CHARLESTON — Prison overcrowding translates into America’s most difficult social and economic problem since slavery, and the war on drugs is a major contributor, a Charleston minister said Tuesday.

The Rev. Matthew Watts, senior pastor at Grace Bible Church, told a legislative panel the congestion can be resolved, and that too much time has been spent talking without taking action.

“Basically, it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rev. Watts, a native of Mount Hope, told the Select Committee on Minority Affairs.

“It’s the hanging thread from the proverbial cheap sweater. Once you start to pull it, you see it’s connected to a whole lot of things. And things start to unravel.”

Watts noted that America makes up 5 percent of the global population but has 25 percent of the inmates.

“It’s a pandemic problem across the nation and West Virginia is no exception,” he said.

Partly due to the war on drugs, he said blacks and Latinos make up a disproportionate number in the criminal justice system.

“If we were to incarcerate low-income white people at the same rate of blacks, we could not build prisons to jail all of them,” Watts said.

The minister suggested action must be taken now, rather than continue studying the issue of crowded prisons and jails.

“We are bogged down in a paralysis of analysis and we’ve taken no action,” he said, quoting one recent authority.

Altogether, counting those on parole and probation, he said, some 23,800 residents are embroiled in the justice system.

Watts said the dropout problem is

exacerbating the problem, along with a loss of jobs, partly because of fewer declining manufacturing and higher standards that have kept many out of the military.

“You can address the problem,” he told the committee.

“It can be addressed. But you have to do something about it. You can’t just talk about it. You really have to put a plan in place of alternative sentencing, a plan of transition and re-entering, and a plan to divert kids to the juvenile justice system.”

Watts said the growing ranks of juvenile offenders pose a silent part of the issue, since their cases aren’t identifiable out of privacy laws.

“The valve to the pipeline is wide open and it’s full of kids going into the direction of the prison system,” he said.

“Younger people are spending their young years in prison. They’re marginalized from employment, job training and other federal benefits.”

Watts cited a letter to the national NAACP president from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., agreeing that prisons are draining the economy and that the nation must reconsider the mass incarceration of non-violent offenders.

“We’re spending $278 million on the prison system and no one blinks an eye,” Watts said.

“It’s the most complicated thing the nation has had to deal with since slavery.”

Ironically, he said, in West Virginia, the prison population keeps soaring while the crime rate is actually declining.

One factor is the jailing of non-violent drug offenders, with a strong focus on the poor, even though most illegal drug use occurs in working, middle-class neighborhoods, he said.

“That’s because it’s easier for the federal prosecutor to put his investigators in a poor neighborhood in a poor community and arrest a bunch of people and bring them into the system and brag how many people they arrested and convicted,” Watts said.

America’s military ranks fell from 3.5 million during the Vietnam War in 1968 to 1.5 million today, albeit the nation’s overall population added 80 million people, he said.

Mix in the outsourcing of jobs and dwindling manufacturing and there has been a surplus in the labor force, he said.

Watts said the prison problem cannot be solved easily, and it entails more than just merely sending fewer people behind bars or letting some there now out early.

“The key is investing in work force development and job training, particularly for younger people,” he told the committee.

On another matter, the panel learned that Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin has narrowed a list of six applicants down to two for the newly-created Herbert Henderson Office of Minority Affairs and expects to name an executive director soon.

— E-mail: mannix@register-herald.com