‘‘Somebody could slap them around, you know, and nobody could do anything about it if the guards aren’t there.’’
-- Sen. Shirley Love, D-Fayette, remarking on letters from West Virginia prison inmates in support of pay raises for corrections officers. Love's district includes the Mount Olive prison, where one in three guards quit in 2005. Turnover statewide for corrections officers rose to 20 percent, officials say.
01 February 2007
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Between, CO turnover, escalating jail costs for counties, and overcrowding leading to inmates being lodged on the floors of the regional jails, is it too much to hope that someone might look on this as a demand-side problem> Which is to say that if we put fewer people in jail, the CO workload will be lighter, which will result in a) a need for fewer corrections officers, and b) better conditions and retention rates for those who are currently employed.
But gee, how can we put fewer people in jail? Declaring a truce in the War on Certain Drugs would be a start; treating the mentally ill instead of locking them up would help, too. Instead, our legislators would rather continue to encourage the generation of thousands of new felons every year, the vast majority of whom will take up space in the corrections system. And what happens when those folks return to Brooke, or Braxton, or Tyler or Upshur counties, stigmatized, unemployable and bitter?
Hey, we'll either worry about that later or not at all.
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