Facts and Policy Reforms for West Virginia
Like most states, West Virginia’s prison population has exploded in recent decades.
Between 1980 and 2016, the state’s prison population increased by 470 percent, and by 2017, more than 7,000 people were incarcerated in West Virginia’s prisons. The state’s jail population has also grown in recent years. In June 2017, there was an average of 4,929 people in regional jails in West Virginia on any given day.
Of the people imprisoned in West Virginia, at least 40 percent were serving time for a nonviolent offense in 2017, and between 2010 and 2014, prison admissions for drug offenses grew by 19 percent. In 2017, three out of every five people in West Virginia prisons had less than a high school level education. Although the state enacted Justice Reinvestment reforms in 2014, a 2015 forecast from the state’s Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety predicted the West Virginia prison population would continue to grow at an annual rate of 1.8 percent for the following 10 years if no further reforms were introduced.
Unsurprisingly, West Virginia’s mass incarceration crisis has had an enormous impact on people of color, especially Black people. In 2017, the imprisonment rate of Black adults in West Virginia was nearly four times that of white adults, and although they made up just 3 percent of the state’s adult population, Black people made up 13 percent of the prison population in 2017. Ending mass incarceration is a critical — although insufficient — step towards addressing racial disparities in West Virginia’s criminal justice system as well as its broader society.
Women are also being sent to prison in West Virginia at alarming rates. Between 2007 and 2017, the number of women in West Virginia prisons grew by 22 percent. The majority of incarcerated women in the state are serving sentences for nonviolent offenses: In 2016, 71 percent of women in West Virginia prisons were there for a drug, property, or public order offense.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
West Virginia can dramatically reduce its prison population by implementing just a few sensible reforms:
- Ensuring that treatment programs for mental health and substance use needs are available as alternatives to incarceration, particularly for at-risk youth and young adults
- Creating a centralized database that will standardize records and consolidate data from various agencies in the adult criminal justice system
- Requiring prosecutors to include and justify estimates of the cost of potential incarceration
- Amending the state’s criminal code to reduce sentencing ranges.
- Eliminating cash bail and limiting pretrial detention to the rare case where a person poses a serious, clear threat to another person
If West Virginia were to follow these and other reforms in this Smart Justice 50 State Blueprint, 3,594 fewer people would be in prison in the state by 2025, saving over $375 million that could be invested in schools, services, and other resources that would strengthen communities.
For more information, and a detailed breakdown of West Virginia’s prison population and the reforms needed to reduce it, click here.