Prison Story Archives - Page 3 of 7 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

W.Va. Stiffens Penalties For Fentanyl Distribution

On Thursday, Gov. Jim Justice signed Senate Bill 536 into law, increasing fines and prison time for drug traffickers distributing the deadly opioid fentanyl in West Virginia.

Jeff Sandy, secretary for the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the harsher punishment will put a real fear into out- of-state drug dealers.

“What this bill does is this, someone from Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, Akron, they bring drugs across the bridge into West Virginia,” Sandy said. “Their sentences are going to be more than doubled.”

The new law also increases fines and prison time for any adult involving a minor in fentanyl distribution.

This week, the CDC announced that fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for American adults 18-45 years old.

W.Va. DNR Police To Help With Jail, Prison Staffing

Division of Natural Resources police officers will assist with staffing challenges at West Virginia’s jails and prisons.

More than 60 DNR officers have finished training for support roles that will enable corrections officers to perform other duties, the state Department of Homeland Security said in a news release Thursday.

The topics during eight hours of instruction last week included staff and inmate interactions, dealing with contraband and restricted items, and sexual assault law. Additional training, including security checks, staffing facility control towers and hospital detail, will be provided once the participating officers are assigned to a facility, the statement said.

The support roles could start as early as this weekend. DNR police officers will work their regular schedules for their agencies and work at corrections facilities on overtime. The Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation will reimburse the DNR police for the staffing costs.

Currently there are 921 inmates and 231 jail and prison staff with positive coronavirus cases, according to state health figures.

Federal Prison In McDowell Back To Normal Operations After Carbon Monoxide Leak

Things are back to normal at a federal prison in McDowell County after a carbon monoxide leak earlier this week.

A spokesperson for the federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed via email that 26 inmates and five corrections staffers received medical treatment after a carbon monoxide leak was found on Tuesday.

Emergency dispatchers in neighboring Mercer County confirmed that a caller reported the smell of “noxious gas” on Tuesday at 11:32 p.m. Mercer County fire crews were dispatched but called off at 12:14 a.m., before arriving on the scene. The trip from Princeton in Mercer County to the prison in McDowell takes about an hour and 15 minutes.

The prison is serviced by McDowell Gas Co-op in Welch. A representative told West Virginia Public Broadcasting that the carbon monoxide was not a natural gas leak involving lines maintained by the company.

The Bureau has not released any more details at this time.

WVU Reed College Of Media To Host 'Beyond Bars' Summit On Incarceration

The Reed College of Media at West Virginia University is hosting a virtual summit on Thursday to discuss incarceration in the Mountain State.

For two years, students have been working on the Women Beyond Bars project, highlighting the issues that women and their families face in prison and after prison.

Emily Allen spoke with Professor Mary Kay McFarland and student Patrick Orsagos about their reporting.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

ALLEN: How did this topic first kind of come to you? And how did you and the students determine where it went?

MCFARLAND: The dean of the Reed College of Media, who is now the provost at WVU, and the dean of the Gaylord [College of Journalism and Mass Communications] at the University of Oklahoma, they were actually looking for a project to do together. At that time, we were looking at the headlines in the news, and the headlines were that West Virginia and Oklahoma had the highest rates of incarceration for women in the country.

And it was No.1, because they were counting the women in federal facilities as well as the state facilities here. So, once they once they started assigning the women in federal facilities to the states they came from, then West Virginia isn’t No. 1 anymore, but it’s still in the top states for incarcerating women.

ALLEN: Turning to Patrick, in one of the stories on the website, you wrote about how a quarter of the women in West Virginia’s prison system aren’t actually in prison. They’re in regional jails, which typically are overcrowded.

Can you talk to us about what you’ve heard, and why stories like these should matter to West Virginians who ultimately have little to do with state corrections?

ORSAGOS: Whether you know somebody or not who’s incarcerated, your tax dollars are going to that. So when there is such this huge increase of incarcerated women, you know, the people of West Virginia are paying for that. And they’re paying for women to be treated — people, I shouldn’t say just women, [it’s] men and women — to be kind of treated unfairly.

What’s the most shocking thing, at least for me, is the fallout from that. So not only were these women sitting in regional jails, but a lot of these women were, you know, suffering from substance use disorder, and they had to detox in a regional jail without any help from anybody. Or, they were disconnected from their families, and they couldn’t talk to their kids for however long. And that affects more than just the person going through the system, that affects a whole lot of people. So the fallout definitely goes much further than just one person.

ALLEN: What’s interesting to me is that this project takes this focus on women in incarcerated situations, but we only have very little options for actually putting women in prison. Have these stories been difficult to pursue, since there’s not much space for them?

MCFARLAND: We did run into women who feared recriminations [from] talking to us. Women who were hoping to appeal, or on parole, and they were not willing to talk to us, because that was a process that could hurt them.

But once a few women began talking to us, I think we found that it was really empowering. It was an empowering thing for people to be interested in their stories.

ALLEN: What about this project and these stories have surprised you the most?

ORSAGOS: There are so many years when the jails are so overcrowded, and it’s been reported in official government documents. And nothing changes. Nothing happens. I think that’s probably the most shocking for me.

MCFARLAND: I just think the amount of money that we’re talking about is staggering. Just to incarcerate one prisoner for a year is more than $30,000. Are there not better ways to, to rehabilitate people to begin to address that issue?

And certainly, the Division of Corrections has been spending money with the Justice Reinvestment Act, they’ve spent millions of dollars on rehabilitation and programs to decrease that number. One of the problems is that as the opioid epidemic has escalated, that number has just continued to increase.

WVU is hosting the Beyond Bars summit Thursday, beginning at 3 p.m. Registration for the virtual event is open to the public. Find out more online at the Women Beyond Bars website.

Additional Deaths At Mount Olive Likely Both Linked To COVID

West Virginia corrections officials say they’re now linking a prisoner death in July to COVID-19, referring to newer medical records that they received Tuesday.

This marks the second known COVID-related death of a prisoner within the state Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, after the agency reported its first inmate death in Charleston on Aug. 28. The DCR also said Wednesday that COVID-19 was possibly the cause of a third prisoner’s death from Sunday, Sept. 13.

When the DCR first reported the death of a 73-year-old man at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex in July, they said medical providers found COVID-19 was not a contributing factor in the prisoner’s death.

The division released this information roughly a week and a half after the prisoner’s reported July 17 death. The agency said he had been receiving hospice care from the prison infirmary for stage 4 metastatic cancer, and a coronavirus test administered shortly before the prisoner’s death came back positive after he died.

A new report finalized nearly two months later from the West Virginia Office of the Chief Medical Examiner disproves that initial assessment and lists COVID-19 as a complicating factor, according to a press release from the DCR on Wednesday.

The DCR declined to share a copy of the medical examiner’s report with West Virginia Public Broadcasting.

A second prisoner from Mount Olive reportedly died on Sunday, Sept. 13, at an outside hospital. The 54-year-old man also had an underlying medical condition and was hospitalized after testing positive for the coronavirus in late August, according to the DCR.

Prison officials are still waiting on results from the Chief Medical Examiner, but the DCR said in its Wednesday statement that a preliminary assessment from the hospital linked the prisoner’s death to COVID-19.

The DCR reported there were still 28 active cases of the coronavirus among Mount Olive prisoners on Wednesday. More than 160 prisoners there have recovered from COVID-19 after testing positive for the virus during a late August facility-wide testing effort.

On Aug. 28, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed a prisoner being held on federal charges at the DCR-run South Central Regional Jail had died from the coronavirus.

The 40-year-old prisoner was indicted on child pornography-related charges in January and had a trial scheduled for September, according to court records. He was the state’s first COVID-related inmate death.

More than 60 others at South Central have recovered from the coronavirus, according to data from the DCR Wednesday.

Although numbers from the DCR show that no state prisons are over capacity, records showed on Wednesday that all 10 of the state’s regional jails were over capacity.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.

Corrections Officials Report First COVID Death In Charleston, More Than 30 Cases At Mount Olive

This article was updated Saturday, Aug. 29, to include details from the U.S. Marshals Service.

The first person to die of COVID-19 at a state-run jail is a 40-year-old man from Wood County who was being held on federal charges, according to a news release from the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Friday.

He died at a hospital on Friday after testing positive for the coronavirus within the last week, the DCR said. Health officials determined during a preliminary assessment that he died from COVID-19.

The DCR reported that the man had underlying medical conditions.

The U.S. Marshals Services confirmed late Friday evening that it was one of their prisoners in a state facility that had died. According to federal court records, the man was indicted in January on four counts of distribution and attempted distribution of child pornography, followed by a fifth count of possession of child pornography.

Records show he had an upcoming jury trial in September. A federal judge rescheduled his trial a few times after deciding against the original date in March.

The U.S. Marshals Service reported Friday that it houses nearly 70 percent of its prisoners in facilities run by state and local governments. That includes the South Central Regional Jail, which data from the DCR shows was roughly 80 people over capacity on Friday.

Officials for the DCR and the state Bureau for Public Health have consulted federal laws for health information privacy, according to BPH spokesperson Allison Adler, and are not providing “identifying details” around the man’s death.

That applies to information from state officials on the man’s medical treatment before dying, according to DCR spokesman Lawrence Messina.

This first death in a state correctional facility comes more than three months after the DCR reported its first inmate case on May 19 at the Huttonsville Correctional Center in Randolph County, where more than 100 employees and prisoners later tested positive in the weeks that followed.

The DCR reported its first employee case of COVID-19 on April 24.

The Wood County man, who died at some point within the last week, tested negative for the coronavirus earlier in August during a facility-wide round of enhanced testing, according to the DCR.

Roughly 450 prisoners and 80 employees at the Charleston jail have tested negative for the coronavirus in the last month.

On Friday, the DCR reported seven active cases of COVID-19 among Charleston prisoners and 57 recovered cases.

One employee for the Charleston jail still has COVID-19. The DCR reported on Thursday that six employees have recovered.

The South Central Regional Jail was nearly 80 people over capacity on Friday.

Nine out of ten state jails were over capacity on Friday, according to data from the DCR. This is despite guidance from state court officials to county prosecutors and judges in March, requesting that they help reduce the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent crimes.

All state prisons were near or under capacity on Friday, according to data from the DCR.

Corrections officials were tracking more than 30 active cases of the coronavirus on Friday at the Mount Olive Correctional Center in Fayette County.

The agency is waiting on more than 850 results after testing all prisoners and staff at the southern West Virginia prison, according to the Friday news release. The DCR reported 13 Mount Olive employees with COVID-19 the same day.

South Central Regional Jail and Mount Olive are the most recent facilities where the DCR has conducted enhanced testing of all prisoners, since wrapping up a statewide enhanced testing effort in June, following the outbreak at Huttonsville.

Emily Allen is a Report for America corps member.