Published: December 01, 2008 10:23 pm      

Delegate wants old prison plans finished

West Virginia could ease the pressure of crowded penal institutions to a degree by simply completing two projects that would add 300 or more beds, says the co-chairman of a legislative panel on prisons and jails.

One project still on the board would translate into 100-plus additional beds at Mount Olive Correctional Complex, and another as-yet-unfinished task is at St. Marys, Delegate Dave Perry, D-Fayette, pointed out Monday.

Moreover, in response to Gov. Joe Manchin’s call to study prison overcrowding, Sen. Shirley Love, also D-Fayette, says the administration could simply expand a number of prisons, in particular the Mount Olive facility in his 11th senatorial district.

“You can renovate possibly at a lot less dollars than building a new prison,” said Love, the other co-chair of the Legislative Oversight Committee on Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority.

“Like Mount Olive. You have the real estate, which you don’t have to buy. You’ve got the system already set up there. Just add on to it.”

Perry attended the recent symposium at Stonewall Jackson Lake that zeroed in on the burgeoning prison population and from which grew Manchin’s suggestion that a special task force might be necessary to seek a solution.

“We’re well aware of the problem,” Perry said.

“To rush into a massive construction project, to me, would be careless. There are other ways in which to deal with the problem.”

Last month, lawmakers learned that penal institutions face a near 1,200-bed deficiency, and regional jails are packed with felons awaiting transfers to prisons.

Besides completing the St. Marys and Mount Olive additions, Perry said the Legislature needs to take a long, hard look at the sentencing structure, simply because many inmates don’t need to be locked up away from society.

“If we look at it across the board nationally, it does not comport,” he said. “There’s too much variance.

“Unfortunately, when you talk about sentencing restructuring, people have to be very careful and aware that’s not perceived as going soft on crime. We need to be smart on how we sentence these people and what kind of intervention can be done to ensure non-repeat offenders.”

A third area of relief lies within community sentencing, Perry said, and that includes both home confinement and day reporting centers, the latter already shown, in Raleigh County, to be a bargain in cutting costs paid to keep inmates in regional jails.

“My immediate thought is there has got to be a complete paradigm shift from just every situation involving locking people up,” the delegate said.

“That has to occur all the way through the judicial system. That’s not to be critical of people who are doing their jobs. But it has to start with sentencing restructuring, and a completion of the projects and wider use of resources available, rather than just locking them up.”

Last week, another panelist, Sen. Andy McKenzie, R-Ohio, applauded Manchin for “finally” getting involved, but suggested the time for studying the issue is past, and that action is needed immediately to head off what Georgetown University predicts will be a prison population upward of 8,000 by 2012.

What’s more, Perry says some inmates are advanced in age and still have family, suggesting they could go home and yield their beds.

“Again, the problem is, you cannot create a perception of going soft on crime, but we can be smarter with what we do than what we have been,” he said.

Love said he doesn’t mind Manchin forming a new commission, “if they’re going to do something about it.”

“We already know it’s overcrowded,” he says of the penal system.

“They may be able to utilize some county facilities out there that could be upgraded so they would fit the criteria of the law, so that someone wouldn’t be mistreated. I can’t say how you can be mistreated if you’re in jail. If you’re in jail, you’re in jail.”