Boiling Point: Overpopulated and Understaffed in West Virginia Corrections

West Virginia’s jails and prisons are plagued by overpopulation and understaffing that have depleted the system’s resources and left those in the system wondering: What’s next?

In West Virginia corrections facilities, an overcrowded inmate population and a plague of staff vacancies have created a potentially volatile setting years in the making. Yet despite the intensity of the situation, the state legislature has struggled to make significant headway on reversing the issue.

Since the early 2000s, the population of West Virginians in state and regional corrections facilities has trended well above the reported capacity of these facilities. As the issue has become more pronounced, the state government has attempted to redirect efforts to manage this issue, including calling in members of the West Virginia National Guard to support individual facilities.

Despite purported government efforts to manage these issues, the prisons and jails of West Virginia continue to be bogged down with too many inmates and too few staff, leaving those in the corrections system to wonder when and if their situation will ever get better.  

Overpopulation and understaffing can leaves inmates and staff to deal with a powder keg of heightened tensions, power struggles, unsanitary conditions and few resources to address problems. These issues combine to leave many facilities across the state rapidly approaching a boiling point.

Overpopulated

In overcrowded jails, the problem goes beyond a lack of space. Amanda Trent, a professor of criminal justice at Liberty University with over 20 years of experience in corrections and law enforcement, has personally seen the impact that overcrowding can have on a jail’s ability to run smoothly.

“Not only do you have to worry about tension and people getting along and all of that stuff, but it's really not the healthiest condition to be in as well. And when you have more people in…you're not getting them the programs they need, you're not getting them recreation as often as they're supposed to have it,” Trent said. “It’s the perfect storm.”

Trent was working in Virginia corrections during one of its worst times of overcrowding. At the jail she worked at, there were frequently four to five inmates in cells built to house two. The tight quarters brought power struggles, unsanitary conditions and overall high tensions that increased the possibility of violence.

On top of the issues offenders faced, the officers maintaining the jail found themselves having to handle unstable inmates in higher numbers than they should have been dealing with. Under ideal conditions, officers are able to build rapport with the inmates so that they can have a finger on the pulse of the jail and know when attitudes are shifting. Having that relationship with the offenders is sometimes the only layer of protection officers have, according to Trent.

“What I'd expect my staff to do is I want you to be able to tell me if I come to this housing location, I want you to tell me what kind of mood they're in today...I want you to be able to know when things are off,” Trent said. “And tensions were high all the time, so you almost didn't get a warning.”  

The 19 regional jails and state prisons overseen by the West Virginia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) had a combined population of just over 9,000 offenders in the 2023 fiscal year. Those 19 facilities have a combined capacity of just under 10,000 according to the DCR website and a report from fiscal year 2018, which have the most recent publicly posted numbers for those facilities.

However, the numbers from individual DCR facilities show that since 2018 at least seven of the facilities have been over capacity, even while other facilities operate at or below capacity. Regional jails are disproportionately overcrowded, with seven out of the 10 regional jails overcrowded in 2021 while all nine state prisons apparently operated under capacity.

Roadblocks to Alleviation

In Trent’s experience, mandatory minimum sentencing laws, also called “three strikes laws,” are some of the main drivers for overcrowding. Mandatory minimum sentences prohibit local prosecutors from using judicial discretion about how an offender should serve his or her sentence to have the best chance for rehabilitation.

“Prosecutorial decision making is something that keeps the course running very smoothly, and if they think someone can be managed in the community, then they're not going to put him in jail where already we have enough to handle,” Trent said. “But, when the mandatory minimum sentences started, that took that discretion away from them.”

West Virginia has mandatory minimum sentencing laws relating to the possession, sale and distribution of drugs and driving under the influence. In 2022, possession of a controlled substance, DUI, and possession with intent to distribute were in the top fifteen charges of offenders in jail throughout the state and accounted for a total of 5,823 inmates. Drug and DUI related offenses accounted for a combined 14% of the prison population.

One of the other driving causes of overpopulated facilities involves bond hearings, according to Sara Whitaker, a criminal legal policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. In most cases, trials begin with an initial hearing before a magistrate where a bond is set. Recent years have seen an increase in money bonds for those arrested in West Virginia, and when defendants cannot pay the bond, they are placed in the custody of county and regional jails.

“This is one of the ways we’ve seen our jail populations increase because…if you are without an attorney you’re more likely to face a money bond, which is essentially a bond that requires you to post money for your release. Over the last four decades, money bonds have gone up around the country…As a result, you have more people coming into a regional jail,” Whitaker said.

West Virginia’s current policy toward bail review hearings—which allow defendants to appeal a bond sentence—require review hearings for misdemeanor charges to happen within five days. The policy does not apply to felony charges.

“When we look closer at that [jailed] population of people, four out of five are there on a felony. So, if you have a law that applies bail review hearings only to misdemeanors, you have a law that’s bound to have very little impact on the overcrowding issue,” Whitaker said.

Understaffed

While regional jails are struggling to handle overcrowded facilities, the state prisons have been facing a crisis of their own with understaffing. Though staff vacancies have long plagued the West Virginia corrections system, they crested in the time surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The system peaked with more than 1,100 staff vacancies across the state, according to DCR chief of staff Pat Mirandy.

Governor Jim Justice issued a issue a state of emergency for West Virginia jails in August 2022, prompting a wave of government initiatives to try to fill the vacancies. The act allowed the state Department of Homeland Security to call in support from the West Virginia National Guard to alleviate staffing shortages at DCR facilities. Since the end of 2022, hundreds of National Guard personnel have been acting as support staff at prisons across the state.

Recent initiatives in response to the state of emergency have indicated some alleviation of this pressure. Mirandy told lawmakers in an April 15 committee hearing that there are now only 429 corrections officer vacancies and the number of National Guard support staff is at around 80, down from 413 in January.

Yet, while the DCR’s numbers show an improvement in understaffing, the experience of those within the system suggest the results may not be as fast-acting as legislators hope.

Mark McAtee has been incarcerated at Mount Olive Correctional Complex since 2015 and has seen the understaffing issue change in real time. According to his mother, Sonya McAtee, the past six months have been some of the worst for understaffing-related issues that they’ve seen in his time at the facility. When there are not enough staff on a shift, the prison has to go on lockdown and the inmates are confined to their cells for hours at a time.

“On average, five nights out of seven they’re understaffed in the evening and get locked down starting at 6 o’clock in the evening and are locked down until six or seven in the morning when the next shift comes in,” Sonya McAtee said. “With the general population, then they can’t go to the library, they can’t go to chow hall, they can’t go out in the yard and get exercise during those times, they can’t shower during those times.”

Legislation Garners Mixed Results

In the West Virginia Legislature’s most recent session, lawmakers passed no legislation targeted to lower the population of DCR facilities or increase the number of staff. According to Whitaker, there were more than 400 bills dealing with criminal law introduced in the 2024 state legislative session. Of those bills, around 175 of them would have increased penalties or added more crimes while others aimed to get people out of incarceration quicker.

There were a few bills introduced targeted at reducing the prison population, including Senate Bill 736 which aimed to create more opportunities for offenders to be released. But this bill, and other like it, finished out the session in committee and will not move forward until at least the next legislative session in 2025.

Though West Virginia was essentially inactive on corrections policy this spring, it has passed significant legislation to target these issues in the past, especially through introducing alternative avenues of treatment and punishment for offenders. 2013 saw the first big push in the legislature for corrections reform with the passage of Senate Bill 371. Among other things, the bill created mandatory supervised release options for inmates which allowed them to serve part of their sentence outside of prison.

In August of 2023, Justice signed three bills into law that increased the pay, benefits and incentives for correctional officers. Debra Minnix, the Director of Policy and Compliance for the DCR, believes the increased pay is one of the major contributors for the number of staff vacancies decreasing so rapidly in the last several months. She also credits the filling of some of those vacancies to a renewed emphasis on recruiting under DCR Commissioner William Marshall’s leadership.

“All that stuff together—the pay increases, the increased recruiting efforts, the commercials—all that stuff has helped. Our numbers in terms of vacancy rates for staff have decreased in the last six months drastically,” Minnix said. “I don’t think money’s the whole answer, but for right now, that money seems to be helping.”

Even with the state’s apparent successes with some legislation, those within the system are still waiting for legislators to address the issues that remain.

“I, nor Mark from what I understand, have not seen any change over the last couple of years…It’s really declined even more over the last six months and we’ve not seen any change over the last month or two. They’re still understaffed,” Sonya McAtee said.

Many have speculated on why legislators seem to categorize corrections system reform as a low priority, but Trent says in her experience the answer may be simpler than people acknowledge.

“It’s not sexy. It’s not abortion, it’s not gun control, it’s not any of those things that politicians run in a commercial ad…A jail is something that’s out of sight out of mind and most people in the community don’t want it anywhere near them,” Trent said.

“Most of the time by the time people are asking for a new facility or an extension to an existing facility, it’s already at a boiling point.”

Even as situation has grown worse in West Virginia’s prisons and jails, some inside the system are hopeful that the severity of the state of corrections in the state will prompt more action from both the government and communities. Some look to more recent improvements, such as the advent of specialty courts for issues like drug use, as an indication that some aspects of the system are changing for the better. Ultimately, only time will tell what the future holds for West Virginia’s corrections system and the people within it.