By Autumn Shelton, West Virginia Press Association
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Corrections Commissioner William Marshall addressed the recent claim that 1,284 inmates statewide are sleeping on the floors of correctional institutions as a result of overcrowding during Tuesday’s interim meeting of the Legislative Oversight Committee on Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority.
“That number was released yesterday in the media,” Marshall began, noting that the number had been released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, but was inaccurate. “It’s not even their fault that number was reported.”
Marshall stated that, through his own investigation, he discovered that the correctional OIS system “doesn’t accurately track the number of inmates that are located in our facilities.”
“The actual number from December 4, of the individuals assigned to the floor, [was] 285,” Marshall stated.
According to Marshall, these individuals sleep in a protected environment, such as a cell or day-area, in what is referred to as a “boat.”
“It looks like a kayak,” Marshall said. “It sits about a foot off the ground, it’s fiberglass and the regular standard issue mattress fits inside of that . . . and that’s what they sleep in.”
He said the overcrowding at North Central Regional Jail is the most problematic, but work is being done to alleviate the issue.
Prior to Marshall’s testimony, Beverly Sharp, founder and executive director of the REACH (Restore, Empower & Attain Connections with Hope) Initiative and WV Reentry Councils, spoke to committee members.
Sharp stated that the REACH Initiative has developed a statewide network that helps provide housing, transportation, work clothes and more to formerly incarcerated individuals.
“I spent a 30 year career listening to story, after story, after story of people that have come through the federal prison system,” Sharp said. […] “There’s a number of pathways that we have created as a society that people end up incarcerated. That is the school-to-prison pipeline, that’s the foster care-to-prison pipeline, that’s the adverse childhood experiences-to-prison pipeline, that’s poverty, that’s trauma – there’s so many things that happen to us – and, along the way, we all make mistakes. It’s just some of us don’t get caught, and some of us do.”
According to Sharp, there are 808 “state collateral consequences to having a criminal record,” in West Virginia.
“If you add in federal consequences, there’s 1,824 collateral consequences to having a criminal record,” Sharp noted, adding that many consequences affect a person’s ability to earn a living wage, including losing their driver’s license, the loss of the ability to work in certain professions and the loss of the ability to find affordable housing and food.
“That’s what makes it difficult to stay out . . . once you have that label of ‘felon’ you are forever deemed to be a second class citizen,” Sharp said.
She said that it’s important that everyone works together to find a solution.
“I think it’s time that we stop arguing, and that we just start being transparent about what’s going on because these are people’s lives,” Sharp stated. ”These are people’s lives that we as a government, we as a people, are charged with protecting just the same as we protect people in society.”
Some solutions that may help decrease the recidivism rate and help individuals with reentry that Sharp recommended include providing state identification cards to released individuals instead of WV DCR identification cards and eliminating incarceration for technical violations.
After describing some of the struggles with transportation that individuals experience upon their release, Sharp said this “happens all the time.” However, “it’s not about placing blame.”
“It is a broken system, not just in West Virginia, but across this nation it is a broken system,” Sharp said.
“It’s about fixing the front end, and then we won’t have to worry about fixing the back end,” Sharp said. “If we fix people not going to jail in the first place because of technical violations, because of capias, because of, you know, setting bond at $500 for a person – that’s what it costs for two weeks of incarceration. I mean, if somebody is fiscally responsible, it’s not hard to figure out we are spending way more on incarcerating somebody then the bail that we’ve set. So, why would we do that? If they are not a threat, let’s figure out a different way to get them out.”
“The bottom line is people are dying inside and outside, people are homeless, people are hurting, the state is hurting, and we need to change that,” Sharp concluded. “And I’m here to help in any way that I can.”
