By Rachel Crumpler
Every day, people leave North Carolina prisons and return to the community — more than 18,000 people this year alone. For many, rebuilding their lives after incarceration is fraught with barriers to basic needs like housing, employment and health care.
Those challenges took center stage in Raleigh April 7 at the North Carolina Rehabilitation and Reentry Conference, where six people who are incarcerated in three North Carolina prisons addressed a crowd of more than 600 attendees. They spoke candidly about their biggest concerns as they approach their release dates — from reuniting with their children to finding work with a criminal record and securing the essentials needed to start over.
“I’m very nervous in terms of judgment once I get home and everyone looking at me differently,” said Rosemary Hernandez, who is expected to be released from prison in January 2029. “I’m also concerned job-wise. I have a friend who just recently got released last year in January, and she’s been struggling for the last year to get a job. That is one important thing for me because that’s a step for me to get closer to being stable and having my children back in my home with me.”
Others pointed to housing, transportation and getting needed IDs as immediate hurdles.
“The biggest issue for me is reconnecting to family,” said Christopher Taylor, who is expected to be released in January 2028. “When I left, my daughter was 13 … now she’s an adult. Another issue is probably identification, health care, housing — these are the topics that people need. Without those, there’s no way to succeed.”
The speakers also highlighted the programs available behind bars that have helped them prepare for release, including prison education classes and work release.
First lady Anna Stein, who has made rehabilitation and reentry one of her priority issues during her husband’s time as governor, led the panel and said elevating their perspectives was intentional.
“I visit prisons on a regular basis, and I always like to talk to people who are incarcerated in our prisons to learn what issues they’re dealing with and understand rehabilitation reentry from their perspective,” Stein told the audience. “These people are very hidden, and visibility is important — that’s what I wanted to have today: visibility of the people that we’re actually doing this work for.”
Since January 2024, state leaders have been taking action to lessen obstacles that could derail a successful transition back into the community for the 95 percent of incarcerated people in North Carolina who will be released after they serve their sentences. They say improving reentry outcomes is crucial to providing people with second chances and to enhancing 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 from 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.
The cost of those outcomes is steep: Housing one person in a North Carolina prison costs more than $54,000 per year.
“Every North Carolinian, every American, every human deserves to live in a community that is safe, to work in a community that is safe, to raise our families in communities that are safe,” N.C. Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes said. “To me, having a correctional system that creates safe communities by prioritizing the rehabilitation and reentry of the people in our custody is absolutely foundational to achieving safe communities.”
Reentry 2030 progress
In an effort to reduce the state’s recidivism rate and improve public safety, former Gov. Roy Cooper signed Executive Order No. 303 on Jan. 29, 2024, launching North Carolina’s “whole-of-government” effort to break down barriers and bolster support for people returning home after incarceration. The work has continued — and grown — under the Stein administration over the past year.
“Equipping folks with the tools that they need to succeed with their second chance — it’s the right thing to do,” said Gov. Josh Stein during his keynote remarks at the conference. “Of course, it helps them, it helps their families, but also, selfishly, it helps all of us. Everyone benefits when each person meets his or her potential. When they contribute to the fullest extent of their talents, our communities are safer and stronger.”
North Carolina is part of Reentry 2030, a national initiative led by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Council of State Governments that aims to dramatically improve reentry success — with the goal of reducing the national recidivism rate 30 percent by 2030. North Carolina was the third state to join the initiative, after Missouri and Alabama, and is now one of seven participating states.
An August 2024 strategic plan developed by the Joint Reentry Council — a group that includes representatives from every cabinet agency — outlines North Carolina’s four overarching goals: improving economic mobility, expanding access to mental and physical health care, increasing housing opportunities and removing barriers to successful community reintegration for formerly incarcerated people.
Of the 133 strategies in the Reentry 2030 Strategic Plan, more than half — 71— are already in progress or completed, according to a 2025 progress report. The N.C. Department of Adult Correction rolled out an online dashboard in September to track progress, which is updated quarterly.
“We’re trying to be transparent and accountable to make sure we are moving the ball forward,” said George Pettigrew, the department’s senior deputy secretary for rehabilitation and reentry.
Accomplishments last year include Campbell Law School and Duke Law School hosting three driver’s license restoration clinics inside prisons. They helped 145 incarcerated people review their driver’s license records and explained the steps needed for reinstatement — a key barrier to transportation and employment after release. The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services also launched specialized mental health teams to support people with severe mental illness as they transition back to the community.
The Department of Adult Correction designated four more prisons as reentry facilities, where enhanced programs and services are offered to people nearing release. That brings the statewide total to 25 — nearly half of the state’s prisons.
Pettigrew said a major focus moving forward is how to better align state systems to remove obstacles — work he said that often does not require funding. He said the state is also working to better measure outcomes in the coming years to demonstrate the cost and public safety benefits of reentry investments.
“That’s the key for the next couple of years so that we can show those that are in charge of the funding that, ‘Yes, this is a good cost-benefit analysis,’” Pettigrew told NC Health News.
Resource challenges
As North Carolina pursues ambitious reentry goals, significant resource constraints are complicating the work.
The Department of Adult Correction is “in crisis,” secretary Dismukes has warned, facing staffing shortages and budget pressures that limit its ability to meet basic operational needs let alone expand reentry programming.
Dismukes told lawmakers in January that the department employs 4,979 correctional officers statewide but needs 9,682 officers to fully staff all posts across North Carolina’s prisons — a shortfall of 4,703 people, or an overall vacancy rate of nearly 49 percent.
With staffing stretched thin, programming is often one of the first things to be scaled back, even though the department would like to expand what it offers.
“If we can’t provide for basic safety needs in our prisons — food, shelter, medical care — then we certainly can’t provide for the programming that comes on top of that,” Dismukes said.
Budget pressures are also compounding the problem. Rising medical costs, needed infrastructure upgrades and other expenses have pushed the department into a deficit, she said, leaving little room to expand services. Without a new budget approved, the department hasn’t gotten increased funding and is feeling the effects of a prolonged budget stalemate between the state Senate and House of Representatives that started in 2025 and extended into this year.
“Right now, we are $100 million behind in paying our bills. That’s our water bill and our light bill, but it is also all the bills that we use to feed and clothe and house and provide medical care to the people in our custody, to fund our education and our programming with our partners. We do not have enough money as an agency to fund what we are already doing. So how are we going to get the money that we need to expand?”
Dismukes has urged lawmakers to increase the department’s funding and said she’s been inviting legislators to visit prisons with her to better understand their needs and work. Several have joined her, and she hopes more will.
“Everyone I take inside says, ‘You need more resources. This is critically important. We need to get you what we need,’” Dismukes said. “I think that the concept of reentry is something that they accept as a legislature generally, regardless of party.
“We have to be able to provide the programming, and we need the General Assembly to step up and fund our agency so that we can provide the programs that we need to provide.”
New reentry efforts
Amid the challenges, though, the department has looked for creative solutions to help it move forward where it can. This includes working to expand the number of prison volunteers who can help sustain and run programs amid staffing shortages.
The department is also pursuing grant funding. In January, the department was selected as one of four states for the inaugural cohort of Jobs for the Future’s Fair Chance to Advance State Action Networks. This will provide up to $2.1 million over four years to expand postsecondary education and workforce pathways for people with histories of incarceration.
Major efforts to improve reentry are also happening outside state government, as community advocates and nonprofits develop new programs and partnerships.
Kerwin Pittman, a state leader in reentry with first-hand knowledge of returning to the community after more than 11 years incarcerated, is leading an ambitious project to turn a former Wayne County prison into a reentry and workforce development center.
Another project is underway in Charlotte. JUMP, or the Justice and Upward Mobility Project, a national nonprofit formed by Larry Miller, chairman of the Jordan Brand Advisory Board at Nike, is working to help provide educational and employment opportunities for justice-impacted people. One of its goals is to catalyze the creation of 1 million jobs by 2040. To help do this, the organization has committed to building 30 coalition cities in the next 15 years, including in North Carolina.
Miller spoke at the conference, sharing his personal story of how, as he climbed the ranks at Nike, he kept secret the fact that he served time for an armed robbery and gang-related murder he was involved with as a teen. Since going public about that several years ago and publication of his book Jump: My Secret Journey from the Streets to the Boardroom, he’s become a leading reentry advocate.
“I’ve been around the country a lot, and what’s going on here in North Carolina is not going on in other places around the country,” said Miller. “You guys have set the bar for other states.”
State leaders would like to raise that bar even higher.
“People leaving incarceration — they are faced with important choices that they will make when they get home,” Gov. Stein said. “But we, as policy-makers and community leaders, we have choices to make as well. I believe that we must choose to do what we can to reduce the barriers to successful reentry.”
KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
