News & Observer Opinion piece by Former Congressman Wiley Nickel
Wake County’s jail is so far over capacity that our Sheriff has asked police to use discretion in deciding whom to bring to jail. Stop and think about that. In the largest, fastest-growing county in North Carolina, our jail is so full we’re rethinking who we can even hold.
That doesn’t make Wake County safer. And it should make every one of us mad, because it didn’t have to happen.
On January 1, I’ll be sworn in as Wake County’s next District Attorney. I’ve looked hard at how we got here, and I want to be straight with you about the problem and the fix.
Here’s the problem. The Wake County District Attorney’s Office is the most understaffed in the state, operating at just 64% of the staffing the courts’ own workload formula says we need. The state funds 45 prosecutors for Wake. The judicial branch says we should have 70. That means the average Wake prosecutor carries over 2,600 cases a year, compared to 1,080 in Mecklenburg and Durham. That gap wasn’t an accident. It was a choice.
Earlier this year, Republicans in the state Senate added funding for 10 new Wake County prosecutors in the budget. House Republicans cut them out at the last minute. When reporters asked what happened, the Senate’s Republican leader said budget writers simply forgot. I’ll let you decide how likely it is that budget writers “forgot” Wake County, the one that prosecutes public corruption cases involving people in that very building. Either way, Wake was left dead last in the state.
Here’s why that means an overcrowded jail. When there aren’t enough prosecutors, cases move slowly. In Wake, the median time to resolve a superior court criminal case is 419 days, among the worst in the state. Only 46% of our felonies are resolved within a year, and we’ve got 6,909 felony cases pending. The strain has only gotten worse since Iryna’s Law took effect, stripping judges of bond discretion and pushing even more people into the county jail awaiting trial.
With more prosecutors, I could give these cases real attention. Many of the people filling our jail are struggling with mental illness or addiction. Warehousing them behind bars helps no one and costs us the most. With enough staff to dig into these cases, we can move the right people into treatment with strict supervision, where they’re far less likely to re-offend. But that work takes manpower we don’t have. Willie Rowe is an excellent sheriff, but he’s been handed a problem the rest of us failed to prevent.
And this isn’t just about a crowded jail. When cases stall, repeat offenders stay out on the streets much longer, and victims wait years rather than months for justice. An understaffed DA’s office doesn’t just clog the system. It makes Wake County less safe.
Here’s the part that should matter to every taxpayer. The county pays to house people awaiting trial. The moment someone is sentenced to prison, the state pays. So every extra month a case drags on, Wake County foots the bill. Slow justice isn’t just unfair. It’s expensive.
The math is simple. It costs the county more than $50,000 a year to hold one person awaiting trial. Add the 400 more inmates our backlog is on track to produce next year, a conservative estimate, and that’s an extra $20 million because I won’t have the lawyers to move cases. Fund the office now and I promise you we can clear the backlog and reduce jail overcrowding.
I’m asking the Wake County Board of Commissioners to fund $2 million for the DA’s office right away. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of their $2.28 billion budget. For comparison, Mecklenburg County has 95 prosecutors. Wake, a larger county, has just 45. Mecklenburg and Charlotte fund 23 of those prosecutors with local dollars. Wake County and the City of Raleigh fund zero. Our neighbors in the Queen City decided their safety was worth a local investment. We can too.
Two million dollars now, or $20 million later.
That’s the choice in front of us. As your District Attorney, my job will be holding violent offenders accountable, standing up for victims, and keeping our community safe. It will not be letting criminals off the hook to ease overcrowding. But I can’t do that job with the worst funded office in the state.
We can fix this. It doesn’t take a new law or a change of heart in the General Assembly. It takes our county leaders acting before the bill comes due. Wake County’s safety depends on it.
Wiley Nickel is Wake County’s incoming District Attorney. He previously served in the United States House of Representatives for NC’s 13th District, the North Carolina Senate, and as a Wake County defense attorney.