North Carolina prison staffers report an average of two assaults a day, the state's new prison commissioner told legislators Tuesday, as he ticked through a bleak report for the state corrections system.
The system's vacancy rate for correctional officers topped 20 percent this year and has climbed nearly every year for the past nine years, he said. The agency spent more than $60 million on overtime last year to try and fill holes.
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In 2018, more than 35 percent of new correctional officers aged 20 to 29 left the system within six months, Commissioner Todd Ishee said.
“We’re in some dark days as an agency," said Ishee, who was hired this summer into a new position aimed largely at improving working conditions in the state's beleaguered prison system.
Even the system's uniforms are bad for morale. Employees say they're hot and uncomfortable, and Ishee said they're being redesigned.
Short-term, the agency is closing three minimum-security facilities and making other changes to shift inmates and workers around the state to boost staffing numbers in struggling prisons. Long-term, some legislators are looking at salary increases that would cost tens of millions of dollars a year, if not more.
Ishee said Tuesday that the temporary closures are just a Band-Aid.
“Ideally, we can't afford to lose those beds, but we’re just backed into a corner," he told a Senate committee that's been looking into state prison issues since March.
The two-assaults-a-day figure represents everything that gets reported, Ishee said. That can be anything from an inmate spitting on a guard to one attacking an employee with a makeshift weapon. The most common reports are things like spitting, throwing urine or feces or punches and kicks, the commissioner said.
Because of the lag time for in-house reviews and outside criminal investigations, these figures far outpace the department's typically published number, which puts assaults so far this year at about 120, Ishee told senators.
Working conditions in North Carolina prisons have been an issue for years, and vacancy rates go up when the economy is strong and it's easier to get other jobs. But working conditions in state correctional facilities got renewed attention in 2017 after four people were murdered during an escape attempt at Pasquotank Correctional Institution.
A U.S. Department of Justice review in the wake of the attack found understaffing so severe that workers cut corners in ways that endangered personnel.
The attack was just over two years ago, and one of the four inmates charged was found guilty Monday. On Tuesday, lawmakers listening to Ishee's report were still using the word "emergency."
Sen. Harper Peterson, D-New Hanover, said the department isn't at a crossroads but at the edge of a cliff. Sen. Bob Steinburg, R-Chowan, whose district includes Pasquotank Correctional, said the system "has basically been neglected for four decades."
Correctional officers and other prison staff got pay bumps in a spending bill passed this year, which will boost salaries a bit past the current average for corrections officers in the state, which is about $36,800. But that average is below the $40,000 starting salary some would like to see implemented.
Steinburg said a plan to do that, and to give correctional officers a 25-year retirement plan like state troopers have, would cost the state about $200 million. That would come down on the backend, he noted, particularly assuming the state wouldn't have to spend $60 million a year any more on overtime.
Ishee said after the committee meeting that he wasn't familiar with that plan's details. He gave a more modest estimate to senators pressing to put a number on the problem: $30 million to $40 million in the first year.
Ardis Watkins, who lobbies for state employees at the legislature, said the prison system is in "a terrible emergency." She said employees don't like plans to close three facilities and coalesce those work forces. The longer commutes mean the 12-hour shifts they work now will be more like 14 hours, with drive time factored in.
Watkins said the state has closed 22 prisons in the last 10 years, and this would make 25.
"How's that worked?" she asked legislators. "The more people you shove in there, the more problems you're going to have.
"How much longer are you going to wait to fix this?" she asked. "Something has to be done right now in terms of salary."