CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Officials with the state Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety want to eliminate the state Regional Jail and Correctional Facilities Authority.
Thom Kirk, deputy secretary and general legal counsel for WVDMAPS, told a legislative interim committee Monday at the state capitol the elimination would improve the operation of regional jails.
“Regional jails is a special revenue generated by the counties. The only way that we could figure out to change that and make that more effective and more efficient is to basically do away with the Regional Jail Authority,” Kirk said.
Kirk asked the committee to give the regional jails an annual budget, establish a per diem for inmates in each county and take over the collection of regional jail fees. Currently, WVDAPS has to collect those per diem fees from each county in connection with the number of inmates housed in the regional jails from a particular county.
“That gives the delegation more say-so than a Regional Jail Authority and it also takes us out of the collection business and puts us back into correctional business,” Kirk said.
Under the proposal, the per diem fees collected by the counties would go to the state’s General Revenue Fund that falls within the jurisdiction of the legislature.
The department is looking at all the codes that the state would have to consider in order to move forward with the request, Kirk said.
“We’re going to give you what we think would help us by reestablishing some of the verbiage of the codes,” he said.
The state Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority was created by the state Legislature in 1985. Generally, regional jails serve both pre-trail defendants and people sentenced to terms of one year or less but in recent years they’ve had to house inmates who have been sentenced to state prisons because of overcrowding in those facilities.