Ohio corrections director urges budget increases for staff, safety gear and statewide Taser rollout

Annette Chambers Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, told the Senate Government Oversight and Reform Committee that the department’s executive budget requests additional funding to increase prison safety and staff support ahead of projected population growth.

Smith said the department’s "mission is to reduce recidivism among those we touch," and that safety and rehabilitation must be balanced in the budget request. She described last year’s homicide of a correctional officer at Ross Correctional Institution and said the department is pursuing equipment and staffing changes to reduce harm and improve officer retention.

The budget request would expand safety equipment that the department has piloted in two facilities, including conducted energy devices. "Tasers are an effective de escalation tool and often stop the need to use force altogether," Smith said, adding the pilot uses a system called Trend to log taser handling and automatically trigger nearby body‑worn cameras. She told senators the pilot began this week at Trumbull Correctional Institution.

Smith said the department reduced its correctional officer vacancy rate to 7.4% after hiring about 360 officers during the current biennium and that the executive budget projects hiring an additional 400 correction officers in the next biennium. The request also includes funds to restore shift sergeants, which Smith said will provide mentorship and reduce mandatory overtime for new officers.

Smith described changes in the system’s supervised population over recent years, saying that while the overall new‑commitment share of nonviolent cases fell from nearly half to about 25%, “78 percent of those people who are housed in our prison system right now committed a crime of violence in their lifetime,” and that an increasing share of people being supervised are more dangerous than in prior years. She said parole officers' caseloads have been reduced in this administration from 1:77 to roughly 1:48 and that the executive budget seeks to expand ankle‑monitoring capacity and rapid location sharing.

Smith also identified inflation and staffing as major budget drivers, noting that roughly 72% of the department's budget is tied to civil servants or contracts and that about 8% funds community‑based grants for halfway houses and other reentry services. She said the department projects a prison population increase of at least 1,000 by July 2027, which may require reopening closed beds and adding staff.

Senators asked for details about the taser pilot. Ranking Member Weinstein asked what outcome data the department will collect; Smith said Trend logs holstering, activation and deployment events, and the pilot will combine Trend data with body‑worn camera footage to assess whether tasers reduce staff and inmate injuries and use‑of‑force incidents. Senator DeMora asked what the department is doing to stem turnover; Smith described targeted reviews of prisons with high turnover, an employee support team with roughly 150 trained staff, staff resiliency rooms, and recent pay increases for officers.

The hearing included no committee vote on the DRC requests; Smith concluded by offering to provide the committee additional documents about retention efforts and program outcomes.

Ending: The department framed its budget request as focused on safer facilities, more staff and equipment to reduce force incidents and better support reentry programming; committee members posed operational and data questions for follow‑up.