‘Right and smart thing to do’: Momentum for boosting support to people coming home after incarceration continues in second year
By Rachel Crumpler
Ninety-five percent of incarcerated people in North Carolina prisons will one day return home — that’s roughly 18,000 people this year alone.
But walking out of the doors of one of the state’s 53 prisons often marks the start of new challenges. Many people encounter a host of obstacles impeding their ability to reestablish a life in the community. Employers frequently refuse to hire them because they have a criminal record, landlords are reluctant to rent to them and, without a job, these folks often lack health insurance.
Since January 2024, state leaders have been taking action to lessen obstacles that could derail a successful transition back into the community. They say that it’s crucial to provide people with second chances and to enhance public safety, explaining that if people can land on their feet, they will be less likely to commit more crimes and return to prison.
An April 2024 report released by the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission found that from a sample of nearly 13,000 people released from North Carolina state prisons in fiscal year 2021, 44 percent were re-arrested within two years of their release and 33 percent were sent back to prison at a high cost to taxpayers.
Slowing or stopping this revolving door has advantages on the financial level too, given the average cost to incarcerate one person in a North Carolina state prison is $149 per day — over $54,000 per year.
In an effort to reduce this recidivism rate, former Gov. Roy Cooper signed Executive Order No. 303 on Jan. 29, 2024, which kicked off North Carolina’s concerted effort to break down barriers and bolster support for this population. During his last year in office, Cooper enrolled North Carolina in Reentry 2030 — a national initiative sponsored by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Council of State Governments aimed at dramatically improving reentry success.
The momentum for this work is growing under Gov. Josh Stein and his new secretary of the Department of Adult Correction, Leslie Cooley Dismukes.
Both leaders asserted their commitment to boosting support for those returning home from incarceration to more than 600 attendees at the North Carolina Rehabilitation and Reentry Conference in Raleigh this month.
“Strengthening reentry is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do,” Stein, who served as attorney general for eight years, said in his keynote address on April 1. “All of us want to live in a safer, stronger state, with more people contributing to their full potential and with less crime … That’s why I’m committed to achieving the reentry goals of [Reentry] 2030 — to give every person a fair shot at a second chance.”
Key supporters
George Pettigrew, deputy secretary for rehabilitation and reentry at the Department of Adult Correction, said that amid a transition in leadership, it could be easy for this focus to fade, but that hasn’t happened.
“It has just been amazing how they just said, ‘Oh, we’re doing it, and we’re doing it even better,’” Pettigrew told NC Health News.
The state’s reentry efforts also have another key supporter: first lady Anna Stein. She announced rehabilitation and reentry as one of three priority issues she will work on over the next four years.
“People who are incarcerated are truly the invisible of our society,” Anna Stein told conference attendees on April 2. “I want to give them the message that I see them, and I want to hear what they have to say.”
Stein explained that her work first intersected with incarcerated people while serving as an attorney and policy adviser on the state health department’s drug overdose prevention team. She said she learned the statistic that people leaving incarceration are 40 times more likely to die of an opioid overdose in the first two weeks after release than someone in the general population. That realization set her on a path of promoting access to medications for opioid use disorder in North Carolina jails.
In her prior work at the Department of Health and Human Services, Stein also helped develop a jail health toolkit that outlines the fundamental components of providing care in the state’s jails in an effort to improve outcomes for detainees.
Now, she says she’s looking to do even more for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations. She has already started visiting some prisons and talking with wardens, program staff and correctional officers to learn about the prevalent issues and needs. Dismukes also appointed Stein to serve on the Joint Reentry Council, a group that coordinates the state’s reentry efforts.
“I will keep [Gov. Stein] well-informed of the work happening in this space and also the needs that I see,” she said.
more coverage of reentry efforts
Work underway
North Carolina’s plans to improve reentry support by 2030 are outlined in a strategic plan developed by the Joint Reentry Council — a group of representatives from every cabinet agency — and released last August. The plan focuses on ways to tackle some common and pressing problems people face when leaving prison and jail.
The plan’s four overarching goals are:
- Improve the economic mobility of formerly incarcerated people.
- Improve access to mental and physical health care.
- Expand housing opportunities for formerly incarcerated people.
- Remove barriers to successful community reintegration, especially for those returning to historically underserved communities.
Of the 133 strategies outlined in the Reentry 2030 Strategic Plan, 52 are already in progress or completed, Pettigrew said. One of the boxes ticked in the first year of work include the establishment of more Local Reentry Councils that act as hubs to resources in the community for formerly incarcerated people. The Department of Adult Correction now submits Medicaid applications for incarcerated people when they are nearing release, which helps people connect with health and substance use services and prevent expensive trips to emergency departments and hospitals. The department has also forged a partnership with the Division of Motor Vehicles to provide more people with state identification cards before release, which are needed to access many resources and services in the community.
The Department of Adult Correction will unveil a public dashboard for tracking its progress on set goals in July. It’s an important accountability measure, Pettigrew said.
“I think transparency is important if we want to accomplish what we want to do,” Pettigrew said. “It helps keep us accountable to everybody, but it also raises the attention of this is what we need. This is what we’re doing.”
Dismukes said she has enjoyed seeing some of the prison system’s reentry programming in action during her first three months at the helm of the Department of Adult Correction — from the field minister program in which incarcerated people earn a four-year degree that prepares them to counsel their peers, to a reentry simulation for incarcerated women at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women to understand the tasks and obstacles post-release.
“I’ve always believed that reentry starts on day one [of incarceration],” Dismukes said. “It’s our job at NC DAC to provide robust programming for those in our custody so that they can prepare to return home and thrive in our communities.”
She said the department has about 170 dedicated staff and more than 4,000 active volunteers working to develop and provide needed reentry programming. Dismukes said she’ll be looking for ways to keep growing programming with an eye toward people being contributing members of society.
Among Dismukes’ goals is to expand the department’s work release program, which has contributed to higher employment rates and higher wage earnings, along with lower reincarceration rates post-release, according to analysis by the N.C. Department of Commerce. However, the program only serves about 800 people — a reduced capacity from over 1,300 work release jobs before the pandemic. The department has assembled an employer services team to work to increase employer partnerships and add more jobs to the program.
She also plans to make every prison a designated reentry facility, where programs and services are specifically offered to incarcerated people nearing their release to prepare for the transition. At these facilities, a designated reentry probation/parole officer starts meeting one-on-one with a person about nine months prior to release to assist in their individual transition planning, including housing, employment and other needed services. They can also participate in group activities such as resource fairs, reentry simulations and group speakers.
So far, 22 of North Carolina’s 53 prisons have this designation.
Additionally, Dismukes committed to expanding access to pre-release medications for opioid use disorder. The Department of Adult Correction started providing these medications to people with opioid use disorder nearing release at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women and Orange Correctional Center in 2022 as part of a pilot project. Twelve more prisons have started providing medications for opioid use disorder this year to help reduce the risk of overdose post-release — and the goal is for the medications to be available at every prison by the end of the year.
Staffing shortages pose barrier
While North Carolina has ambitious reentry goals, Dismukes and Stein acknowledged that chronic staffing shortages hamper the Department of Adult Correction’s ability to provide all the rehabilitation and reentry programming it would like.
Overall, the Department of Adult Correction — an agency with more than 18,000 full-time employees — has a vacancy rate of 24 percent, according to a March 4 presentation to state lawmakers. Correctional officers have an even higher vacancy rate of 35 percent.
“Despite our deep commitment to these issues, our programming cannot be at its best if we don’t have enough correctional officers to keep everyone safe at the facility,” Stein said. “The reason we have so many vacancies is we are 48th in the country in what we pay our correctional officers, and it is unacceptable.”
The starting salary for a new correctional officer is just over $37,600, with pay rising based on years of experience and the custody level of the prison.
Dismukes previously told NC Health News that recruiting and retaining staff is one of her top priorities. Stein’s budget proposal called for a 6.5 percent pay increase for correctional officers. However, any raises will ultimately be determined by state lawmakers who control the state’s purse strings and will soon set a budget for the next two years. The Senate unveiled its proposed budget last week, which included Stein’s recommended salary increase of 6.5 percent for correctional officers — an amount exceeding the 1.25 percent raises lawmakers allocated to most other state employees.
However, the Senate’s proposed budget also cuts 87 of 98 corrective program positions that have been vacant for longer than 90 days as of March 10. A Department of Adult Correction spokesperson said the agency is working to determine which positions would be affected, should the measure be included in the final conference budget.
To better educate lawmakers about some of the reentry challenges faced and funding needs, Dismukes said she is hoping to arrange a time for lawmakers to participate in a reentry simulation — a hands-on exercise where people seek to navigate a series of tasks after release.
A national example
Maggie Brewer, chief deputy secretary of rehabilitative and correctional services at the Department of Adult Correction, says other states are taking notice of North Carolina’s momentum to help formerly incarcerated people.
“Our Division of Rehabilitation and Reentry team has gone to several national meetings and spoke on panels, and the one resounding thing that we hear is, ‘We want to do it like North Carolina does it,’” Brewer said. “We have been the role model.”
North Carolina was the third state to join the national Reentry 2030 initiative, after Missouri and Alabama. To date, six states have signed on, including Nebraska, New York and Washington.
“If we can move the ball on a lot of these goals even if we don’t get there — but I have full confidence we will — we’re going to make a difference and transform reentry in 2030 for North Carolina,” said Pettigrew, who oversees the Department of Adult Correction’s Division of Rehabilitation and Reentry.
A panel of formerly incarcerated people shared the challenges of returning to the community after years of incarceration, putting into perspective the need for changes. While they’re now on steady ground, they said they want the path for their formerly incarcerated peers to be smoother and filled with more positive outcomes. The work can’t stop until that’s accomplished, they said.
“I’m just grateful to have an opportunity to be a mouthpiece for so many other men and women who are sitting on their bunks right now, thinking that no one cares, thinking that they aren’t remembered,” said Anthony Willis, who was incarcerated for 26 years in North Carolina from the age of 16 until his release in March 2022.
During his time in prison, he earned five college degrees, including in business management. Willis now works as program coordinator at the Urban League of Central Carolinas helping Mecklenburg County residents find work or enroll in workforce development. He also founded and runs Smiley Vizion, an initiative aimed at using motivational speaking and peer support to help at-risk youth and people returning home from incarceration “unlock their full potential” as well as spark conversations and change related to the criminal justice system in communities.
“I can be here to let you know that there are men and women right now who have been rehabilitated,” Willis said. “People can change, and they are looking for an opportunity to demonstrate that change, that maturity and that rehabilitation. I just want to be an expression of that and a testimony.”
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