The New Head of N.C.’s Prisons Tries to Unwind a Staffing Quagmire 

The first few months after prison can be rough, as Richie Sanborn can testify. 

Sanborn, who was released at the end of August from Foothills Correctional Institution in Morganton, North Carolina, after serving six and half years for burglary, came out with little idea of where to go next. Not wanting to burden his mother, he stayed with her for just a few weeks. Then he was on his own, sleeping under bridges in his hometown of Lincolnton with only a blanket to cover him. “I wasn’t cold,” he said. “More lonely than anything.” He’s been showering at the YMCA.

He has managed to secure one important thing: a job, working for a local homebuilder. 

There’s also the psychological adjustment. So far, the 53-year-old has stayed off drugs, “but I get panic attacks,” he said. He recalled a recent visit to a grocery store, where he got in a fistfight with a shopper who jumped ahead of him in line. He knows he was lucky that no one pressed charges. 

“Sometimes I wish I was back in,” Sanborn said. “At least I knew what was going on.”

Many people released from North Carolina state prisons share his experience. With little assistance to restart their lives, they struggle to adjust to the outside world. Many wind up back in prison. 

Leslie Cooley Dismukes, the new secretary of the N.C. Department of Adult Correction, wants to change that.

She knows it won’t be easy. North Carolina, like many other states, is dealing with a serious shortage of correctional officers that has resulted in the loss of the kind of programs that might help someone like Sanborn. Across N.C. state prisons, an average of 35 percent of positions are vacant, but that number is as high as 60 in some facilities. Most prisons don’t have enough staff to cover regular duties inside, let alone think about preparing incarcerated individuals for the outside.

Dismukes, a 46-year old native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, is a doubly rare selection for the job. She’s the first woman to head the agency, and one of very few who haven’t spent their entire career in corrections. She has been a prosecutor, first working in the district attorney’s office in Mecklenburg County, and more recently serving as the head of the criminal bureau in the N.C. Department of Justice for Josh Stein during his time as attorney general, where she oversaw the state’s defense of all criminal appeals, as well as litigation on behalf of N.C. prisons. 

“I thought this could be a natural progression,” said Dismukes. “I’m looking at the same criminal justice system, the same public safety issues, but bringing a slightly different lens.”

In a statement, Stein touted her “strong leadership and creative problem solving skills” as reasons he chose her. 

The question now is whether creativity and a slightly different lens can fix some of the prison system’s most intractable problems. 

Looking for a Challenge

Observers say they weren’t surprised Stein appointed Dismukes to the post. Former colleagues and mentors described her as smart, hardworking, and principled. 

“Leslie is someone who wants to be challenged,” said Bruce Lillie, a deputy district attorney in Mecklenburg County who supervised Dismukes in her first job after Duke Law School. He portrayed her as a “fantastic prosecutor” who also serves up a mean plate of crab cakes. 

James Coleman, a Duke Law professor, was similarly enthusiastic. “I don’t have any question at all that she has the character and the ability to be an outstanding director of adult corrections,” he said. He managed Dismukes in his death penalty clinic and later interacted with her in her role at the Department of Justice.     

The department’s Public Safety Section, which Dismukes oversaw during her time as head of the criminal bureau there, was recently sanctioned by a federal judge for problems stretching back several years. 

“The NC Department of Justice has worked for years to address the persistent challenges faced by its Public Safety Section, including high caseloads, limited staff and scarce resources,” said Dismukes in response to questions about the judge’s assertion that the NCDOJ had failed to effectively monitor the Public Safety Section.

In person, Dismukes—who is married to a Cary police officer and has a toddler at home—is warm and down-to-earth. She doesn’t shy away from the fact that she’s a woman in what has traditionally been a male space, and has publicly embraced concepts of rehabilitation and redemption. “We’re all people,” she told incarcerated journalists this spring. “I think no one is a lost cause.”

Dismukes was unanimously confirmed by the state Senate in June, but she actually began the job in January. The department she took over has had its share of problems. Last year, the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission found that 44 percent of people released from state prisons in 2021 had been re-arrested within two years; 33 percent of them were sent back to prison. 

Thirteen people in DAC custody died by suicide last year, an unprecedented number, and another five have killed themselves this year. Over half of those suicides took place in solitary confinement, according to a series of articles The Charlotte Observer published in May. 

Dismukes is in the process of visiting all of the state’s 53 prisons, aiming to improve conditions throughout the system. That includes getting all facilities equipped with air conditioning by 2027, increasing technical skills training options for incarcerated people, and adding more chaplains. She and her staff have revamped the DAC’s disciplinary guidelines to reduce its reliance on solitary confinement, which it calls “restrictive housing.” Instead, it encourages the use of other consequences for poor behavior, such as withholding privileges.

“There will always be a need for restrictive housing for the most serious offenses like staff assaults,” said Dismukes. “But what we also hear from staff is that they need to have more control to be able to administer discipline.” 

DAC has also created new housing categories where prisoners can be temporarily separated from the rest of their unit, but given more time outside of their cell than traditional solitary confinement. 

Reducing the reliance on solitary is not simply a human rights issue; research has repeatedly found that prisoners who’ve spent extended time in isolation have worse outcomes after they are released. 

Roughly 31,000 adults are currently incarcerated in North Carolina state prisons, and about 18,000 are released each year. Improving their ability to adjust to life on the outside should be common sense, Dismukes said: “If the end goal is safe communities—and I think everybody can agree on that as a universal priority—what do we need? Lower recidivism. And what do we need for lower recidivism? People who have housing, jobs, education, and are well.” 

An Emphasis on Reentry

Gov. Roy Cooper started the push around reentry with a 2024 executive order directing state agencies to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people more easily access things like driver’s licenses and veterans’ benefits. Under Cooper, North Carolina became the third state to join the national initiative Reentry 2030, which researches evidence-based solutions and supports states making changes.

But Dismukes has quickly made it her own. “I’ve never seen a secretary prioritize reentry and recidivism reduction like Secretary Dismukes,” said Kerwin Pittman, executive director of the nonprofit Recidivism Reduction Educational Programs Services. Pittman also sits on the state’s Joint Reentry Council, which coordinates government agencies and organizations doing reentry work, alongside First Lady Anna Stein. 

While most prisons offer some programming aimed at reducing recidivism, what matters most are services that can help people like Richie Sanborn find housing, gain skills that will make them more employable, and manage anger and behavioral health concerns before they exit prison.  

Currently, those services are in short supply. The DAC tries to have case managers work with every inmate before they’re released to identify a place to live, for example. But those caseworkers are almost always overloaded. And with only about 200 transitional beds available statewide and a widespread affordable housing shortage, many people are still released and dropped off in front of the Walmart or the county courthouse with a few dollars and a “Good luck.” 

There are organizations that help ex-offenders with housing, health insurance, and substance abuse. But getting information about them to people before they’re out is often difficult. 

“When I got out, I had no idea there were people who could help me,” said Lewis Whitmire, who was released from prison three and a half years ago. He now works for the Rocky Mount-based nonprofit OurJourney, which provides “reentry kits” to offenders released from many of the state’s prisons that include up-to-date, county-specific lists of groups and services assisting formerly incarcerated people. 

Dismukes wants each of the state’s prisons to become a “reentry facility,” where those within a year or two of their release date can access life skills training, mental health support, and one-on-one assistance focused on getting out—and staying out. So far, 24 prisons carry that designation; Dismukes certified three of them this year. 

But ramping it up largely depends on one big missing piece: adequate staffing.  

Solving the Staffing Shortage

“More Beds Equals More Jobs,” read the headline in the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald announcing a 500-bed, $20 million addition to Bertie Correctional Institution in the northeast corner of the state in 2011. The expansion would bring at least 100 new state jobs to the economically struggling region, jobs generally considered reliable and decently paid.

But 15 years later, more than 600 beds in the Windsor institution, including the entire new wing, are empty because officials haven’t been able to hire enough employees. Sixty percent of the prison’s correctional officer positions are vacant, according to officials.     

During the pandemic, “the numbers dwindled down and never got back up,” said Bertie Warden Luketchia Boston. Instead, she said, locals are taking jobs as sheriffs’ deputies, which pay better, and at the chicken processing plant. The prison has had to cancel programs because there aren’t enough employees to cover them, said Boston. 

Greenville resident Keisha White used to work at the prison. Now she manages a convenience store. “It was terrible,” she said. “The inmates were scary. The pay was OK, but not worth it.” 

Bertie’s example is extreme, but around the state, one in three correctional officer positions is vacant, despite the fact that the state’s prison population is significantly down from its peak in 2012. The reasons are varied. In rural areas like Bertie County, the workforce is small and affordable housing scarce. Correctional work is also extremely stressful. Prison guards’ rates of PTSD are very high, rivaling those of veterans who’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan, according to one study.

But the biggest reason appears to be pay. North Carolina correctional officers earn the second-lowest wages in the country. While salaries here have increased almost every year over the past decade, more often than not, those increases only kept pace with inflation. A new officer now starts at around $37,600; after six years, the salary for a CO in a high-security facility tops out at $54,000. 

Meanwhile, fast food and retail jobs pay more than they used to; entry-level positions earn around $28,000 per year, and come without the responsibilities and discomforts of a prison. (Almost one-fifth of the state’s prison beds are in facilities that aren’t air conditioned, for example.) 

The problem isn’t unique to North Carolina. “It’s a national crisis, no doubt about it,” said Brian Dawe, national director of One Voice United, a correctional officers’ advocacy group. Younger workers want to make a difference and feel valued, he said. But the way most CO jobs are structured, “there’s no mission accomplishment—just trying to come home in one piece.” 

Efforts to work around staffing shortages, like mandatory overtime, have made the problem worse and seriously impacted the department’s ability to retain staff. Roughly 15 percent of correctional workers left their jobs over the past 12 months, much higher than N.C.’s average turnover rate of 3.5 percent. 

At the Bertie prison, correctional staff are required to work one overtime shift a week. While that adds to their paycheck, it can create challenges at home, as workers with kids struggle to find childcare to accommodate 12-hour shifts that start or end outside of business hours. The state paid $103 million in overtime to COs in fiscal year 2024-25, up from $91 million the previous year.

When there aren’t enough officers on duty to guarantee inmates’ and their own safety, a prison will often lock down residential units, confining people to their cells for hours at a time. Dismukes said DAC staff try to limit lockdowns to nighttime, when offenders are sleeping, but the practice inevitably happens during the day too. “We do have to employ some of those things,” said Dismukes. “I would like to get away from that.” 

It’s a malicious cycle, as lockdowns, canceled programs, and limited recreational options can result in more disgruntled prisoners and a more stressful environment. Retaining existing workers is almost harder than bringing new ones in, Dismukes has said. 

“Burnout is real,” said Wendell Powell, a captain at Harnett Correctional Institution, which has a vacancy rate of 35 percent. “Prisons that 10 years ago had 50 officers, now that’s turned into 20.” 

While the state has been deemphasizing use of solitary confinement over the past few years, agency data pulled by Disability Rights North Carolina indicates it’s still been used fairly consistently over the past nine months.

“If we do not have the staff to run our basic security levels at our prisons, we cannot run the programming that we would like to run,” said Dismukes. “And so staffing up is critical to us being able to rehabilitate people and release them into our communities in a way that they are not coming back to see us again. And that has got to be the goal.”  

Dismukes and experts agree that raising workers’ pay would likely have the biggest impact on solving the shortage.

But that decision is ultimately beyond Dismukes’ control. This year, the governor, state House, and Senate all proposed salary increases of 6.5 percent or more for correctional officers—more than double last year’s increase of 3 percent. But the two chambers have thus far been unable to agree on a final budget.

Legislators do want to increase correctional officers’ wages, said state Sen. Norman Sanderson, a Republican representing part of northeastern N.C. “For the last several years, we’ve been focusing more on teacher salaries than for other state employees …  but we’ve got to find a balance,” he said. “We’ve got to do everything we can to raise the pay.” 

Still, it would take years of increases for CO wages in N.C. to approach the national average salary of $58,000; the state’s average is currently $49,000. And that still might not be enough to overcome younger workers’ disinterest. 

Dismukes is aware of this. “I’m not sure I will ever find 4,000 additional correction officers,” she admitted.

Advocates say there is another solution: Having fewer people in prison. “The alternative to more funding is less people,” said Ben Finholt, director of the Just Sentencing Project at Duke’s Wilson Center for Science and Justice. “That to me seems like the obvious direction we should go.” 

He and others point to the almost 6,000 people in state prisons who are over the age of 55, who are statistically unlikely to commit crime again and who bring high medical costs. While state law permits what is known as “compassionate release,” eligibility is restricted to people who are “permanently and totally disabled, terminally ill, or geriatric” and deemed to pose little risk to public safety. 

For the DAC to agree that someone meets those standards requires months of work by people like Finholt. They must review a candidate’s medical records together with a pro bono doctor, submit a report to the DAC’s chief medical officer, and, if all goes well, present the case to the parole commission, which issues a final decision. But Finholt thinks it’s a clear solution to the department’s staffing woes that could be scaled up—and Dismukes and her colleagues at the DAC haven’t necessarily disagreed. “They’re cautiously enthusiastic about the process,” said Finholt. 

“Secretary Dismukes supports use of the medical release law to its full extent,” said a DAC spokesperson. But applying it to more people is not up to her. Stein’s office didn’t respond to a query about his support for compassionate release.

This is a tough time to make any moves that might appear soft on crime. In September, the General Assembly passed a crime bill in response to a stabbing on Charlotte’s light rail that aims to, among other things, restart executions and put stricter rules on bail. 

Still, it’s hard to imagine the current situation continuing indefinitely. For Dismukes, what happens to people in prison and what happens to them after are inherently linked and in need of shared solutions.  

“Until we as North Carolina decide to stand up and say ‘We have got to make this work so that our communities are safer,’ we’re not going to be able to get there,” said Dismukes. “I think that’s the piece that’s missing.”

Back in Lincolnton, Richie Sanborn is figuring out much of this on his own. A church recently bought him a tent and sleeping bag, making his nights a little more comfortable. He just put his name on a public housing waiting list, and is saving his wages until something opens up. Hopefully that’ll happen before the weather gets much colder. 

“It is what it is,” he said. 

Correction: The name of the agency Dismukes leads has been corrected. It is the Department of Adult Correction, not “Corrections.”

Amanda Abrams is a freelance journalist in Durham, N.C.