On Feb. 9, 20-year-old Desarae Godsey died during a stint at the Southern Regional Jail, adding another name to the growing list of people who have died at West Virginia’s deadliest jail.
An hour west on I-64 and a day earlier, delegates on the House Committee on Jails and Prisons sat around a large conference table to discuss some bills to hopefully make the jails a little better.
The week after that, they met again to hear from the state’s jail commissioner. A Democrat asked about Godsey’s death and the commissioner said he couldn’t give specifics. He did say in general, cracking down on drugs coming inside could save inmate lives.
The committee never met again.
Despite the deaths, the investigations, the lawsuits, the alleged coverups and the poor conditions inside West Virginia’s regional jail system, lawmakers failed to pass any meaningful bills that would provide oversight, better conditions or programs for those behind bars during the 2024 legislative session.
But the politicians had a lot of ideas — over 200 bills in fact — that would’ve created new crimes for people or even stretched out prison bids by decades.
Longer sentences and more felonies means overcrowding in the state’s jails and prisons, according to Sara Whitaker, a criminal justice analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
Almost all of those bills got cast in the rubbish bin too.
While nothing got accomplished, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Del. David Kelly, R-Tyler, chairman of the jails committee, said two big priorities for the session were more oversight and continuing to decrease the number of staff vacancies at the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Two bills that would’ve done just those two things — one that would’ve provided a 3% pay raise to non-uniformed correctional workers and another establishing an independent oversight ombudsman — ran through the House unanimously, the Senate didn’t bother to take them up.
Senate spokeswoman Jacque Bland said it’s up to the discretion of the chair to put a bill on the agenda. Neither Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Trump, R-Morgan, nor Finance Chairman Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, responded to a request for comment made through Bland.
Kelly, taking a few minutes from his day job as an investigator for the Tyler County Prosecutor’s Office, said he intends to try again next session.
“That would be my goal,” Kelly said. “That’s disappointing that they didn’t get across, but it gives us something to look at in more detail during interims.”
Throughout the session, DCR commissioner Billy Marshall appeared before Kelly’s committee a few times, reporting that a pay raise given to correctional workers over the summer and a new recruiting drive has been steadily chipping away at job vacancies, which at one point cracked 1,100.
As of January, the number had dipped to about 850. Marshall said the National Guard, which had filled the gap during the height of the shortages, should be gone by summer.
“I want us to keep our finger on the pulse of this vacancy issue,” Kelly said.
During the session, lawmakers did little with bills that would have improved the lives of those incarcerated throughout the state.
That’s a feature, not a bug, said Kenny Matthews, a former prisoner and criminal justice advocate.
“What real interest does the Legislature really have in seeing real reform, real changes?” Matthews said. “Because if they institute policies that allow that to happen, then they no longer have a platform to say, ‘We’re tough on crime, or these people are doing these horrendous things.’”
There were some bills introduced that would help with rehabilitating those behind bars– such as one requiring GED certificates for inmates at regional jails and prisons, another providing a minimum of 60 days drug rehab for parolees and probationers suffering from addiction and bills that would provide actual IDs upon release.
Lawmakers never put those on an agenda. Most were backed by Democrats.
“We had a bunch of good ideas,” said Del. Hollis Lewis, D-Kanawha, top Democrat on the House Committee on Jails and Prisons. “I feel like we would have been able to alleviate some of the stress as far as controlling the population that actually sits in jail.”
A Senate bill that would’ve made simple possession of a drug a felony critics say would have resulted in an explosion in the jail population, which right now is hovering at around capacity. That bill breezed through the Senate, went to the House Judiciary, but was pulled off its agenda for a meeting in the final weeks of the session and never placed back on again.
Another Senate bill would’ve curtailed a magistrate’s power to set a signature bond in a felony case – the House Judiciary Committee shot it down on a voice vote in committee.
When the Senate attempted to stuff the body of the bail bill into another bill, but that effort failed too.
Whitaker, the criminal justice analyst, said both would’ve driven increases in the jail population, which has been hovering at capacity in recent months. She said real reform would mean relying less on the penal system in general.
“These are policy choices by lawmakers to criminalize more and more conduct to increase the penalties when it comes to existing criminal offenses,” Whitaker said. “And if we want to see different results from this system, we need to make less use of it.”
But Kelly said decreasing the jail population is a balancing act.
“There are people that need to be in jail,” Kelly said. “And then there are pretrial detainees that aren’t violent, that don’t pose a threat to our society that we should be looking at. And I think we’re doing better with that.”
Going forward, the Joint Committee on Jails and Prisons could be getting a clearer picture of what the system needs. During the regular session, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Mike Honaker told lawmakers he is conducting inspections at all 23 of the state’s adult correctional facilities and he should be turning over a report by June.
Correction, March 22, 2024: This story originally misstated the direction the Capitol is located related to Southern Regional Jail.