The Department of Adult Correction has a new leader. What challenges will she face?

By Rachel Crumpler

The N.C. Department of Adult Correction has a new leader: Leslie Cooley Dismukes was sworn in as secretary on Jan. 6. Addressing the growing health care and mental health needs of the state’s prison population will be among the toughest challenges.  

Dismukes, who took over from Todd Ishee, will oversee the supervision and rehabilitation of the more than 31,000 people in North Carolina’s prisons, thousands of system staff, plus another 75,000 people on probation and parole.

She takes the helm as the agency keeps struggling to operate amid chronic staffing shortages. It also is managing recovery from Helene — two prisons in Mitchell County are still closed.

Dismukes’ background includes seven years as Criminal Bureau chief at the N.C. Department of Justice. She also worked almost six years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, several years as criminal chief, and spent time as an assistant district attorney at the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s Office. 

NC Health News spoke with Dismukes about her vision for the prison system — including her priorities and the challenges the Department of Adult Correction is facing. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

NC Health News: When Governor Stein approached you about this position, what appealed to you about leading the Department of Adult Correction?

Dismukes: I have been involved with parts of this agency throughout my career, whether it was as a prosecutor working with probation and parole, working with the prisons for the folks that we were convicting, or whether it was through the N.C. Department of Justice doing the legal work for this agency. 

The big thing that attracted me to this agency — and hopefully that I will be able to bring to bear with my history — is the reentry work that we do [helping people leaving prison reintegrate into the community]. 

I have done reentry work in every job that I have had. As an assistant district attorney, that looked like mental health courts and drug courts in the early 2000s when those were just starting to come online. At the U.S. Attorney’s Office, we had lots of different types of reentry programming, including some of what we do here at DAC now, such as working with our local reentry councils, doing in-reach at the federal prisons, helping folks who were within six months of release try to find resources where they were releasing to. 

NCHN: You don’t have a corrections background like your predecessor. You’ve actually been more involved on the other side of the criminal justice system prosecuting people for crimes. How will this inform and shape your approach to the role?

Dismukes: The biggest issue we face here at DAC is our recruitment and retention. That is an issue that I’ve been working on for years at the N.C. Department of Justice as we’ve been working with law enforcement partners. Being able to work on recruitment and retention here within our agency, I think, is going to be critical, and I’ll be able to move seamlessly into that role. I’ve already started to get out to different facilities to learn the specific challenges of staff.

The reentry work is a huge part of what DAC does. Reentry 2030 is a very big initiative, and it is a lot of our charge. Reentry at base is a public safety issue. Having spent my career in public safety work, touching all the different sectors and working with all the different stakeholders, I feel like it’s going to be a pretty seamless transition.

NCHN: What have you learned from your first weeks on the job? 

Dismukes: One of the first places that I wanted to visit was Bertie Correctional because we have had some challenges at Bertie over the years, and I wanted to see some of those challenges head-on. (In a recent incident, local media reported on a correctional officer/supervisor who was beaten and stabbed with a broomstick by an inmate. The officer’s injuries were not life-threatening.)

The biggest issue I think we are facing there is our staffing challenge. We do not have enough correctional officers there to run the prison effectively and to run our programming effectively, as we would want to do in every facility. Our warden there has left, and we’re going to be hiring a new warden. So we will be trying to find the right person to bring into that setting to help Bertie move forward. 

That area of the state — the northeastern part of the state — is a people desert. There’s not a lot of commerce, and so there are not a lot of people there doing work. It is hard for us to recruit staff. We have staff at Bertie — and other prisons around that area as well — that are driving an hour, an hour and a half, two hours to and from work every day because they don’t live close by. There’s also a lack of affordable housing for our staff. 

I think working with other cabinet agencies like [the Department of] Commerce, for example, will be important to try to bring in more affordable housing or to try to see if we can target businesses and industry to move into that area so that then we can have a workforce to pull from. That’s a different approach maybe from the past — and something that this administration is really focused on.

NCHN: Are those site visits how you’re planning to immerse yourself in the issues and what you hope to address?

Dismukes: I would like to hit all of my facilities, as well as all of my community supervision locations, this year. And that’s going to be a challenge because there are 55 facilities — give or take which ones are open and closed at any time — and then more than that for community supervision. I have identified some locations as my first priorities. I’m leaving to go visit Avery-Mitchell Correctional and Mountain View Correctional, which are our two facilities [in Mitchell County] still closed from Helene. And then next week, when we’re out west with the cabinet, I’m going to visit our three facilities in the Asheville area that were closed for some time after Helene so that I can put my eyes on what our recovery and resiliency looks like.

After that, my next priority will be our top facilities with the largest number of vacancies to try to understand what’s causing the vacancies, what staff challenges are at those facilities and how we might be able to move the needle.

NCHN: Staffing shortages have been one of the biggest ongoing challenges DAC has faced, particularly since the pandemic. Where does overall staffing stand as you inherit this agency, and how do you plan to address this persisting challenge?

Dismukes: We are roughly around 24 percent vacant agency-wide. We hover in the 30s with our correctional officers and even higher than that for our nursing staff. We have been able to move the needle some in the past year through the work that Secretary Ishee has done. The vacancy rate has come down about 4 percent over the last six months, so that’s really good. We hope to keep trending in that direction. 

We have worked on quicker turnaround for our hiring and for our certifying. Many of our staff have to be certified, which isn’t something that DAC controls. The N.C. Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission controls that, so [we’re] partnering with the commission to make sure those decisions and investigations are streamlined so we can get our staff hired and on board quickly. 

I also think that recruitment and retention has to be a bigger focus. We need to grow it even more because that is our largest challenge, which trickles into everything. 

Our reentry programming is affected by the fact that we do not have enough staff to safely run a prison, much less run the programming for the prison. Part of that is going to be a public information campaign and getting people to understand what we do. I think there’s a lot of bad press surrounding what happens in prisons and the people who work in prisons, so we want to shine a light on the good work that our staff are doing and the hard work that our staff are doing — and make sure that everyone knows that these are good jobs and good-paying jobs and stable jobs with state benefits.

The retention side will have a lot to do with wellness for our staff and focusing on career advancement for them, giving them opportunities to train and to constantly learn. It’s also about providing a safe environment for them, which goes back to staffing levels. Dealing with prisons that have aging infrastructure and are not as pleasant to work in is also something to address. 

A big part of our budget asks to the General Assembly will be to deal with staffing retention challenges and infrastructure challenges to make it a better place to work and a better place to house individuals who are in our custody.

NCHN: What will be your approach with the legislature about salary and benefits for corrections personnel? 

Dismukes: The bottom line is we have to get everybody to understand that reentry is a public safety issue, and so critically what DAC does is public safety. We have safer communities when we can adequately staff our prisons so that we can adequately provide the programming to people in our custody so that when they are released, they can adequately and hopefully better reintegrate back into society. 

Money for our staff — to be able to have market rate increases to be able to pay a living wage to our staff — is needed. We are the largest state agency. We have the most staff statewide, and so it’s going to cost us a lot to be able to bring those people up to where they need to be. Making the case for that is making the case for public safety. By making DAC better and giving us more resources and making us more well-funded, everyone sleeps better at night because their communities are safer.

NCHN: An emerging dynamic is North Carolina’s aging prison population, which brings a lot of health care needs and costs. Just over one-quarter of the prison population is 50 and older. How are you thinking about this “graying” and the prison system’s ability to manage their increased needs?

Dismukes: Our state’s population is aging, and therefore so is our prison population. We are not equipped to handle it currently, because our [prison] populations typically have been younger and have been more rotational. We have longer-term stays now due to [mandatory] sentencing laws and the way that they have interacted with the length of sentences. Part of our budget ask is to help account for some of those things. 

For example, our pharmaceutical costs last year were way over budget because our population is aging and needs to have more medications. But if we are going to be able to provide programming like medications for opioid use disorder, then we are going to need more money, not just to cover our current pharmaceutical costs, but also to cover the expansion of medications for opioid use disorder, which clearly is directly tied to outcomes on the outside when people are returning — getting folks unaddicted, or in treatment and recovery. 

I want to think outside the box. I don’t expect or anticipate that all of our money to fund these things will come from the General Assembly. We need to look at grant funding and private funding and who we can partner with at other agencies who can bring resources to bear on this issue. We need to innovate on the money side, but we also need to innovate on the efficiency side, including looking at how our prison medical system is structured. I have asked the folks in this agency who are responsible for managing most of our medical processes to look at it “big picture”: What is the best way to run a prison medical system? How do we need to be structured? How do we need to innovate to make sure we are in the best, safest, most efficient workflow?

NCHN: The state’s incarcerated population also has a large need for mental health and substance use treatment. About one-quarter of incarcerated people were on the mental health caseload, and nearly 80 percent of people had substance use disorder in need of treatment. Treatment options in prison can’t keep up with that demand. 

Dismukes: Part of it goes back to budget, right? There’s been a lot of research surrounding medications for opioid use disorder and its efficacy and how it can have long-term outcomes and effects once someone is released from prison. Right now, we’re piloting it in a few prisons. We have put in our budget ask to be able to more broadly introduce it into other prisons. Our goal is to have it in every single prison, but we have to have the infrastructure surrounding it, which includes the nurses and also the other treatment and behavioral health options that we need to pair with that.

Another challenge for us is our nursing staff. Those vacancy rates hover in the high 40s, and if I had to guess, it has something to do with labor market rates and us not being competitive in that area. But it’s also a really hard job, and so we are contracting with nurses to come in and work.

Sometimes their pay is more than our nurses that are on staff and they also turn over at a higher rate, so the continuity of care isn’t there. 

NCHN: Reentry support made a lot of strides last year after Governor Cooper’s Executive Order No. 303. How are you planning on building on those efforts?

Dismukes: Reentry is a really good area where we can start to innovate. For example, what are our partnerships looking like with community colleges or with other types of colleges? How can we expand our Correction Enterprises‘ locations and also the areas that they support? If there is a main industry in a part of the state where a prison is, how do we grow that skill within our population so that then we can have a pipeline to those employers upon release? We need to think critically about making connections with the other sectors of the state, of state government, and of our commerce and business.

NCHN: There have been some calls to reform solitary confinement over the past several years. In 2020, Gov. Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice called for limiting the use of solitary confinement in North Carolina’s prison system, including by adopting the Nelson Mandela Rules prohibiting prolonged solitary confinement of more than 22 hours a day for more than 15 consecutive days. Is that a direction the prison system can go? What other reforms do you plan to consider or implement?

Dismukes: We have reduced by one to two percentage points our numbers in population in restrictive housing — that’s what we call solitary. We have a restrictive housing implementation committee that’s looking at how we are doing things, what the time is spent in restrictive housing, how you can earn good time credits so that you can reduce the amount of time spent in restrictive housing. We’ve instituted a 20-day cap on restrictive housing that we have for most people and are trying to get that in line with the Mandela rules. 

We are kind of in a phased implementation where we have reclassified what types of infractions cause the different levels of restrictive housing. Only the most serious can get restrictive housing at this point. That policy went into place on Dec. 4 — before I got here. We’re still having to educate people and teach people what everything looks like. There’s going to be some trickle-down time and some implementation time there. 

We’re also starting to work on phase two, which is looking at the disciplinary hearing process and trying to streamline that to have more efficiencies, have more fairness and more opportunity to be heard throughout that process. By bringing down the number of days that it takes to conduct an investigation hearing, then you can resolve those cases more quickly so that if an individual does not need to be in restrictive housing, we can get past that. 

NCHN: According to the N.C. Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission, about one-third of people will be back in prison within two years of their release — whether from a probation revocation or a new crime. What can the prison system do to get those numbers to drop so people find more success in re-establishing their lives in the community? Or what other help do you need to see those numbers drop?

Dismukes: We are going to have to make a conscious choice in North Carolina and in our country, frankly, to invest in reentry because it is a public safety issue. 

The minute someone goes in, we need to think about how we’re preparing them to come out. We need to back up all of our programming to that first day and how we can work all the way through so that when you are released, you are the healthiest, you are the most prepared, you have job skills. We can do some of those with internal programming. Then there are the things on the outside that we can’t do, that we need to partner with, like setting up transportation and housing and trying to find job partners. 

But it is hard for us to move the needle [on recidivism] without additional resources. 

NCHN: Those were some of the main topics on my mind, but what priorities do you have for your first year?

Dismukes: I would like to see within the first 18 months of our administration, a true vetting of all of our systems and processes. So looking at our efficiencies, at what staff needs, how can we do more with less, and how can we retain more staff and recruit more staff. Getting the “why” questions answered: Why do we do it this way? Why do we need this? Or what do we need? When we are in a position to make our next budget ask, then we can make sure that it is building upon this year’s budget ask and the things that we hopefully will get at least some of. That’s a big priority. 

Also, externally focused branding. People need to understand how hard our folks are working and the work that they do so that we can recruit more people. 

Internally, I’m very big on transparency and accountability, so that’s going to be another big focus. 

I see my role as being the person who can go out and push for resources, who can push for partnerships and work with stakeholders to bring them back to the agency, to get the agency what it needs.

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