State officials join Alamance County reentry fair to aid returning residents

State corrections and public safety leaders turned up in Burlington as Alamance County pressed a simple public-safety question: can reentry services cut repeat crime by helping people find work, housing, treatment and transportation before they fall back into crisis?

Jeffrey Smythe, now secretary of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, and Leslie Cooley Dismukes, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction, joined local officials Wednesday at the Alamance County Reentry Resource Fair at Sustainable Alamance, 715 N. Church St. The event ran from 1 to 3 p.m. and brought together local employers, community organizations and service providers aimed at returning citizens. Organizers said the fair offered access to job opportunities, housing assistance, healthcare connections and education programs.

The visit carried added weight in Alamance County because reentry has become a recurring local policy issue, not a one-day theme. Smythe, who was appointed by Gov. Josh Stein effective Jan. 1, 2026, previously served as Burlington police chief and later as director of the North Carolina Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Division. Dismukes started her tenure on Jan. 1, 2025. Their presence connected county-level service delivery with the state agencies that oversee public safety and corrections.

North Carolina’s State Reentry Council Collaborative, created by statute, is tasked with studying the needs of people recently released from correctional institutions and strengthening local reentry councils. That state mandate matches what Alamance County has been building on the ground. Sustainable Alamance describes itself as the county’s designated local re-entry coordinator and says its mission is helping formerly incarcerated people gain and sustain employment.

The county’s reentry network already includes monthly Men In Transition meetings, which Impact Alamance said were created to connect formerly incarcerated men with community stakeholders and service providers. County Stepping Up materials also show Alamance County has been working for years on reentry, behavioral health and recidivism reduction through cross-system collaboration.

The stakes are measurable. One North Carolina reentry nonprofit says about 19,000 people leave state prisons each year, 44% are re-arrested within two years and only 49% find employment within a year of release. The same organization says the opioid overdose death rate is 50 times higher in the first two weeks after release than for the general public, a number that underscores why housing, healthcare and addiction treatment are part of the crime-reduction conversation.

Sustainable Alamance says it was helping 61 previously arrested men and women and had saved taxpayers more than $5 million since 2014, giving the work both a fiscal and public-safety case. The fair followed another county reentry event, the Second Chance Alamance Reentry Rodeo on April 26, 2025, signaling that the county’s push has been building for at least a year.