The legislature’s budget stalemate has hit North Carolina’s prison system hard, making it difficult to pay bills and keep enough staff to safely operate its 55 facilities.
Starting pay for correctional officers is $37,000 a year, or about $18 an hour – the second lowest in the country. That’s made it hard to fill thousands of vacant positions and resulted in major safety concerns.
The agency hasn’t received an increase in its operating budget to keep pace with inflation (something that normally happens when the legislature passes a budget).
The prison system also has $1.4 billion in deferred maintenance needs, from unairconditioned buildings to dysfunctional fire alarms.
Secretary of Adult Correction Leslie Dismukes joined the WUNC Politics Podcast this week to provide a closer look at the problems.
This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Gov. Josh Stein got my attention during a recent press conference, when he said the budget for the state's prison system is getting dire, and is “having to ask vendors to float them on their bills.” Can you elaborate on that?
“We have two very distinct and very large budgetary issues in our agency. The first is that our operational budget is simply insufficient for the agency's needs, and the second is that our budget for personnel, for the payroll, is completely insufficient. What that ends up meaning for our agency is that we are having to set aside the money just to make payroll, and when we have the remainder of that money, it is not enough to pay the cost of our daily bills. We are delaying payments for bills – some of them are up to 120 days old – because we are simply unable to make those payments with the base budget.”
How much of this stems from the lack of a state budget?
“Without having a budget, we just cannot keep up. When we go through the budget cycle, we talk about what our increased needs are. We talk about how the cost of things have changed, so that we try to account for that in what the legislature gives us. But without having a budget, we can't account for any of that. It is simply inadequate. The amount that we were given three, four or five years ago that we are now having to deal with in 2026 — it does not pay the bills these days.”
Do you have a sense for the dollar figure that's needed to get up to speed on these ongoing needs, in terms of vendor payments and general operational costs?
“We are, at any given moment in 2026, $100 million behind in our bills. As recognized by the governor’s ‘critical needs budget,’ $80 million would really help us get to a place where we are paying bills on time, so that's kind of the magic number for us to break even. But that is the number that we need to catch up. We have got to right-size our base budget based on the current operational needs of our agency. And if we cannot do that, then we will be in the same place again.”
The other big issue is the staffing situation. How many vacant positions are you talking about right now, and what impact does that have on your day-to-day operations in these facilities?
“Right now we have roughly 4,600 correctional officers working, and we need roughly 9,600, and so we are 5,000 short of running safe prisons. That is a drastic number. We need 50% more correctional officers to run a safe system, and we cannot do that with the salaries that we've got right now. We cannot recruit, and more importantly, we cannot retain. We are losing talented people, dedicated people, who for years now, we have been saying to them, ‘just hold on till we get a budget.’”
What are some of the competing fields that people go in to where they can easily make more money?
“People can stay in important work and make more money. Most of the sheriff's offices that have detention facilities, they pay more than we do. All of our surrounding states pay more than we do. You can go into other types of public safety work, and they pay more than we do. We literally are at the bottom of the pay scale.”
What safety issues are you seeing, and how do you manage the fact that the number of people on the job right now is way lower than what's considered to be the safe level of staffing?
“We have seen an increase in violence in our prisons, and I think that is simply because there are not enough people to monitor on any given shift. Our staff is in danger because we cannot pay to bring more people on staff for them, and so it is already a crisis. Those numbers will only continue to go up if we cannot stick our finger in the dam and start to retain the good people and start to recruit more people.
“People are tired, and they are burned out from mandatory overtime and from driving long distances to work in a place there where they don't have a lot of other support from their staff. We're going to continue to lose those folks.”
A few years ago in Pasquotank County, a couple of correctional officers died as the result of a violent incident that occurred. Is that something that worries you, that if we don't solve this problem soon, we're running an elevated risk of seeing that kind of incident occur again?
“It absolutely does. Those types of things could happen easily tomorrow. We, as an agency, are more poorly staffed today than we were in 2017 when that happened at Pasquotank.”
Listen to the full interview with Dismukes on the WUNC Politics Podcast.
