By Rachel Crumpler
As last year’s state budget stalemate stretched into January of this year, N.C. Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes laid out the crises facing her department.
Staffing shortages pushing prison operations to the brink. Ballooning medical costs. Broken fire safety systems and mounting deferred maintenance needs. Millions of dollars in unpaid bills.
“We need your help, and we need it now,” Dismukes told lawmakers on Jan. 15 during a meeting of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety.
State lawmakers responded in April with an appropriations bill that directed $80 million in non-recurring funding to the department to help close its operational shortfall.
Now, the newly enacted $34.4 billion state budget allocates more than $2.2 billion to the Department of Adult Correction — more than it has received in previous years — and includes significant pay raises for correctional officers.
Dismukes told NC Health News that though the funding provides needed relief, it is not enough to overcome years of chronic underfunding.
“For too long, we have been running this agency without the money to pay our staff, fix our prisons or rehabilitate our inmates,” Dismukes said during a budget signing event at the governor’s mansion on July 7. “This budget is a start, but we have a long way to go.”
Largest correctional officer pay raise in decades
One of the budget’s biggest investments is in correctional officer pay. Dismukes said she’s grateful for the 13 percent pay raises for correctional officers — the largest increase in decades.
Lawmakers boosted starting correctional officer pay to about $43,600 from $37,621, which was the second-lowest salary level in the nation — behind only Louisiana.
“A number that starts with a four instead of a three is a more respectable number,” Dismukes said.
Dismukes and others have long argued that low pay has been one of the biggest barriers to recruiting and retaining correctional officers. The vacancies have left the department confronting “dire” staffing shortages that Dismukes has repeatedly warned impair the safety of staff and the more than 32,000 people incarcerated in state prisons.
As of June, about one in four of the department’s 6,574 budgeted correctional officer positions were vacant, according to department communications director Keith Acree. He said 4,902 correctional officers work across the state’s 55 prisons — a staffing level that is only about half of the 9,815 officers recommended by the National Institute of Corrections.
Some prisons have been especially hard hit by prolonged vacancies. Craggy Correctional Center in Asheville is winding down operations; prison officials decided to close it because chronic staff shortages left the prison operating at less than half of its capacity for the past two years. Meanwhile, recruitment efforts yielded only three new correctional officers.
Even after the raises, Dismukes said North Carolina will rank among the nation’s 10 lowest-paying states for correctional officers. Neighboring Southeastern states offer an average starting salary of $45,594.
Despite the Department of Adult Correction hiring 1,530 correctional officers in 2025, they still ended the year with 38 fewer filled positions than in 2024. Departures outpaced hiring, and the turnover rate among correctional officer positions was 24 percent.
“I think what this budget will do for us is to allow us to shrink the losses while we are trying to work on the gains,” Dismukes said.
Dismukes said she’s finally seen more people hired than leaving the department over the past two months.
She attributes the promising trend to conditional hiring pilot programs recently implemented at three prisons to streamline the hiring timeline. After hiring a combined 119 correctional officers to work at Central Prison, Harnett Correctional and Pasquotank Correctional, Dismukes said the program is expanding to Bertie Correctional and Granville Correctional — two other chronically understaffed prisons.
Even if hiring keeps improving, Dismukes said it will take months before staffing shortages begin to ease. New officers require extensive training before they can work independently.
“Once we hire someone, it’s really going to be about six months before they are a truly functioning pair of hands to help alleviate some of the safety issues on post,” Dismukes said. “It’s going to take them six weeks to get through basic training, and then when they come out of that, they’ll do field training.”
Wendell Powell, a captain at Harnett Correctional Institution, said the next challenge will be retaining those new hires. He’s worked for the state prison system for more than 20 years, a tenure that’s a rarity these days; nearly half of the state’s correctional officers have been on the job less than five years.
“I know they’re doing everything they can to try to get people, but the main thing is how to get them to stay,” Powell said.
Not enough raises for other key positions
While Dismukes was pleased by the raises provided to correctional officers, she said she was disappointed by salary increases for other staff working inside prisons.
Nurses are among the department’s most pressing staff shortages. Acree told NC Health News on July 17 that the department’s registered nurse vacancy rate is about 48 percent, forcing the department to rely heavily on contract nurses, who cost roughly 30 percent more.
North Carolina was paying $58,898 as a starting salary for correctional nurses — well below the Southeastern regional average of $75,446. It’s made recruiting permanent nurses difficult.
During visits to three prisons in the week after the budget was signed, Dismukes said she asked contract nurses whether the 5.5 percent raise would be enough to persuade them to stay.
“All of them said, ‘No,’” Dismukes said. “While it will be good for our dedicated nurses who are our employees to receive that raise, I would like for them to have received more. It’s just not a huge bump that will allow us to be competitive in the nursing market.”
She said the budget also leaves a gap for non-certified staff — such as maintenance workers and administrative staff — who work in prisons and have contact with incarcerated people. They are only receiving a 3 percent increase.
“If you think about the job that an HVAC technician or a plumber does in the community and what they are able to get paid for that, and then compare that with what we are able to pay them in a prison setting, we are not able to compete,” Dismukes said. “We have got to be able to better compensate those folks.”
Powell, who is also president of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, said the 3 percent raise many state employees received is not enough to keep up with inflation.
“On top of that, health care is about to go up,” Powell said. “You got a little bit of a raise, and now it’s going to be eaten up by paying more for insurance.”
Beyond raises, Dismukes said she’s trying to improve recruitment and retention by strengthening workplace morale and culture. Those efforts include providing more leadership training, career development opportunities and technology upgrades intended to improve workplace safety and efficiency.
Cutting hundreds of vacant positions
To help pay for raises and other department expenses, state lawmakers eliminated 574 vacant positions and redirected the roughly $40 million in unused salary funds.
Dismukes said a majority of the cut positions are correctional officer jobs that have been vacant the longest. Even after the cuts, Dismukes said, there are more than 2,000 positions to fill across the agency.
For now, the eliminated positions won’t affect operations because the department had already been relying on those unspent salaries to cover operating expenses, but Dismukes said a different issue will arise once the department staffs up.
“The conversation at that point is the fact that the number of positions that we have is not representative of the number of people we need to run our agency.”
Long session priorities
While the new budget makes significant investments in the Department of Adult Correction, Dismukes said it’s not enough.
The department ended the last fiscal year in a $150 million deficit, driven in part by ballooning medical costs for the aging prison population, Dismukes said. That operational gap came even as Dismukes cut each division’s operational budget by 10 percent last year.
Even with the higher appropriation this year, two-thirds of the $120 million provided to address operating shortfalls at the department is one-time only, meaning the department will likely face another deficit.
“We’re going to be in the same position at the end of next fiscal year if we don’t have a conversation in the long session about what the right operational budget is for an agency of our size,” Dismukes said.
Looking ahead to the legislative long session that begins in January, Dismukes said staffing and safety continue to be her top priorities.
“We have got to secure raises for the people that were left out of this budget,” Dismukes said.
She also plans to push for technology upgrades, including equipping correctional officers with body cameras — equipment rolled out to all probation/parole officers this year.
“When you look at states who have brought body cams inside their prisons, it drives violence down, and it improves staff efficiencies,” Dismukes said. “We’ve got to look at some of the other technologies and mechanisms that will improve staff experience, make their jobs more efficient, but also keep them safer.”
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