Friday's intriguing people

Andrea Cabral - The sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, says that, to keep people from returning to prison, they need vocational and educational skills and the health care that they were not getting before they were incarcerated.

In November 2002, Cabral became the first female in the commonwealth's history and also the first African-American in the county to hold the position. She is responsible for both the jail and the prison in the county – which means more than 1,000 corrections officers, investigators, educators, health care providers, caseworkers, managers and administrative staff who watch over some 2,700 offenders who are in the system on any given day.

Cabral is scheduled as one of the featured speakers at the 2010 National Organization for Women Conference beginning Friday in Boston, Massachusetts. Cabral told CNN on Thursday that she'll focus her remarks on the issues that are unique to women in prison.

"I see a lot of women who have experienced domestic violence. Everything from their self-esteem to the way they raise their children to the way they act out criminally is very much related to the violence in their own lives," she said. "We have gender-specific programs that deal specifically with the trauma that these women have experienced. We help them understand it and the relationship between the trauma and their own self-destructive and criminal behavior."