On Saturday, August 3, 2024, a Harrison County sheriff’s deputy arrested Marissa Crim in downtown Clarksburg. In a criminal complaint filed that day, the deputy wrote that he saw Ms. Crim make an improper turn in a car with a registration that had expired in June.
After stopping her car, the deputy learned Ms. Crim’s license was suspended. He arrested her for the misdemeanor of driving with a revoked license.
According to the deputy’s complaint, he contacted Ms. Crim’s grandfather to pick up her car, then Ms. Crim was “processed and fingerprinted and then transported” to North Central Regional Jail (NCRJ).
NCRJ is West Virginia’s most overcrowded regional jail. The Doddridge County facility was originally built to house 400 people. But at the beginning of August 2024, NCRJ had more than doubled that capacity, housing 835 people.
When an officer makes an arrest like the deputy in this case, the person arrested is supposed to be brought before a magistrate in the county where the arrest occurred. During this “initial appearance,” the magistrate reviews the officer’s allegations, decides whether there is a probable cause for an arrest, and if there is, then sets a bond.
The court documents are silent on why the deputy did not take Ms. Crim to a magistrate but instead drove 30-minutes away from downtown Clarksburg to deliver her to NCRJ.
According to her obituary, Ms. Crim died on Sunday, August 4th – the day after her arrest.
In the last decade, West Virginia jails were the deadliest in the country. But tragic, preventable deaths continue to occur in the current decade. West Virginians may now be familiar with the staggering number of deaths at Southern Regional Jail, where at least 27 people have died since 2020.
But the second deadliest jail over that period was North Central Regional Jail. Since the beginning of 2020, at least 19 people have died in NCRJ’s custody.
When a person dies in one of their facilities, the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (DCR) does not release a statement. There is no public acknowledgement of a family’s loss. No assurances to conduct a thorough investigation. Instead, journalists and concerned citizens must make a public records request to find out how many people have died in the state’s custody. Even then, DCR does not disclose the names of people who died, making it near-impossible to identify them.
On September 25, 2024, the DCR Commissioner’s Office responded to a public records request for a “log of all people who died in the custody of the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation” during the month of August.
DCR reported three deaths in its custody in a single month: a 43-year-old man who died in Northern Correctional Center (Marshall County) on August 14, a 36-year-old man who died two days later at South Central Regional Jail (Kanawha County), and a 53-year old man who died on August 28 at Mt. Olive (Fayette County).
Marissa Crim was not on the list.
One may point out that Ms. Crim did not die at NCRJ, but instead at a hospital. However, the request to DCR explicitly asked for any deaths that occurred under Ms. Crim’s exact circumstances (“This request includes people who died following a DCR administrative release, as well as any people who died after a transfer from DCR to an ambulance, a hospital, or other medical facility.”).
Further, and perhaps most importantly, until her death Ms. Crim was in DCR custody. If she had not died, but instead woke up in the hospital, she would not have been free to leave the hospital and go home. In fact, walking out of the hospital would likely lead to a criminal charge of escape.
But even if the lawyer responding to public records requests has a distorted understanding of custody, the jail staff did not.
The day after Ms. Crim died, an assistant prosecuting attorney from Harrison County filed a motion to dismiss the two-day old misdemeanor charge. In the space provided for the motion’s basis, the prosecutor wrote: “Jail informed defendant died in custody.”
Perhaps North Central Regional Jail did not inform the Commissioner or the legal staff who respond to public records requests about this death in its custody. This would not be the first time NCRJ gave misleading or insufficient information about a person who died in its care.
A few weeks after Ms. Crim died, a Kanawha County jury heard a civil case regarding another NCRJ death. In July 2019, 26-year-old Zachary Bailey entered NCRJ around 8:00 p.m. By midnight, he had died.
DCR did reveal Mr. Bailey’s death in their official tally, reporting that his death was an overdose caused by “Drug/alcohol intoxication.”
Five years later, at the August 2024 civil trial, a former NCRJ correctional officer (CO) testified to a different reason for Mr. Bailey’s death.[1] Aaron Parker told the civil jury that he was working at NCRJ in July 2019 when he heard a call for officer assistance. When Parker arrived at the jail’s admission area, he saw a supervisor holding Mr. Bailey in a chokehold and another CO hitting him. As he and other COs arrived, they piled “on top of Mr. Bailey” for what Parker told the jury was “about seven minutes.”
According to Parker, Mr. Bailey told the COs he couldn’t breathe. Then as the minutes passed, Mr. Bailey’s body “started convulsing” before he turned “purple from head to toe.” After Mr. Bailey’s body went still, Parker told the jury that the supervisor in charge of the jail that night said, “Not so tough now are you, fucktard.”
The day after Parker’s testimony, DCR agreed to settle the lawsuit with the maximum offer allowed by the state: $1 million.
But missing is any reflection from the state about how Mr. Bailey’s and Ms. Crim’s deaths could have been prevented. Agencies who claim the mantle of “public safety” have failed to show us that they are actively working to prevent harm to people in their custody.
Where do we go from here?
In 2023, lawmakers created an Inspector General position for the Department of Homeland Security – the cabinet-level department that oversees DCR. Then-Governor Jim Justice appointed Mike Honaker, one of the lawmakers who voted to create the Inspector General role, to fill the position.
Two years later, the Department of Homeland Security claims there are no public records of any reports produced by the Inspector General. This lack of transparency isn’t cheap: West Virginians pay the Inspector General a salary of $85,000 per year for him to not tell the public what he has been doing.[2]
The most transparent watchdog could not solve the fundamental problem – the state has become increasingly comfortable with jailing people. Last fall, DCR Commissioner William Marshall described NCRJ’s overpopulation to lawmakers, explaining: “…we don’t have the ability to put ‘no vacancy’ signs on our facilities, so we have to take who we get.”
The commissioner is right. DCR does not control who comes into their jails.
That decision belongs to magistrates and judges, who last year, handed down 2,470 years’ worth of days in state jails to people serving misdemeanor sentences or awaiting trial. On any given day more than half of people in jail are there because they cannot afford the bond set.
Bond is not supposed to be a punishment. Instead, magistrates and judges are required by the constitution and state law to make an individualized assessment of the person arrested, then set the least restrictive bond designed to ensure safety and a person’s appearance at all future court dates.
Recent legislation has made it likely that more and more people will spend more and more time behind bars.
In 2021, the legislature eliminated bond review hearings for felony cases – in practice this has meant that people who could not afford their bond would have to wait days or weeks before they had a meaningful hearing with an attorney representing them. Two years later, a law made it cheaper for counties to send people to jail to await trial. Then last year, the Senate passed a bill that would have increased bond amounts in many cases.
The evidence is clear that jailing people pretrial makes us less safe: it does not deter crime but does increase the likelihood of future arrest. We are doing this to ourselves despite decades of declining crime rates. As a data analyst wrote in December, violent and property crime in 2024 “were likely amongst the lowest rates recorded since the 1960s and 1970s.”
West Virginia can do better.
Counties can take advantage of existing laws and rules to help them safely reduce the number of people exposed to overcrowded jails (and save money while doing it). Courts can set quick bond hearings and conduct regular reviews of people jailed prior to trial.
Lawmakers can reinstate a 2020 law that required a magistrate or judge to review bonds that were set without a formal hearing.
But the real test will happen in the coming weeks as the legislative session winds down. This session more than 185 bills have been introduced that create new criminal offenses or increase existing criminal penalties.
Will we continue to turn to the criminal legal system for problems it cannot solve? Will the crisis of jail deaths and the crisis of hiding information about jail deaths persist?
It took Mr. Bailey’s mother five years of fighting DCR head-on before one of the officers who participated in her son’s death told the truth. This is a system that will not budge unless it is forced to do so by those of us who value life.
[1] Testimony of Aaron Joseph Parker, August 20, 2024, Bailey v. DCR, Case No. 19-J-1163, Honorable Tera Salango, Kanawha County Circuit Court.
[2] For another example of failed oversight, see the now-defunct Legislative Oversight Committee on Regional and Correctional Facility Authority. That committee heard almost exclusively from state officials leading the jail and prison bureaucracy. During some of the deadliest years for people behind bars, the committee’s agendas suggested that the most important issue facing the regional jails was pay for jail and prison officers.
