Report shows West Virginia jail officials knew about SRJ issues (2024)

In April 2022, public outcry about conditions at West Virginia’s Southern Regional Jail reached a fever pitch.

For weeks, media outlets had been reporting serious mistreatment and neglect of people held at the jail. They were deprived of water and toilet paper and forced to sleep on bare concrete floors, the reports said. And most concerning, at least three men had died at the jail so far that year.

Justice sent his long-serving Homeland Security Secretary Jeff Sandy, who oversaw jails, state police and emergency management, to personally investigate.

“The investigation concluded that allegations of water deprivation, failure to provide toilet paper, and inmates having to sleep on hard floors without a mattress are false,” Justice’s office said in a press release.

But what Justice didn’t say was, a few weeks earlier, a different state investigation found that everything was not fine.

A team of specially-trained corrections officers went to the jail outside of Beckley and inspected every cell. They found the very conditions Justice denied.

“Toilet will not flush,” their report said of one cell. “No water,” it said of another. It noted “a strong odor of urine” coming from one of the showers, and at least 19 folks sleeping on concrete floors.

The report was among the hundreds of pages of records reviewed by Mountain State Spotlight for this story. Some were taken from depositions, while others were filed in lawsuits against the state over conditions at Southern Regional Jail, where at least 25 people have died in the last five years.

Available public records don’t indicate whether Justice was briefed on the report; but it did make its way to one of the jail commissioner’s direct reports.

Neither Justice nor corrections officials responded to questions about this story.

The existence of this investigation — not previously reported in media accounts — adds to the growing evidence that the Justice administration knew about deteriorating conditions at the jail, but kept that information from the public.

Two deaths in West Virginia’s Southern Regional Jail

In December 2021, Timothy Considine was sentenced to serve one to five years in connection with a deadly four-wheeler crash. His attorney Michael Whitt tried to get him probation, arguing that Considine was in his early 70s and would likely die in jail.

“I wouldn’t say he was sick the day he went to jail, but he was frail,” Whitt recalled recently.

While visiting clients at the jail, he’d see Considine. And each time, Whitt said he looked worse and worse.

“I did something I never done before — I filed a motion to have the judge move him to another facility, or at least release him until he could go to prison,” he said.

As Considine waited for his hearing, word spread about the conditions at Southern Regional Jail. The institution is one of 10 regional jails across West Virginia, meant to hold people awaiting trial and those convicted of a crime before they’re transferred to state prison. In recent years, the regionals have been chronically underfunded, understaffed and overcrowded.

In mid-December, U.S. Magistrate Judge Omar Aboulhosn — who would later lambast the West Virginia jail system in a strongly worded opinion — ordered the U.S. Marshal Service to pull any federal inmates out of jail due to plumbing issues that “appear to render the SRJ (Southern Regional Jail) unsanitary.”

Around the same time, a man at the jail named Anthony Scrogham sent a letter to a sentencing judge, likening the conditions to “a 3rd world country.”

“Also the shower continues to be used as a toilet at night. To the point that this morning the drain had to be opened by myself and two other inmates. It was stopped up by human feces. It had to be dipped out and flushed out. By hand by myself and other inmates,” Scrogham wrote.

A reporter for the The West Virginia Daily News sent an email to a Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman, asking if inmates were being held without water or heat.

On the same day Aboulhosn ordered federal inmates be pulled out of the jail, Superintendent Mike Francis unequivocally denied all allegations, writing, “The facility REGULARLY does Inspections and MAINTENANCE is performed DAILY.”

But maintenance was having trouble keeping up; The four-man team had been two men down for almost two years at that point, Francis later said in a deposition.

A few days before Christmas in 2021, a deputy U.S. marshal inspected the facility — and it passed muster, according to the depositions of officials who were there.

And despite his attorney’s best efforts, Considine was sent to Southern Regional Jail to stay until he could be transferred to a prison.

Just a few months later, Considine died at Southern on Feb. 8, 2022. He was one of 12 people to die at the jail that year.

“It was a tragedy, it was needless,” Whitt said. “When you’re sentenced to jail, you’re sentenced to serve that time. Not a death sentence.”

Less than a month after Considine’s death, there was another. On March 1, 2022, three correctional officers took 37-year-old Quantez Burks out of the frame of the jail’s many cameras and beat him to death, according to federal grand jury indictments. In total, federal prosecutors would charge eight guards with the killing and the subsequent attempts to cover it up. Two have pleaded guilty.

As outrage mounted over Burks’ death and reports began pouring out of the jail about inmates drinking out of commodes, public pressure mounted for something to be done.

In a second letter Scrogham sent to his sentencing judge that month, he said the conditions of the Southern Regional Jail continued to get worse.

“I want to inform the Court that every day, I and many others are scared for our lives,” Scrogham wrote. “This is no exaggeration.”

At the end of that month, Secretary Jeff Sandy visited the jail to conduct his inspection — one that didn’t involve turning on a faucet, walking into a cell or taking any notes for posterity, as a Mountain State Spotlight investigation in August revealed.

Weeks before Justice dismisses allegations as ‘not true,‘ a report finds issues with plumbing, electrical wiring, bedding at Southern

Ten days later — at 7:30 a.m on April 7, 2022 — Lt. Bobby Berry met with the Correctional Emergency Response Team at Tamarack to brief them before searching Southern Regional Jail.

Berry had been going since 5:30 a.m. — as a part of his search, he had to conduct a check on the lighting throughout the jail and that’s best done in the dark, according to his deposition.

This special operations team, among other things, searches every nook and cranny of the state’s jails and prisons for contraband and to identify possible security risks, like broken windows.

According to Berry, that’s supposed to happen every 18 months — maybe twice a year if problems persist. But Berry said Southern had never had one of these searches.

By 8 a.m, the team was inside and getting to work.

The officers went from cell to cell, then reported back what they found. It took two days to complete the search.

They found cells with broken toilets, busted windows, no hot water, exposed electrical wires and lights that didn’t work. In one cell block, officers found 19 inmates living on the bare concrete floor — something Sandy’s report said was untrue — and the team gave them beds and mattresses they found in other areas of the jail.

The phone and video system inmates use to contact the outside world had cracked screens and broken receivers, according to Berry. Inmates said they’d been turned off for awhile. But Berry said what he couldn’t forget was the state of the showers.

“I hated every shower in that place,” Berry said in a deposition. “They were dirty, they had plastic up on the walls, the inmates were breaking them where it came loose and they smelled.”

These are the kinds of issues that pose serious risks to both people in the jail and the correctional officers, according to Allison Gorga, a Webster University professor specializing in prison policy.

“When you’re in a place with really bad conditions, if you don’t have access to things like running water, or if the toilets are not flushing or you know, things like that are obviously going to cause health effects,” Gorga said. “But these could also cause psychological effects.”

On April 12, Berry sent his report up the chain of command.

But whether Sandy — or the Governor, for that matter — was ever told about it is unknown. Requests for comment from Sandy and other high level officials were not returned. Former Commissioner Betsy Jividen declined to comment.

Berry, who served briefly at the Western Regional Jail in Barboursville to get it up to standards in 2018, issued a number of recommendations. Those included regular inspections of the jail, giving inmates mattresses and pillows and a full remodel of the showers.

But just two weeks after Berry’s report, Justice’s office tried to end the conversation about the problems at Southern.

“Our investigators talked with a bunch of people and pulled a bunch of records and, at the end of the day, they determined that the allegations were simply not true,” he said in the press release.

Three investigations in six months

By September 2022, Southern’s superintendent Mike Francis was gone, either voluntarily retired or forced out, depending on the version of events. As higher ups started looking into the jail, officials said they found Francis to be “not forthcoming” and “not transparent.”

Rob Cunningham, Sandy’s second in command, said when he was asked what they should do with Francis, he recommended firing the superintendent.

Berry temporarily took Francis’ place over the jail — and started asking for help for some fixes — but he was now gone. Commissioner Jividen had been forced out of her position due to the death of Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston’s nephew at the jail, according to multiple depositions and testimony.

Lawsuits were brewing, too. Throughout the summer, the West Virginia Division of Corrections got letter after letter from attorney Stephen New, asking them to preserve evidence for an upcoming class action lawsuit over conditions at the jail.

Sandy assigned Jimmy Stout, a retired state trooper, to look into suicides in the jails, as well as misconduct in the State Police’s training academy.

Stout called it “temporary yonder duty,” a position that would later turn into the official title of Inspector General.

But Stout’s first assignment was to double-check his boss’ work, according to a deposition. Pictures from the Berry’s more comprehensive inspection had started circulating, contradicting Sandy’s report’s findings.

“He was concerned that some of the information that he was given had not been, you know, factually true,” Stout said in his testimony.

But Stout was not convinced his investigation was necessary. This would be the third examination of the facility in six months.

A few days in, he learned of Berry’s search. While he saw the photos, he never got to read and digest the entirety of the report. Sandy also told him not to approach Francis, due to a federal investigation that was underway.

And eventually he learned he wasn’t the only one looking into Southern: Sandy had also assigned an assistant DCR commissioner to investigate the facility.

“And I don’t know why other than I think — well, I’m thinking he was trying to put different people on the same information and then compare it to see what he got,” Stout said.

Stout said while the question of access to water, toilet paper and mattresses appeared to be settled, there were many other issues, like the en masse cut off of the phone system for inmates and sloppy record keeping. He said his boss’ report followed “the marching orders” he was given, but it was hard to ignore the other issues.

Stout finalized his report in March 2023. While it brought up numerous issues with Sandy’s investigation and raised concerns that hadn’t been addressed before, Stout said there was absolutely no intention of sharing it with the public.

“There was discussion on this being an internal document for DCR review to try to make it better, try to make it — I mean, try to be factualbut not a document that was intended to be used for anything other than our own purposes,” he said in his deposition.

Legislators press jail officials on issues at Southern Regional Jail

By late October 2023, lawyers had gone to a judge with news that the division had lost emails, records and potentially key evidence in the class action suit against it.

With most key leadership retired — Jividen, Francis, Sandy were gone — and others taking up different positions, the only ones left holding the bag were Chief of Staff Brad Douglas and Chief Counsel Phil Sword.

And after Aboulhosn strongly condemned the destruction of emails, recommending a default judgment against the state, Douglas and Sword were publicly fired.

Shortly thereafter, the state said it would settle the suit for $4 million.

About a week after the settlement was announced, Jividen found herself before a committee of lawmakers at interim meetings at the Oglebay Resort near Wheeling.

While she was there to give a presentation on her work in reentry for those coming out of prison, committee co-chair Sen. Jason Barrett, R-Berkeley, began drilling down on the issues in the penal system.

His counterpart, Del. David Kelly, R-Tyler, quickly intervened, instructing Jividen not to answer. Tension rose between the two men, as Barrett tried once again and Kelly shut the conversation down.

“This is not the time nor the place to ask these questions,” Kelly said, once again.

“Well, I think the people of West Virginia deserve answers,” Barrett retorted.

A month later, it was both the time and the place when the same committee met at the Capitol on Dec. 12

Jividen’s successor, Commissioner Billy Marshall, gave a presentation on the strides he’s taken to fix the issues with the division in the year he’s been on the job. He said they’ve been able to hire more than 200 new guards due to pay raises. He touted a new system to track inmates being piloted at the North Central Regional, and added that just about every facility is either at or under capacity in the system.

Then Barrett started asking his own questions, namely, if the commissioner had any comment about the investigations at the state’s jails.

“I feel like there was some things that could’ve been done better, that weren’t,” Marshall said. “That comes from the facility, all the way down to all the way up.”