New Hampshire’s prison system is on the verge of losing funding for nearly 200 positions after the House Finance Committee endorsed reducing the Department of Corrections’ spending by 10%.

As part of a push to lower expenses all across New Hampshire government, Epsom Rep. Dan McGuire proposed cutting funding for 191 jobs in the Department of Corrections. That includes 36 positions at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, 14 at the Northern New Hampshire Correctional Facility and 14 assigned to secure psychiatric units and mental health, as well as a victim services coordinator, maintenance roles and other programming positions.

Out of the 191 positions being abolished, 99 are currently filled, said Jane Graham, the strategic communications administrator for the Department of Corrections. The agency’s commissioner, Helen Hanks, was not available for an interview for this story.

The specific list of positions that could be eliminated might change before the state budget is finalized.

“I expect, at the end of the day, there will be cuts of this sort of magnitude for Corrections,” McGuire said, “but they won’t necessarily be the identical list of positions that we have now.”

His reasoning, McGuire said, was that staffing levels don’t reflect the significant decline in New Hampshire’s prison population over the past 15 years. The number of people incarcerated in New Hampshire prisons has decreased by nearly 800 since 2009, and in 2025, the inmate population was 1,970. Meanwhile, McGuire said, the system’s staff has grown – but an informational sheet provided to the committee from the Department of Corrections on Monday says otherwise.

The agency had 1,085 authorized positions in 2009. That number dipped to 887 around 2016 and has since grown slightly. In 2025, the department had funding for 973 full-time employees, 747 of which are currently filled.

The proposed cuts would eliminate staff responsible for lots of systematic work, including managing sentencing in the offender system and maintaining legal compliance. They’d also do away with a big portion of the Employee Development Bureau, which handles law enforcement training and certification, according to the info sheet.

The House Finance Committee was tasked with reducing state spending by hundreds of millions of dollars as New Hampshire faces revenue shortfalls and enters its first year without the Interest and Dividends Tax, which the Legislature voted to eliminate last year.

These budget cuts aren’t yet final. The full House of Representatives will vote on its version of the 2026-27 state budget next Thursday, after which it’ll head to the Senate for revisions.

 

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.com.