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This October, the Adaptive Climbers Festival will gather in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge for the fifth year. In 2023, Folkways Reporter Emily Chen-Newton covered the event for Inside Appalachia. Since then, the Adaptive Climbers Festival has grown. Organizers say they’re nearly at capacity, with 300 climbers, caregivers and volunteers. Ahead of the festival, the campground has made accessibility improvements. Volunteers with the ACF have also been sprucing up the trails.
Us & Them Encore: Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars In W.Va.
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Overcrowding and understaffing have pushed West Virginia’s prisons and jails to what many believe is a crisis point.
On this episode of Us & Them, we hear what incarceration is like for someone in a mental health crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people with mental illnesses are caught up in a criminal justice system that was never intended to treat them.
In a recent special session, West Virginia lawmakers earmarked $30 million to address staffing shortages and provide pay raises and retention bonuses to correctional staff. There is also $100 million for deferred facility maintenance. However, a new lawsuit against the state on behalf of West Virginia inmates, demands more than three times that amount is needed.
This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the Just Trust, the West Virginia Humanities Council, the CRC Foundation and the Daywood Foundation.
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Bishop Mark Brennan and Jeff Allen, director of West Virginia Council of Churches, listen to Beverly Sharp, founder of the REACH Initiative in West Virginia at a West Virginia Council of Churches press conference on the subject of the criminal justice system in West Virginia.
Photo Credit: Kyle VassLara Lawson from Milton in Cabell County, W.Va., has her master’s degree in sociology and is passionate about social justice issues. She has also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and manages that condition. Lawson told Us & Them host Trey Kay about her experience during a manic period of her illness when she was placed in Western Regional Jail and deprived of mental health medication. While Lawson said she was not suicidal – she recalled being put in a suicide watch cell for observation.
Photo Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Us & Them host Trey Kay met with investigative reporter Mary Beth Pfeiffer at her home in the Hudson Valley of New York to talk about her book Crazy In America: The Hidden Tragedy of Our Criminalized Mentally Ill. Pfeiffer’s book shows how people suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, clinical depression and other serious psychological illnesses are regularly incarcerated because medical care is not available. Once behind bars, she reports that people with mental illness are frequently punished for behavior that is psychotic, not criminal. Pfeiffer’s reporting examines a society that incarcerates its weakest and most vulnerable citizens — causing some to emerge sicker and more damaged.
Photo Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public BroadcastingAshley Omps testified at the West Virginia State Capitol before the Senate Oversight Committee on Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority. She told this group of powerful strangers about the worst experience in her life — a time when she was incarcerated in Eastern Regional Jail after an intense, traumatic event and said she was denied mental health treatment. Omps said it was uncomfortable to share her personal story, but it made a difference. West Virginia law has changed, because people like Ashley took their stories to the capitol.
Photo Credit: Trey Kay/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Two federally important facilities located in West Virginia require a strict limit on radio frequency interference. But for decades – increasingly as communication systems have become more advanced – those limits have made it difficult for emergency crews and first responders in Pendleton and Pocahontas counties to do their jobs as safely and effectively as possible. Now the results of a lengthy federal study show exactly how precarious the situation is. We caught up with Pendleton County Emergency Management’s Rick Gillespie to find out what the study shows and what happens next.
This October, the Adaptive Climbers Festival will gather in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge for the fifth year. In 2023, Folkways Reporter Emily Chen-Newton covered the event for Inside Appalachia. Since then, the Adaptive Climbers Festival has grown. Organizers say they’re nearly at capacity, with 300 climbers, caregivers and volunteers. Ahead of the festival, the campground has made accessibility improvements. Volunteers with the ACF have also been sprucing up the trails.
