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Gov. Joe Manchin is giving a special commission on the state's inmate overcrowding until July 1 to provide initial recommendations on how to curb the problem.
Although violent crime is down in the state and population has declined, West Virginia is locking-up more violators than ever before.
The state's prisons are overcrowded. If the current trend continues, they will be bursting at the seams by 2012.
Lawmakers are being told a new 1,200-bed state prison is needed.
Around the USA, with budgets in crisis, governors, legislators and prison officials are making or considering policy changes that will likely remove tens of thousands of offenders from prisons and parole supervision.
Collectively, the pending and proposed initiatives could add up to one of biggest shifts ever in corrections policy.
The USA leads the world in locking up offenders.
In West Virginia, non-violent offenders, mostly charged with drug or property crimes, exceeds violent offenders.
"Prior to this fiscal crisis, legislators could tinker around the edges - but we're now well past the tinkering stage," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which advocates alternatives to incarceration.
Even before the recent financial meltdown, policy-makers in most states have been wrestling with ways to contain corrections costs.
The Pew Center's Public Safety Performance Project has projected that state and federal prison populations - under current policies - will grow by more than 190,000 by 2011, to about 1.7 million, at a cost to the states of $27.5 billion.
In Florida, where prisons are so crowded that the state has acquired tents for possible use to house inmates, officials say 19 new prisons may be needed over the next five years. | 
