Boyd Bennett, the Director of the Division of Prisons of the North Carolina Department of Corrections, recently spoke to over 100 Superior Court Judges at our Fall Conference in Chapel Hill concerning the state of the prisons in North Carolina and the rehabilitative services they offer inmates. Prison rehabilitative services will be addressed in a later column.
Currently there are 76 prison facilities throughout the state and one female halfway house in Charlotte. New Hanover County has two minimum custody prisons, one for 400 men located by the airport on Division Drive and one for 36 women on Darlington Avenue. On December 6, 2004, there were 36,061 inmates in the state prison system (33,542 male and 2519 female) and the number of inmates is rising 1000 a year. The overall increase in prison population has doubled in the last 15 years and the latest projection is 44,000 inmates in the system by 2013. It costs an average of $21,000 a year to house an inmate in our state prisons.
     Even though budget cuts caused some rehabilitative programs to be discontinued, the Department of Corrections has been continually building prisons since the mid- 1980's. Twenty-nine new prison projects were approved by the 2001 General Assembly, which included three brand new 1000 bed high security prisons. These are now filled to capacity and the state is paying counties to hold convicted inmates serving active sentences in the county jail until a prison bed opens up. This process is called back-logging and is a warning signal that the state needs to build more prisons or to amend Structured Sentencing laws to slow prison population. The last session of our General Assembly enacted laws increasing sentences for convictions of methamphetamine offenses, discharging a firearm on educational property, on some domestic assaults, and created new crimes of secretly peeping and aggressive driving.
     The 2003 General Assembly approved building three more high security, single closed cell facilities. These will soon be opened and are projected to be filled by 2007 and then no more space will be available unless the 2005 General Assembly approves the budget request of the Department of Corrections for additional funding for more prison construction. Each new high security prison costs 80-100 million dollars to build and will have a staff of 400 with an $18 million annual operating budget. The 2004/2005 Department of Correction overall budget is close to one billion dollars and the Department has 20,000 employees. The starting salary for officers in the Department is only $24,000 a year so there are hundreds of open positions in prisons throughout the state and it is harder to find qualified persons for the job because of the initial low salary and difficult working conditions.
     The prison population is increasing even though the percentage of violent crime in our state is slowly decreasing. The reason is that over 70% of crime is drug and substance abuse related but there are few long-term rehabilitative programs available inside or outside prison that are available to address this societal problem.

Opinions expressed in this article are solely that of this writer and are not the official position of the Conference of Superior Court Judges. Readers with questions about the Judicial System may send inquiries to the Weekly News, to be responded to by Judge Hockenbury or send the judge an e-mail at www.judgejayhockenbury.com .