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| Senators Discuss Prison Population |
| By Erica Peterson, Staff Writer, wvpubcast.org |
| Published: 01/29/2010 |
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Senators discuss prison population, prescription drugs January 28, 2010 · The state’s burgeoning prison population is a big issue this legislative session. On Thursday, the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety had their budget hearing in front of the Senate Finance Committee. The senators had a lot of questions about the state’s juvenile programs. Sen. Walt Helmick (D-Pocahontas) reminisced about the days when the state only had one juvenile detention center—now, the population has dwindled but there are more juveniles in the system. Deputy Directory Denny Dotson said the division’s statistics about recidivism weren’t necessarily accurate because after age 18 they have a hard time keeping track of their former clients. “I could tell you that we’ve got about a 95 percent success rate for kids not entering the juvenile justice system, but that sort of hogwash because they’re 18 by the time they get back out on the street, many of those youth are,” he said. Terry Miller, the Regional Jail director, told senators that the regional jail system currently has almost 4000 inmates—more than 1100 over capacity. And there are several thousand who could need space as well—they’ve been sentenced or are awaiting sentencing or trial. Miller says a lot of the people in the regional jail system are non-violent offenders, serving time for drugs or alcohol. “Your top three alcohol-related charges, there were 7,618 of those charges and of those, 7,463, that was the only charge they had,” he said. “So that’s an important statistic. So, you’re looking at 98 percent of those just had that single charge.” Creating legislation to give non-violent offenders alternatives to jail has been a priority this session. Yesterday, several bills about prescription drug abuse were introduced on the Senate floor with that end in mind. Sen. Ron Stollings (D-Boone) is a co-sponsor. “We also need some type of substance abuse treatment,” Stollings said. “You know, these folks, you pull the plug on them, they don’t have any medicine, what are they going to do? They’re going to withdraw, they’re going to become very excitable, they’re going to break into pharmacies, break into people’s houses. So we really need to treat them. …we really need.” Stollings is a doctor, and says part of the problem is doctors who over-prescribe pain medication. “Turn the spigot off. We need to turn the spigot off early on,” he said. “Also, that would save boatloads of money at the end of the road. We need to front-load the system in such a way that we can maybe treat them for substance abuse early on, instead of them ending up in our prison system, in which case it’s a high cost. So the earlier we can treat them, the better.” All the prescription drug bills are pending in committee. Read More. |
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