Our state is woefully short of corrections officers in our prisons and jails, due primarily to our parsimonious approach to paying them.

The Legislature considered a plan to increase the pay of correctional employees in its 2023 Regular Session, but punted. The plan wasn’t very good, but it would have helped.

Since then, there have been calls for a special session to deal with the issue, but Governor Jim Justice poured cold water on that idea. He said he wouldn’t call a special session unless there was an agreed upon plan to solve the problem.

While that sounds logical, lack of a plan to solve a problem has not in the past prevented him from calling special sessions, when solutions were not in sight. Almost a year ago he called the Legislature into special session, ostensibly on some fiscal matters. Justice said at the time that abortion would absolutely not be on the agenda, as no compromise plan had been worked out. The day the Legislature assembled, he placed abortion on the “call” for the session, and abortion was effectively banned statewide, in short order.

The proposed raise for corrections officers was to be a one-time $3,000, followed by a similar raise in the future. This would have kept some officers on the job for a few more years, but would have only postponed their inevitable departures. A sensible approach would be to look much farther into the future, with a plan for continuing raises.

We have a similar problem with other state employees and with public school teachers. Our state is 1,500 teachers short of the number of teachers needed, because we pay them so little.

The reason Governor Justice and the legislative leadership didn’t want to pay our public employees a living wage, is that they needed about $800 million for the state income tax cut they passed. At 21 percent across the board, that cut will go primarily to high income individuals.

Justice thinks he’s temporarily solved the corrections problem by ordering several hundred National Guard troops to work full time in our jails and prisons. I wonder if he thinks he can use other folks from the National Guard as teachers!

I hope not, because with overtime we’re actually spending as much on using the National Guard as the Prison Guard, as we would be spending if we paid our trained jail and prison guards decently.

The shortage of jail guards is greatest here in the Eastern Panhandle. That is also the case with teachers and other public employees. But one Republican legislator representing Jefferson County recently wrote that the Legislature should have eliminated the income tax entirely, not just cut it by 21 percent. And he said we wouldn’t need to raise alternate revenue!

Were the Legislature to do that, we would be paying our teachers, school service workers and state employees even less than the paltry sums we now pay them. Who would then teach our children and guard our prisoners?

John Doyle is a 26-year former member of the West Virginia House of Delegates. He can be reached at rjohndoyle@comcast.net.