Corrections reform stalled
House committee kills bill to establish oversight board for largest state agency
Another layer of bureaucracy is rarely the ideal solution to a public problem. Oftentimes it erodes, rather than improves, efficiency and only serves as an impediment to the sort of reform that can deliver meaningful change.
In the case of the Virginia Department of Corrections, however, establishing an oversight committee staffed by a combination of lawmakers and citizens would be a valuable way to ensure the concerns of officers and inmates are treated seriously.
That idea will have to wait for another day. After passing the Senate on a unanimous 39-0 vote, the House Appropriations Committee voted last week to reject a bill that would have created such a board, halting a push for greater accountability for state corrections facilities.
Heading into this year’s session, Virginians should have expected that the Democratic-led Senate and Republican-led House would differ dramatically on their vision for the commonwealth’s future. Still, it is surprising to see the number of bills to pass the Senate with broad bipartisan support only to meet a party-line demise in the lower chamber.
Killing this corrections oversight proposal is particularly perplexing.
Though the bill’s sponsor, Fairfax Democratic Sen. Dave Marsden, told the House committee that the department was very sound, and pointed to Virginia’s low recidivism rate for those released from state facilities,
there are examples that illustrate the need for stronger oversight.
In 2019, The Virginian-Pilot reported that DOC staff told an 8-year-old girl visiting her father at Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn that she must submit to a strip search or be banned from the prison. Officials at the time said that the officer who approved the search and its ultimatum wasn’t authorized to do so.
Not that it mitigated the harm inflicted on the child, whose mother told a Pilot reporter, “She’s a minor, she’s a girl. She was traumatized. She gets emotional, she will break down.” The girl was accompanied by her father’s girlfriend, who alleged that corrections officers pressured her into signing a consent form for the search
despite not being the child’s legal guardian.
Subsequent reporting found this sort of behavior happened frequently in Virginia corrections facilities, highlighting an 83-year-old man who was given the same ultimatum for a non-contact visit with his step-grandson at Buckingham State Prison and a 15-year-old who was barred from Green Rock Correctional Center near Chatham for refusing a strip search. Sixteen visitors subjected to strip searches between 2017 and 2019 were under the age of 18.
In response, Gov. Ralph Northam suspended a DOC policy allowing strip searches of minors, but the absence of internal oversight or an ombudsman was glaring. Under such a system, complaints by those subjected to intrusive searches could go directly to DOC, where they could be handled promptly.
The coalition supporting the proposed legislation included groups on the opposite ends of the political spectrum (among them, Americans for Prosperity and the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia) as well as the Virginia chapter of the National Coalition of Public Safety Officers, which advocates for correctional officers.
But the DOC itself opposed the bill, calling it too costly. The Senate budget plan includes $750,000 for a new ombudsman office, though the full costs of establishing and supporting an oversight commission are not known.
But Marsden argued before the committee that an investment in accountability might well be recouped by reducing the roughly $2 million that Virginia pays out annually in civil cases against the department.
The Virginia Department of Corrections handles the incarceration of more than 23,000 individuals, boasts 11,000 personnel across the commonwealth and commands an annual budget of $1.4 billion. It is the largest state agency and should be subject to reasonable scrutiny.
While not every problem can be solved by additional bureaucrats, this is an area where Virginia would have benefited. It is a shame to see a promising and needed reform proposal undone for no good reason and without sufficient explanation.