Every year West Virginia children are taken into state custody. Sometimes, a case involves parental neglect or drug abuse. Other times, kids commit crimes and are placed in juvenile residential facilities.
The juvenile justice programs and agencies have been under a spotlight over the past decade — partly because West Virginia has had one of the highest rates of juvenile incarceration in the country. Lawmakers have passed bills to reform the system but the outcome is mixed.
Meanwhile, juvenile incarceration means the system makes decisions for kids — and those changes can last a lifetime.
This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the West Virginia Humanities Council and the CRC Foundation.
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Louis Mitchell
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Geard Mitchell (19) knows West Virginia’s juvenile system first hand. He spent nearly three years in the Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Julian, W.Va. Mitchell, who now lives in Brooklyn, NY, is one of 12 plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed against the State of West Virginia. The plaintiffs argue the state violated the rights of children by failing to plan appropriately for juveniles in state custody.
Trey Kay
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This is the exterior of the Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center in Julian, W.Va.
Laura Rigell
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Trey Kay is in Boone County, W.Va. standing on the shoulder of U.S. Route 119 in front of the Donald R. Kuhn Juvenile Center.
Trey Kay
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Ronda Lehman has been the coordinator of Teen Court in Jefferson County, W.Va. since 2013. There are currently about 16 other Teen Courts in the State of West Virginia.
Berkeley County’s Community Service Roadside Litter Program, which launched three years ago, is the only litter program in the state that is full-time, runs five days a week and uses community service day-in-and-day-out. Most of the participants are people who have chosen community service instead of being incarcerated.
“Community service has a big part to do with it,” said Allen Hart, deputy marshal for the Berkeley County Courthouse. “If we wouldn’t have community service, we wouldn’t be able to do this job.”
Hart and his partner, fellow deputy marshal Noel Ebersole, spend their workday supporting the program participants by driving alongside them as they walk various roadways in the county — from back roads to the highway.
Participants toss full bags of litter onto Hart’s truck. Often they collect 40-85 bags of litter a day over a distance of just two to four miles.
Liz McCormick/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Participants in the Berkeley County Community Service Roadside Litter Program are often individuals who have opted to do community service instead of serve time in jail.
Ebersole drives a small bus with a bathroom, drinking water and hand sanitizers ahead of the group. The participants get breaks throughout the day and are also fed lunch.
“What I’ll do is stay a couple hundred yards in front of them,” Ebersole said. “And we keep the people in between us, so we keep an eye on them and keep them safe.”
Litter waste in the U.S. increased during the coronavirus pandemic. Garbage workers had to pivot, halting some waste pickups, and people used more plastic bags, containers and disposable masks. According to the Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study, more than 200 million personal protective equipment (PPE) items were littered on U.S. roadways and waterways through early fall.
West Virginia has also experienced an increase in litter waste, but counties have been trying to tackle it.
Over its three years, the Berkeley County Community Service Roadside Litter Program has serviced more than 120 different roads within the county and amassed more than 476,000 pounds of litter.
The program also recently hit a major milestone. It’s serviced more than 1,000 miles of road since it began and collected more than 9,000 bags of litter.
Sandy Rogers, program manager for the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection’s Rehabilitation Environmental Action Plan program, or REAP, provides West Virginia counties with support like grants and bags for litter cleanup.
Rogers said Berkeley County likely collects the most bags of any county. Berkeley is the fastest-growing county in the state and has seen a population boom in recent years.
“I think the more people you have in an area, the more litter you’ll see on the side of the road,” Rogers said. “These high traffic areas — you’re going to notice that more.”
From 2010 to 2019, Berkeley County has grown by 15,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s an increase of more than 14 percent.
This population growth and subsequent increase in litter is one of the reasons why the litter program in Berkeley County was started.
Liz McCormick/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Allen Hart, deputy marshal for the Berkeley County Courthouse (left) and his partner, fellow deputy marshal Noel Ebersole (right), place signs along the roadways to let drivers know the litter crew is working.
“We took it upon ourselves to try to start a program to not only beautify Berkeley County but also to boost people’s morale, even the ones that are in community service,” said Berkeley County Council President Doug Copenhaver.
Berkeley’s roadside litter program is housed under the Berkeley County Council. “The whole intention of the whole program is never, ever beat somebody down, but to bring them up,” Copenhaver said.
Along with the council, the county’s judicial system plays a big role and provides workers for the program. Berkeley County Prosecuting Attorney Catie Wilkes-Delligatti said the program helps to hold offenders accountable while allowing them to remain home with their families.
“This is a way for them to repay their debt to our community,” Wilkes-Delligatti said. “It’s utilizing people who are available to us to make our community a better place to live, both by beautifying the streets but also by repaying a wrong that they’ve committed to our society.”
The program also saves the county money. Copenhaver said the county’s regional jail bill has gone down by about $1.5 million since 2016. While the litter program didn’t launch until 2018, Copenhaver thinks the program has made a positive impact on the county budget.
The Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority is another community partner in the litter program. At the end of every day, the bags that are loaded up onto Allen Hart’s truck are left at one of two drop-off points for the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority. Clint Hogbin, who has been the head of the solid waste authority for nearly 30 years, said the litter program is making a difference.
“It takes five or six different agencies to make this work,” Hogbin said. “And the solid waste authority was thrilled that when we all sat down at our very first meeting, and we went around, ‘What can you do? What can you do? What can you do?’ And next thing we knew, all the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place, literally very quickly.”
Hogbin said once the waste is dropped off at the solid waste authority, a regional waste agency called Apple Valley Waste will pick up all the bags for free. Some of the bags even go to Entsorga West Virginia — a new waste-to-energy facility that opened in the county a few years ago.
“Berkeley County’s investing in people,” said Mike Laing, Berkeley County’s chief court marshal and the head of the roadside litter program. “They’re not just putting them in jail. Everybody has a bad day, and they’re giving people alternatives to get their lives straightened out, and I think that’s really what Berkeley County is standing for.”
While Laing and other county officials say they are proud of the program, they also note they are disheartened by the continuous need for litter cleanup efforts.
“It’s been well-received by the public, but the sad part is there’s a need for it,” Laing said. “[But] anytime that you can have programs that better individuals, saves the taxpayers’ money … it pays dividends.”
Some state lawmakers in West Virginia are looking at some ways to address our overcrowded prison system and help more previously incarcerated people reenter the workforce. What would criminal justice reform look like in West Virginia? Last year, several groups and non-profits went around the state to gather testimony and stories from over 200 people about their experiences with the criminal justice system. Their stories were collected through interviews, surveys and focus groups.
Lida Shepherd works with one of the groups spearheading the project, The American Friends Service Committee. Shepherd sat down with West Virginia Public Broadcasting to share some of the results.
***Editor’s Note: The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: What were some of the themes that emerged from what people talked about?
LIDA SHEPHERD: We definitely heard a lot of trauma. I think, as a society, we fall into this trap of thinking that people who are formerly incarcerated, we look at them through this one dimensional lens of they are a criminal or they are a felon. And what we heard a lot about was people who had very complex lives and had really complex challenges growing up.
Q: And how does race and things like implicit bias factor into how people are treated by the criminal justice system in our state?
SHEPHERD: Looking at the numbers of the demographics of our prison system, there is no doubt that there is racial bias at every point of the system, from policing, to arrest, to who get sent to drug court.
Q: So the people who are often offered this opportunity for treatment as an alternative to being sent to jail or prison are often white, and the people that are of color often just get funneled into the prison system?
SHEPHERD: Yep. And I think it also shows up even in sentencing, the length that somebody is sentenced. So really at every single point, you see the racial bias show up. The numbers bear that out. And then as far as women incarceration, I mean, that’s a sector of the population that has just steadily climbed. We are incarcerating more women in this state, year after year. And that is in part attributed to, of course, the opioid crisis and just everything that occurs around addiction in West Virginia. And I think it’s also attributed to women actually being perceived differently by judges. There is actually a real gender bias when sentencing occurs. It’s a little counterintuitive, you would think that women would be let off more easily. But what we actually see is that women are actually sentenced more harshly. And I think part of that is because, quote unquote “bad behavior” amongst men is a little bit more expected, and therefore a little maybe more acceptable. A woman being brought before a judge for the same crime is actually sentenced more harshly.
Credit Courtesy Lida Shepherd/ American Friends Service Committee
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Lida Shepherd
Q: What did you hear about the types of ways that people are treated when they’re children? I know we have a high rate in the state of children being suspended, or being put into some type of juvenile justice situation. What did you hear about how people are treated as children, and how that transforms into their adult behavior?
SHEPHERD: You know, you’re listening to people’s stories. And often when you ask them to tell their story, it starts in childhood. And people talked about how situations that occurred in their childhood led them to acting out in school, that led them to getting expelled or suspended, lead them into the juvenile justice system. And we know that if you are in the juvenile justice system, your likelihood of ending up in the adult criminal justice system is very likely.
The first point of contact that kids often have with the juvenile justice system starts in schools. They end up in the juvenile justice system because of truancy, because of these really low-level status offenses.
And we are not equipping schools as much as we should be to really deal with the complex issues that these kids are facing. They’re coming into school every day bearing a lot of weight of trauma, and of adverse childhood experiences. And so I think really having those [mental health] services in schools, I think, would really go very far to keeping kids in school, not expelling them, not suspending them.
Q: So what happens next? What types of changes out of this project could occur?
SHEPHERD: Well, its legislative session, and the legislature is really taking a pretty careful look at how we can address and reduce incarceration. I think there is growing consensus that this is a really expensive way of dealing with very complex social problems. So we’re seeing a big effort to look at our money bail system, so that people aren’t being held in regional jails who have not been convicted of a crime, but simply cannot afford to make bail.
There’s also an effort to basically look at our parole system and make sure that people are being released earlier who pose no threat to public safety. Once they are parole eligible, they are paroled. And that we are providing as much support to them upon release, because definitely one of the things we’ve heard over and over again is that the barriers to people who are released from jail are often insurmountable barriers to employment: housing, transportation, food. And while we’ve been tackling some of those barriers, we have a long way to go.
Lida Shepherd works with with the American Friends Service Committee and was one of the people involved in the Criminal Justice Listening Project, which compiled the testimonies of people across West Virginia. The majority of those interviewed have experienced incarceration or have had family members behind bars.
A West Virginia city council has passed a bill allowing people to perform community service at nonprofit organizations and public entities in lieu of incarceration or paying fines to municipal court.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reports that the bill passed by the Charleston City Council on Monday broadens the scope of permissible volunteer work, which was previously restricted by an ordinance requiring community service to be done for the city. City Attorney Paul Ellis says that those who chose the community service option have been working at the Civic Center.
Ellis says his office will speak with area nonprofits about how community service work could benefit their missions.
The municipal court will have to approve both the organization and community service work.
