Every person locked up in a North Carolina prison has access to a tablet they can use to watch movies, chat with families and access a wide range of educational programs, Secretary of Adult Correction Todd Ishee said Monday.
The educational programs are free, the entertainment options and family chats cost money. Ishee said the tablets cut down on idleness, which helps a woefully understaffed system avoid flare ups that can spell disaster in a prison.
Roughly 40% of the system’s correctional officer positions are vacant, Ishee said Monday, at a prison reform conference in Raleigh. He called the vacancy rates, which have been an issue for years, “an anchor holding us back.”
The tablet program is run by a ViaPath, which deployed more than 30,000 devices to the state’s 54 prisons in phases over the last few years.
Tablets aren’t assigned to people, but they can be checked out for use. Calls and text messages are recorded. The devices don’t connect to the normal internet but run over a secured, monitored network, the department said.
Ishee told the conference, hosted by NC-CURE (Citizens United for Restorative Effectiveness), that state prisoners have taken more than 259,000 courses through the tablet program’s free Hope University. He said the tablets help fill holes in the state’s prison system, which struggles to keep enough people on staff to offer educational programs.
The most popular classes so far offer certification in the restaurant industry, carpentry classes, electrical and plumbing education and basic math: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Because video chats and texts with family members cost money, the tablets have critics. John West, a Biscoe man whose son is in prison, also spoke at Monday’s conference.
“We have to pay to send him money, to talk with him, to send him pictures,” West said. “A lot of times prisoners are thought of as cash machines.”
During Monday’s conference Ishee also said that:
- Fifteen of the state’s 54 prisons are now accredited by a rating agency. Ishee said he hopes to get all 54 facilities accredited and that 15 accreditation audits are scheduled in 2024.
- A prisons “field minister” program has helped produce 44 bachelor’s degrees in theology and another 47 students are in the program now.
- Sixty-three percent of the state’s 32,0000 prisoners have a problem with addiction.
The conference touched on multiple topics, and advocates called repeatedly for people who are locked up to be treated with more respect. Attendees also returned, over and over, to North Carolina’s staffing crunch.
State lawmakers have boosted prison salaries in recent years, but more must be done, State Employees Association of North Carolina Executive Director Ardis Watkins told attendees. Watkins noted that, when four Pasquotank Correctional Institute staffers were killed during a 2017 escape attempt, the facility’s vacancy rate was around 30%.
Now it’s 40% system wide, Watkins said, “and we don’t think the building is on fire?”
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