The second major piece of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin’s legislative agenda gained final approval Saturday when the state Senate passed the prison overcrowding bill.
The Senate unanimously approved the changes the House made to the bill with about seven hours left in the 60-day session. Those include allowing sentencing judges to decide if non-violent offenders should get out of jail six months early and mandating drug courts in all 55 counties.
The measure, which was introduced following a study of the state’s corrections system, would release some non-violent offenders early and provide additional counseling for violent offenders in hopes of cutting down on repeat offenders.
The governor says this approach has worked in other states.
“We’ve got to give it a try,” Tomblin said. “The alternative is to spend a couple hundred million dollars on a new penitentiary but we still have the same problem with recidivism.”
The governor says the number of repeat offenders is where the problem lies. He says the supervised release of non-violent criminals will address that.
“I think it’s going to be a big help in preventing the recidivism rate. That’s where most of our overcrowding is coming from. People going back for the second and third time,” Tomblin said.
Carl Reynolds of the Justice Reinvestment Initiative program, which did the West Virginia study, says it’s a little more difficult to predict how much money the state will save with the changes the House made to the bill.
“That decision depends on what the judge says at sentencing. In the Senate version it would have been an automatic six-month early release,” Reynolds said. “That was about a third of the savings we were projecting.”
The projected savings for next year could be reduced from $27 million to $18 million.
Del. John Ellem, R-Wood, says each judge will be given a risk assessment of the inmate at the beginning of the case. He says they will have a lot of information before deciding if they get out early.
“That offers a lot of safeguards for those certain non-violent people that you may not be comfortable with,” Ellem said.
Gov. Tomblin is expected to sign the bill once it reaches his desk. The education reform bill was the governor’s other major piece of legislation to pass this session. He signed that bill into law last Wed.