FOLSOM, Sacramento County — The laser feels like bacon grease slathered on her face. Soon her skin turns numb, though there’s still an itch.

In her fourth session to remove tattoos that she had inked on her cheeks behind bars, Jessica Garcia has asked the technician to crank up the intensity.

“Ooh, I can smell it. Can you smell it?” she says. An expression of utter tranquility belies any discomfort.

Garcia wears bulbous goggles to protect her eyes from the red flashes. If not for the prison uniform, she could be about to slip into a tanning bed. As the ruby beam clicks into action, she grips her chair and inadvertently kicks the wall.

Garcia, 24, and dozens of other inmates are burning off tattoos they no longer want — and in some cases, never did — during bimonthly visits aboard a converted bus parked in the front yard of the Folsom Women’s Facility.

The California Prison Industry Authority, a state agency that provides work placement and job training for inmates, started the program in May 2018 after former convicts said their tattoos were a barrier to finding a job on the outside.

So far, 216 women, with about 650 tattoos, have been treated at the prison in Folsom. An additional 57 women, with about 160 tattoos, have participated through a community re-entry program in Sacramento.

It’s a mentally and emotionally transformative experience for participants, many of whom are removing gang tattoos or branding that they received when they were trafficked as sex workers.

“They can get rid of the old scars or signs that may have brought them to prison,” says Michele Kane, a spokeswoman for the authority. “It’s like a release.”

Officials plan to expand the program to nearly two dozen additional lockups next year, bringing laser treatments to male inmates for the first time. The state budget includes a $1.1 million funding boost that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation estimates will allow the tattoo removal program to reach 3,000 more prisoners a year.

At the front of the bus, several women waited their turns on a recent morning. A television played a safety video about tattoo removal on a loop.

Shaunda Lane, 35, has seen it 10 times before. She was among the first inmates to sign up for the tattoo removal program and is nearing the end of her treatment. The large cursive name on her left forearm is barely visible anymore, merely an abstract collection of dots.

Lane has eight other tattoos, few of which peek out from her blue uniform. They are mostly tributes to her children, a reminder of the “happiest days of my life” when she “brought something amazing into the world.” She plans to keep them.

The tattoo she is having removed is a connection to a time in her life she would rather forget. It used to read “Doeboi,” the nickname of a man she was involved with when she was convicted three years ago of assaulting a lesbian couple with a baseball bat while she was high on methamphetamine. She got it after she arrived at the Folsom Women’s Facility.

“I was in love — so-called in love, not really in love, confused is more the sense — and wanted to feel some pain other than the pain that I was feeling when I was incarcerated,” Lane says.

She considered covering up the name with roses. Then she heard about the tattoo removal program. She had never known that you could get rid of a tattoo.

“I was really excited, because I could actually make that mistake go away,” she says.

Lane is set to be released in eight months, and she wants to go home with a clean slate. That means erasing Doeboi from her body.

She’s not worried about anyone seeing the tattoo. Her chef’s coat would cover it anyway.

While in prison, Lane leaned into her passion for cooking and undertook culinary arts training. Now she’s working on her general equivalency diploma so she can take community college classes when she’s paroled. Her dream is to run her own restaurant.

Lane, who previously served time on burglary and check fraud charges, says her latest prison term saved her life amid a downward spiral that could have ended somewhere far worse. She has done self-reflection and therapy to understand why she was so angry and why she hated herself so much.

But wearing Doeboi’s name, long after they broke up, has been like carrying a weight on her shoulders.

“I was tortured and belittled, degraded and — no, it has to come off,” she says. “I’m a new person now. I understand my wrongs, and I don’t want to be that ugly person that I used to be. And today I’m not her.”

Garcia’s session lasts only a few minutes. By the end, the two small tattoos she is removing that celebrated her hometown — the area code 805 on her left cheek, an “SM” for Santa Maria on the right — are glowing white and bumpy.

“OK, that one hurt,” she says.

“That’s good. That means we’re on the right track, because that pain is the laser blowing up the ink,” says the technician, Barbara Schach.

Schach works for Inkoff.me, a tattoo removal company with outlets in Sacramento, Stockton and Berkeley that partners with law enforcement agencies and nonprofits to help inmates and ex-gang members. The Prison Industry Authority hired Inkoff.me on a two-year, $400,000 contract to run its tattoo removal program. Schach joined the company seven years ago, drawn by the opportunity to combine her past careers as an artist and a nurse practitioner.

Garcia asks Schach for a mirror and is surprised to see the progress that seemed elusive during her first three sessions. “Wow,” she says, before grimacing.

“What are you oohing about? The white’s gonna go away in a minute,” Schach says. “The white is the steam escaping from the ink.”

Even after months of laser sessions, Garcia is uncertain about her decision to remove the tattoos from her face. She has four others hidden under her uniform, including her mom and dad’s names written inside a heart, that she would never get rid of.

When she was imprisoned at age 19 for stealing a car at gunpoint while she was on drugs, everybody seemed to have ink on their faces. Garcia thought it was trendy. So when she was transferred to the Folsom Women’s Facility late last year, she tattooed her cheeks.

“I got it like a dummy and regretted it right away,” she says.

She realizes that face tattoos could hold her back professionally. She has been studying construction labor and building maintenance, with the goal of eventually advancing to a management position. The tattoos, she says, would quickly stereotype her as someone with a bad background.

“It’s clear as day that it’s on my face, so it’s the first impression,” Garcia says. “I don’t want to be viewed as that, even though I’ve done a lot of time already. It doesn’t have to show.”

But there’s also still that part of her that thinks the tattoos look cool. She admits she’s thought about getting them redone — then she immediately backtracks.

“No, I can’t,” Garcia says. “A little bit in me wants to, but (at) the end of the day, when I’m at work and I see somebody looking at me, I’m going to be really self-conscious about it, so I can’t even go there.

“I’m getting to a point where I just need to cut some old habits off. That’s probably where I’m at.”

Garcia is committed to the removal process now. She’s been on her best behavior, staying out of trouble so she doesn’t get kicked out of the program for fighting or not following orders.

The laser treatment has permanently removed most of the hair around her tattoos. It used to be long enough to cover them, but there’s not enough left for that kind of styling anymore.

The patches on her cheeks will serve as a reminder — of what she did, what she went through to fix her mistakes, and her gratitude that they no longer define her.

Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff