Lawmakers look at parole reform as session gears up in Charleston

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WCHS/WVAH) — The joint Senate and House Judiciary Committee is looking to solve one of West Virginia's most pressing issues: prison overcrowding.

Today, seven out of 10 regional jails are over-capacity. That averages out to about 16 percent too many inmates per jail.

The overcrowding is affecting jail operations and is also a major burden to tax payers. Now, lawmakers are considering a plan to save the roughly $16 million each year being spent on an overcrowded prison system.

West Virginia's maximum security prison may not be overcrowded, but the backup of convicted prisoners in the regional jails has put the jail system 31 percent over capacity on its worst day and 16 percent over on Monday.

Overcrowding creates security issues and creates a scenario where courts could intervene in running jails.

Lawmakers are looking at parole board reform as one way to ease prisoner overcrowding and costs in West Virginia's prisons and jails.

A joint judiciary committee heard granting automatic parole when non-violent offenders hit their eligibility dates could cut the prison population by more than 1,000 inmates. Those inmates would have to complete all prison requirements and not have broken any major rules behind bars.

DMAPS Secretary Jeff Sandy said it takes about $1,000,000 to house 28 inmates for a year. This proposal, if it were adopted, could free more than 1,000 prisoners each year going automatically to parole.

"But if you take out your calculator and you multiply 1.012 inmates $48.25 a day times 365, you're talking in the tens of millions of dollars,” Stacy Nowicki-Eldridge, deputy counsel at DMAPS, said. “Now I would just caution this committee if this is something you would wish to do, these are people who would be getting out and getting onto parole which means that they would have to have supervision. "

That would mean hiring roughly 15 more parole officers, but that's still cheaper even with benefits than the roughly 17 million to house the prisoners that this so-called presumptive parole would save if adopted.

Roughly 39 percent of the people in jail are felony suspects awaiting trial in state court, which is something parole reform would not impact.