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Rehabilitation and treatment programs will suffer and more people will return to prison after getting out. The state’s prison system will struggle to meet legal requirements and force officers to take on extra overtime shifts. The state may even have to call upon the New Hampshire National Guard to fill the gaps.
These are the outcomes at stake if the state budget passes as is, Department of Corrections Commissioner Helen Hanks told state senators this week. She made her case to the Senate Finance Committee in hopes it would reverse sweeping budget cuts and layoffs approved by the House of Representatives, which she warned would create safety hazards and decimate vocational programs in state prisons. “The result is a correctional system that is under-sourced, overburdened and increasingly out of legal compliance,” Hanks said.
“These cuts may appear to offer short-term savings, but they guarantee higher long-term costs through litigation, increased recidivism, staff burnout and public safety risks.” Most of the positions targeted by the House are civilian staff, not sworn officers. Of the 190 on the chopping block, 133 are civilian roles and 57 are sworn law enforcement.
The House redirected money from 41 of those officer positions – most of them vacant – to fund overtime for others. Of all the positions to be cut, 98 were filled as of April 4. Rep.
Dan McGuire, an Epsom Republican who supported the staff cuts in the House, said in an interview that he thinks the Department of Corrections needs to slim down its civilian workforce. As the number of incarcerated people steadily declines in New Hampshire, he thinks staffing should decrease, too. The agency had 1,085 authorized staff positions in 2009, according to data from the commissioner’s office.
That number dipped to 887 around 2016 and has since gone up. In 2025, the department had funding for 973 full-time employees and 747 of those jobs are currently filled. The state’s incarcerated population has steadily gone down over the past decade and in 2025 comes to just shy of 2,000 people.
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Cross|Word Flipart Typeshift SpellTower Really Bad Chess “There’s simply an imbalance between the number of employees per inmate. That needs to be corrected,” McGuire said. “This is a time when we had to trim the budget.
We simply didn’t have the money that everybody wanted, and so this seems to us to be an area that can make do with less money.” Hanks argued that her department won’t be able to make do. The proposed budget reduction would leave almost no area untouched, including everything from mental health support roles to medical staff to regular office functions like human resources and administrative support.
The House’s version of the budget would also cut funding for roles that work directly on rehabilitating people in prison, including case managers, teachers, the family connections center and workers who help incarcerated people develop plans and opportunities to earn parole. “Many of those services will either not happen because we will not have people with the skills to do it, or individuals simply will not have rehabilitative or treatment programs to be successful to attain the privilege of parole,” Hanks said. She noted that New Hampshire’s recidivism rate – the percentage of people who get out of prison and then end up committing more offenses – has decreased from 51.
9% in 2009 to 40.2% in 2022. Not only will these cuts “reverse any traction that we’ve had,” Hanks said, but because it’s expensive to keep people in prison, she said it would be “advantageous” to invest in jobs that help people rehabilitate and re-enter society.
The Department of Corrections currently has a 41% vacancy rate in its entry-level officer jobs, which Hanks said civilian staff helps alleviate. She said getting rid of civilian positions will shift many responsibilities – including tasks from kitchen and warehouse management to determinations of timely release – to officers and force more overtime on law enforcement. The prison system already relies heavily on overtime shifts because of a shortage of guards.
Accountability in New Hampshire prisons could also be on the line, with the House proposing the elimination of eight of 12 investigators in the department’s Division of Professional Standards. Hanks said those roles provide oversight on violence in prisons, including on misconduct by both inmates and guards. The proposed budget also would eliminate positions that help with recreation in prison.
She called the idea of those cuts, when the department only employs one full-time person who oversees recreation for the entire incarcerated population, “a demonstration of not understanding” that positive emotional outlets are important to help people function in society. “When inmates have access to regular structured recreational activities it reduces idle time, which is a key contributor to mapping behavioral issues and reducing facility destruction,” Hanks said. “Recreation provides a constructive outlet for stress, frustration and energy, helping to prevent conflict and lowering the rate of violence.
” As Hanks attempted to raise the alarm to senators, her relationship with House budget writers remained rocky. McGuire told his colleagues earlier this month that the House Finance Committee had lost confidence in the commissioner. McGuire told the Monitor he could not discuss the details publicly but said he has received information from others in the department and Gov.
Kelly Ayotte’s new Commission on Government Efficiency about “things that are going on that shouldn’t be” like over-staffing in civilian roles. Hanks’s office declined to comment on that claim and referred back to her budget presentation. House budget writers didn’t meet with Hanks to discuss the impacts of their proposed layoffs and job cuts.
“The fact that we’re not on the same page with the commissioner means that we did the trimming ourselves, rather than say to the commissioner, ‘You pick how you trim,’” McGuire said. The commissioner faced what appeared to be a more sympathetic audience in the Senate Finance Committee on Monday, with senators from both parties questioning how these spending reductions would affect safety and quality of life in prison, as well as the state’s recidivism rate and morale among corrections officers. Sen.
David Watters, a Democrat from Dover, also proposed adjusting the spending plan to a back-of-the-budget cut, where the Legislature can direct an agency to reduce spending by a certain amount but would leave the specifics to the department head. Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America. Follow her on X at @charmatherly, subscribe to her Capital Beat newsletter and send her an email at cmatherly@cmonitor.
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