the idea with every outgoing participant. Some said they would think about it. Ray was interested. When a slot opened he brought her back so she could tell him how far the jail had come and what still needed doing. She moved from Washington State without her family at first. The work stuck after shift. Inmates who had opened up to her as a fake cellmate now had to take orders from a CO. Noel called that human nature, and a risk. He also said she was one of the few people who could tell staff, honestly, that she had been an officer and an undercover inmate in the same jail.

Ray used that overlap at intake, the hour when the door clinks and a new arrival does not know the next step. "It's scary. I don't care who you are, it's scary," she told Business Insider. She wanted two minutes to explain the process. Old training said kindness reads as weakness. After sixty days in a bunk she said that was wrong. Get someone a towel, she said, and they remember.

On camera she sat for a tattoo, an open cage hanging from a willow, birds flying out, a memorial for a pregnancy she named Willow. A&E's episode copy says she moved across the country to resume corrections in the jail where she had gone undercover. A later Law Enforcement Action Partnership bio lists her as the only officer to do that loop. North Carolina Department of Corrections from 2000. Clark County from 2017. Out again in 2019, working as a consultant and case manager. Portland State for the degree. ,

The sheriff who hired her is the part that aged like milk. Noel sold 60 Days In as reform theater, release pamphlets, Medicaid sign-ups, a census he claimed ran 20 to 30 percent lower than other Indiana jails. In November 2023 Indiana State Police arrested him. In August 2024 he pleaded guilty to 27 felonies, theft, tax evasion, money laundering, official misconduct among them. WDRB reported the plea and the lifestyle charge, cars, trips, a private plane, public money. Inside Edition reminded readers he had been the face of that A&E jail. Ray is not in the charging papers. The web series is just the tape of him recruiting her and talking about dignity. The court file is the punchline nobody wrote in 2017. , ,