Prison director retiring

Boyd Bennett, the state's prisons director, is retiring at the end of the month after more than 36 years working in the Correction Department.

Bennett, 59, has been the director of a system that has 79 prisons and roughly 40,000 inmates for eight years, Dan Kane reports.

He started out in the department as a probation officer, switched over to the prison division six years later, and rose through the administrative ranks to the top spot. A successor has not been named.

"It's just a good time for me financially," Bennett said of his retirement plans. "When you get as much time in as I've had with the state it doesn't pay as much to be working as it does to be in retirement."

More after the jump.

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Bennett said he is looking at doing some consulting work on prison issues or some teaching. He has a master's degree in public administration from N.C. State University. He also plans to help out at the family homestead in Stokesdale, north of Greensboro, where his father used to run a farm that had milk cows, tobacco and other crops.

The prison system saw tremendous growth during Bennett's tenure, adding roughly 8,000 inmates and six maximum-security prisons. New projections show the system could add another 9,000 inmates in the next 10 years. Bennett said unless lawmakers consider other alternatives such as reducing some sentences, those projections would likely mean the state would have to build five new prisons to keep up with the demand.

"Every prison director in my memory this has always been on their agenda," Bennett said. "Every year the prison population keeps growing and we ask what are we going to do about it."