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By Bob Weaver
West Virginia is one of the nation's leaders with incarceration, resulting in financially strapping counties with jail costs.
Calhoun County, which operates on a meager budget, continues to face budgeting challenges over the jail bill.
Calhoun's July bill was a record high for incarceration at Central Regional Jail at $30,687.
If that monthly rate continues, Calhoun commissioners would have to make significant budget revisions to pay the $360,000 annual cost.
West Virginia has been doing studies about the state's incarceration rates and costs and working on alternative sentencing programs.
The United States has the world's highest incarceration rate, reaching 25 percent of all the world's prisoners, the USA becoming the "Incarceration Nation."
Most of the individuals in West Virginia's regional jails and the state prison are incarcerated for non-violent crimes, mostly linked to drug offenses.
A seminar on the establishment of drug courts is being held today in Spencer.
The US has an incarceration rate of five to seven times as high, in proportion of population, than the world's industrial democracies.
West Virginia had the second-largest percentage increase in its prison population in 2010 [of all 50 states].
Prison overcrowding in West Virginia increased from 1,500 prisoners in 1990 to about 6,500 in 2010 - more than four times, and still going up.
"The WV growth rate makes it nearly three and a half times higher than the national average and one of the fastest growing prison populations in the U.S.," said Senate President Jeff Kessler, D-Marshall.
Politicians struggle to make changes about incarcerations, appearing soft on crime.
Attorney General Eric Holder has been calling for major changes to the nation's criminal justice system - including scaling back the use of harsh sentences for some drug-related crimes.
In remarks to the American Bar Association, Holder said he favors diverting people convicted of low-level offenses to drug treatment and community service programs.
Holder says he wants to expand a prison program to allow for release of some elderly, nonviolent offenders.
He said prisons should be used to "punish, deter and rehabilitate" - not to "convict, warehouse and forget."
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin launched a public safety initiative that brought several stakeholders together to study and address the state's crowded prisons and crime rates.
"In Texas, they're building a billion dollars' worth of penitentiaries," said West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals Chief Justice Menis Ketchum.
West Virginia is facing building another new prison costing more than $200 million, with millions in projected costs of operating it.
Tomblin said nearly 7,000 people are incarcerated in West Virginia right now, and about 1,800 Division of Corrections inmates currently are held in regional jail facilities because there is not enough room.
"We have a choice to make, continue on this path, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on top of what we're already appropriating in hopes that it has more of an impact on crime than it has to date, or use data to determine if there is a way to spend less and have a bigger impact on crime," Tomblin said.
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