North Carolina prisons face ‘dire’ staffing crisis

Years of vacancies, low pay and high turnover have eroded staffing levels at North Carolina prisons, disrupting operations and raising safety concerns.

by Rachel Crumpler, North Carolina Health News
February 5, 2026

Five prison employees were killed in North Carolina in 2017 — four from a failed escape attempt at Pasquotank Correctional Institution and another in an attack at Bertie Correctional Institution.

It was the deadliest year for prison staff in state history.

Investigations that followed pointed to understaffing as a central factor. At the time of the incidents, correctional officer vacancy rates at the two prisons ranged from roughly 20 percent to 28 percent, according to reporting by The Charlotte Observer.

Eight years later, that worst-case scenario is looming large for corrections leaders. Staffing levels across most of North Carolina’s prisons are as bad — or worse — than they were in 2017. Prison officials and advocates say the shortages have reached a dangerous tipping point, heightening the risk of another catastrophic incident.

“The way those prisons were staffed when those murders happened is the average way prisons are staffed now,” said Ardis Watkins, executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina, which advocates for state employees, including those working in prisons. “What we thought were terrible vacancy rates eight years ago are pretty average right now.”

About one in four state prisons — 14 facilities — have half or more of their correctional officer positions vacant, according to December 2025 staffing data from the Department of Adult Correction provided to NC Health News. Vacancy rates by facility range from a low of about 5 percent to as high as nearly 69 percent.

N.C. Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes described staffing at North Carolina’s 55 state prisons in stark terms during a recent meeting of the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Justice and Public Safety.

Dismukes told lawmakers on Jan. 15 that the department employs 4,979 correctional officers statewide. However, to fully staff all posts across North Carolina’s prisons, she said, the department needs 9,682 officers — a shortfall of 4,703 people, or an overall vacancy rate of nearly 49 percent.

That wide gap is pushing prisons to the brink. Dismukes said the department has determined that the absolute minimum number of officers needed to staff only “critical” posts is 4,651. Current staffing exceeds that bare-bones threshold by only 328 officers — a precarious margin as mandatory overtime, rising workloads and low pay continue to fuel burnout and departures.

“Our staffing situation is dire, and it is dangerous — dangerous to my staff, dangerous to the people in my custody and dangerous to the people of North Carolina,” Dismukes told lawmakers.

“Our vacancy rates have grown higher and remain at unsustainable levels, leaving us with fewer staff to run safe prisons,” she continued. “This problem has compounded year over year, as salaries of our employees have not kept up with the cost of living — much less the market rate.”

North Carolina’s starting salary for correctional officers is $37,621 — second-lowest in the nation and thousands of dollars below the average starting salary of $45,594 among neighboring Southeastern states, according to Department of Adult Correction data. Dismukes said low pay is the primary barrier to hiring and retention, and she urged lawmakers to allocate funding for raises.

“We need your help, and we need it now,” Dismukes said, noting that she was before lawmakers to “sound the alarm” on the agency’s staffing crisis.

“If we do not address these issues immediately, something bad will happen,” she said. “It is not a question of if. It is a question of when.”

Fewer staff, high turnover

Wendell Powell has worked for the North Carolina prison system for more than 20 years, starting as a correctional officer. Now a captain at Harnett Correctional Institution in Lillington, he helps manage staffing at a facility grappling with shortages typical across the state’s prisons.

Powell, who also serves as president of the State Employees Association of North Carolina’s executive committee, said he has seen shifts that once had 40 people working a decade ago plummet to 15.

“The least you had in a building was four people — that was considered short,” he said.  “Now you have one or two.

“Back in the day, we would have thought that was the skeleton crew.”

Now, Powell said, it’s the norm.

The work hasn’t changed, but with fewer people to oversee the state’s prison population of about 32,000, workloads have intensified. Shifts are longer with more tasks to complete, breaks are fewer and days off are harder to come by.

Staffing has long been a challenge in prisons because of the nature of the job and work environment, Dismukes said, but the COVID-19 pandemic pushed staffing to new lows as the coronavirus swept through facilities and added another layer of risk to the job.

Staffing levels have not rebounded and appear to be far from doing so.

In 2025, the Department of Adult Correction hired 2,647 employees across all job classes, according to data shared with NC Health News. That’s a ramp up in hiring from previous years, Dismukes said. But nearly as many people — 2,483 — left during the same time period.

Turnover is particularly high among correctional officers. The department recorded a 24 percent turnover rate for those positions last year. Despite hiring 1,530 correctional officers in 2025, the Department of Adult Correction ended the year with 38 fewer filled positions than in 2024. Nearly half of the state’s correctional officers have been on the job less than five years, according to department data provided to NC Health News.

“The bottom line is that unless I can pay them the raises that they deserve, I will not keep them my employee,” Dismukes said. “We cannot provide adequate staffing levels needed for our current population.”

In addition to custody staff, prison health care positions are also experiencing high vacancies, with the highest rate among nurses. As a result, shortages have forced some prison medical units to close, pushing more care to community providers — at a higher cost.

To help fill staffing gaps, the Department of Adult Correction has about 760 private security contractors working at 34 prisons, a spokesperson told NC Health News. Those contractors provide perimeter security, freeing up state correctional officers for other duties inside the prisons. Additionally, about 65 percent of the Department of Adult Correction’s nursing and medical providers are contract workers who are more expensive than employees.

Most staff are also working mandatory overtime to keep prison operations going. In 2025, prison staff logged between 150,000 to 225,000 overtime hours per month, according to Department of Adult Correction data provided to NC Health News — a tab of roughly $6 million to $8 million monthly. Over 12 months, the department spent $73.5 million on overtime.

“That overtime is for people who are already working a 12-hour shift and who are sometimes driving an hour to an hour and a half to and from work each day,” Dismukes told lawmakers. “That is a really long day, and it’s a really long month, and it is a very dangerous environment when people get tired in prison.”

Powell has seen the toll firsthand. He and other prison management staff routinely step in to help complete the day-to-day tasks of line-duty correctional officers, such as supervising meals, showers and medical and transfer trips. As a result, Powell said that can put him behind on his administrative work, including completing investigations, safety reports and ordering supplies.

Staff shortages exacerbate an already demanding work environment, fueling a cycle that drives even more people away. Powell said burnout is a top concern, but options to delegate the workload are limited.

“In our profession, fatigue and bad decisions can lead to someone getting hurt or killed,” Powell said. “If we see that a person’s working more, we try to schedule them off or put them on an assignment that’s easier.”

Shortages disrupt prison operations

Amid worsening staff shortages, North Carolina’s prison population has ticked up. In 2025, Dismukes said admissions outpaced releases by more than 50 people per month on average.

At the same time, the Department of Adult Correction has fewer beds available to house them. Insufficient staffing has forced the temporary closure of 4,281 beds across 19 prisons. For example, Bertie Correctional Institution in Windsor — the state’s newest and one of its largest prisons — has a capacity to house 1,504 men. But it is operating at roughly half that level due to lack of staffing, Dismukes said.

Staff shortages affect nearly every aspect of daily prison life. Correctional officers are responsible not only for security, but also for distributing meals, transporting people to medical care, supervising education and rehabilitation programs and more.

Some days, the staffing just doesn’t add up, Powell said, forcing tough operational decisions that directly affect those in custody.

“Sometimes facilities have to just lock it down,” Powell said, referring to days when some activities and programs are suspended for safety, leaving people confined in their cells for longer periods.

Those cancellations may solve an immediate staffing problem, but they come with ramifications.

“If you cut out programs and school, a lot of offenders look forward to that,” Powell said. “When they’re stuck in the building all day, tension rises. Tempers flare. It does have a short-term fix, but long term it’s not a good situation.”

With staffing margins already razor-thin, unexpected emergencies can be precarious to manage. Powell recalled a recent day when multiple medical transports — each requiring two officers — depleted staff working inside the prison. He made it work by calling in other officers, but Powell said sustaining operations with a smaller workforce is increasingly tough.

“Sometimes you just pray and take a deep breath, and you try to put your most advanced staff where you may have the most issues,” Powell said.

Years ago, Powell said, he didn’t have to worry as much. There were more staff on hand each shift — and many were seasoned officers — to step in if problems arose. Today’s less-experienced workforce adds another layer of concern, he said.

And with thousands of prison beds offline, staff have less flexibility to move people between housing units, custody levels or facilities.

“We cannot move them out of restrictive housing or into restrictive housing if we need to,” Dismukes told lawmakers. “We cannot move them into maximum custody if we need to, because we don’t have the staff to run those beds.”

Staffing shortages also hurt the prison system’s ability to support people as they near release and to reduce recidivism — a key priority as North Carolina works to improve outcomes for formerly incarcerated people by 2030.

“We cannot assign them to programming,” Dismukes said, noting that prisons often only have enough staff for primary security functions. “We are warehousing people if we cannot use programming for them, and we are not releasing them any better than when they came into our custody.”

Need to pay more

Dismukes described the staffing situation as a “crisis” — one she said is not sustainable. She knew staffing would be her biggest challenge when she took the job. More than a year into the role, it still is.

Low pay, she said, is one of the biggest barriers to recruiting and keeping staff.

“The police pay more. The sheriffs pay more, and often, even fast food restaurants pay more,” Dismukes told lawmakers as she urged them to approve raises.

Powell said the compensation doesn’t match the demands of the job, which he described as physically and mentally taxing.

“In some areas, you have prisons competing with Burger King and Subway,” Powell said. “That says a lot — that someone can go work fast food or work in the supermarket and make more than at a prison securing and keeping offenders safe and keeping the state safe.”

For many, the math doesn’t add up — particularly given the risks of the work. Studies show that correctional officers across the country have higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and are at greater risk of suicide compared with the general population. The average life expectancy of a correctional officer in the United States is about 59 years — substantially shorter than the national average of 75 years, according to a national 2024 study.

“The idea that you would risk your safety in that way for no more pay than you could get working in a fast food restaurant is simply not adding up,” said Watkins, executive director of the State Employees Association of North Carolina. “The mental, the emotional, the stress and the toll it takes on you is something that literally changes and shortens your life, but you’re not paid as though you’re making that kind of sacrifice.”

Powell said he has stayed at the Department of Adult Correction because he believes it’s a good career, but he maintains that it needs to be compensated as such. He plans to retire with the department, but he’s watched others head for the door.

Dismukes said she wants 2026 to be the “year of retention,” but she needs lawmakers’ financial backing to help make that happen.

Gov. Josh Stein, as well as lawmakers in the state House and Senate, supported raises for correctional officers in their proposed budgets last year. But last year’s salaries are unchanged because the Republican leaders of the House and Senate are locked in a budget stalemate that has left the state without a new budget more than halfway through the fiscal year.

“No one’s gotten pay raises,” Powell said. “Your insurance is going up … your cost of living is going up. But your pay is not moved. It’s very frustrating.”

Powell said raises could be one of the most effective ways to stabilize the prison workforce and give people a reason to stay, but it’s not clear if or when that will happen.

“Right now there’s not a relief in sight,” Powell said.

The stakes of understaffing are high, Watkins said, and prison staff are increasingly voicing concerns.

“If we don’t [solve staff shortages], someone will die again in a prison because of understaffing,” Watkins said. “People know when they take the job it’s dangerous, but they don’t need to die because of understaffing.”

That’s what Dismukes wants to avoid.

“We are doing everything we can,” she told lawmakers. “But these conditions are unsustainable.”

This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.