County to Save Lots of Money on Ferrell

The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday passed the second bill in as many weeks aimed at reducing the inmate population in West Virginia’s regional jails.

It’s the second year in a row that lawmakers in the House have pursued a bill that, if it becomes law, would help keep some people out of jail while they await trial for certain nonviolent misdemeanor offenses.

The intent of House Bill 2419 is to require magistrates to release people from state custody on what’s called a personal recognizance bond when they are charged with certain low-level, nonviolent crimes, said House Judiciary Chairman John Shott, R-Mercer.

“The idea is to basically try to reduce the number of people that are being sent pretrial,” Shott said Tuesday. “In other words, they’re being incarcerated before they’ve been convicted of anything. It’s intended to try to reduce that flow in certain situations, but not to totally remove the discretion of the presiding officer, the magistrate or the judge.”

In doing so, Shott said lawmakers hope to decrease jail bills for the state’s 55 counties and make a more equitable and predictable system for who gets released from jail on bail and who waits for their trial in a cell.

Anecdotally, Shott said, lawmakers were hearing a lot of stories about broad discrepancies among who is held in jail before a trial and who is freed through bail.

“Keep in mind, magistrates are elected by the people, and some of them feel pressure to appear to be tough on crime,” Shott said. “Sometimes, they overlook the fact that the purpose of bail is to assure that the person appears for their court appearance and doesn’t constitute a threat to others in the community or to property and so forth.”

As of Tuesday, there were 5,107 people incarcerated in the state’s regional jails, which are equipped with 4,265 beds to house inmates, said Lawrence Messina, director of communications for the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Of those incarcerated, more than half, approximately 2,867 people, were awaiting trial, according to data provided by Messina.

In total, 12 percent, or about 627 inmates were pretrial for misdemeanor crimes, and 1,997 inmates, about 39 percent of the regional jail population, were awaiting trials for felony crimes, Messina said.

Another 243 inmates, about 5 percent of the jail population, were incarcerated awaiting trial for federal crimes, Messina said.

When asked for a breakdown of the pretrial jail population based on the charges against them, Messina said he was pursuing that data Tuesday, noting that most inmates are charged with more than one crime at the time of their incarceration.

Counties and municipalities pay a flat rate of $48.25 per inmate per day for those inmates arrested by their respective law enforcement officers.

The actual cost of housing one inmate per day is $53.75, Messina said, but the rate for counties and municipalities is capped, to help alleviate some of the financial burden. The state pays the remaining $5.50 per inmate to make up the difference.

Once an inmate is convicted of a crime, the state assumes all of the costs of that person’s incarceration.

It cost $70.90 each day to house a person in the state’s prison system in 2018, the most recent year for which data was available, Messina said.

“I expect that per diem will have increased when the 2019 annual report for [the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation] comes out later this year,” Messina said.