DCR Commissioner William Marshall said Wednesday that progress is being made toward reversing correctional officer shortages in West Virginia. (Photo courtesy of WV Legislative Photography)
CHARLESTON — State officials reported progress nearly four months after legislation was signed providing additional pay and incentives for correctional officers and as a federal class action lawsuit continues over conditions in West Virginia’s jails and prisons.
Gov. Jim Justice and William Marshall, commissioner of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, provided a report Wednesday on corrections hiring and other updates during Justice’s weekly administration briefing from the State Capitol Building.
According to Justice and Marshall, 227 new officers have graduated from the state’s correctional academy in Glenville since May 6 during six classes. The 52 cadets of the 77th class are scheduled to graduate on Friday, Dec. 22, bringing the total number of new correctional officers to 279.
“Today, I’m really proud to announce … that our Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation have successfully graduated a gigantic class and everything with six basic training classes,” Justice said.
“Over the last several months, we’ve been able to restructure our academy process, which has allowed our superintendents to get new recruits on-the-job training … for a couple of weeks to see if those individuals are actually cut out for what the tasks are in our jails, prisons and juvenile centers,” Marshall said. “It has really improved the process. It has allowed the individual to get within our facilities behind the doors to see if they are cut out for this kind of work. It takes a special person to do what we do.”
Justice signed six corrections bills following a special legislative session in August, including Senate Bill 1005, providing $21.1 million to increase the starting pay and change pay scales for correctional officers in the state’s system of 11 prisons, 10 regional jails, 10 juvenile centers and three work-release sites. Senate Bills 1003 and 1004 will provide nearly $6 million for one-time bonuses for support staff in the correctional system beginning in October.
Justice declared his second state of emergency for correctional vacancies in August 2022. At one point, the statewide vacancy rate for correctional officers was more than 30%, with some individual facilities having officer vacancy rates higher than 60%. The West Virginia National Guard was brought in, along with some Division of Natural Resources officers, to help backstop correctional officer vacancies.
Since the passage of the correctional officer funding bills and a change made in October to salary scales, Marshall said progress on clearing up vacancies has occurred.
The Lakin Correctional Center and Jail near Point Pleasant, an all-women maximum security facility, has no correctional officer vacancies. The Western Regional Jail – serving Cabell, Lincoln, Mason, Putnam, and Wayne counties – added 14 new officers in the last month, with eight new officers starting soon. South Central Regional Jail, serving Jackson and Kanawha counties, is down to five vacancies.
According to Marshall, 32 new officers have been added in the last month to the Northern Correctional Facility, serving Brooke, Hancock, Marshall, Ohio and Wetzel counties, with two new officers starting in the next two weeks. The James H. “Tiger” Morton Juvenile Center in Institute is fully staffed. The Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Boone County has only one correctional officer vacancy.
“We have shown some growth in our facilities throughout the state,” Marshall said. “There’s been a tremendous amount of work done by our new recruiting team and structure we have in place … we’ve had a lot of success promoting our facilities and what we do. We’re excited about the potential of obtaining more officers.”
Marshall also said some progress has been made regarding overpopulation of inmates in state correctional facilities and how inmates are distributed across the entire system of jails and prisons.
“We’ve done a much better job recently with the classification of our inmates,” he said. “Our classification experts have been doing a wonderful job. We are as good as we’ve been in a long, long time as far as our prison population goes within our jails. We have several beds available in our prisons, and our classification experts are working on trying to alleviate some of the population issues we have in the jails to utilize some of those prison beds.”
The state is in the process of settling a federal class action lawsuit over conditions at the Southern Regional Jail near Beckley. The proposed $4 million settlement will be divided between eligible inmates who were incarcerated there between Sept. 22, 2020, and the date of the finalized settlement, approximately 9,200 inmates. Settlement details are still being negotiated and must be approved by the federal judge in the case.
The settlement came after U.S. Magistrate Judge Omar J. Aboulhosn’s 39-page order finding in favor of a motion from SJR inmates seeking default judgment against the state. Aboulhosn accused DCR officials of intentionally destroying evidence, including emails and electronically stored documents.
The separate ongoing federal lawsuit filed in August against the entire state correctional system in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia accuses the state of understaffing, overcrowding and delays of deferred maintenance for facilities. The inmates are seeking a ruling in their favor and an order to require the state to spend no less than $330 million on staffing and maintenance with available funds or by submitting appropriations bills between now and the next legislative session beginning in January 2024.
Justice and the Legislature included $60 million in the surplus section of the current fiscal year general revenue budget for deferred maintenance projects at the state’s jails and prisons. Those projects are underway.
Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.
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