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Montana politics, elections and legislative news

Hundreds of Montana inmates are being transferred out of state

Gov. Greg Gianforte is calling on lawmakers to solve overcrowding in Montana’s prisons. He’s asking for 500 additional beds at the Deer Lodge prison. That’s on top of a $200 million the Legislature approved for the facility last session.

Meanwhile more inmates are being sent to private, out-of-state facilities. Montana PBS reporter Sam Wilson dug into the issue and spoke with MTPR’s Elinor Smith.

Elinor Smith: Sam, thanks so much for being here today.

Sam Wilson:  Thanks for having me, Elinor.

Elinor Smith: Of course. Can you start by explaining what Montana's prison population is looking like now?

Sam Wilson: Yeah, so Montana has a contract with CoreCivic, which is one of the two biggest private prison companies in the country. They've had a contract to have inmates at a CoreCivic facility in Shelby, Montana since 1999. And just in the last year, or I guess since November of 2023, there's been 360 Inmates sent to a facility in Arizona. And they're starting to transfer right now another 240 to a facility in Mississippi. And those moves are, you know, if you ask the DOC, those moves are meant primarily to address another overcrowding issue this time in county jails. At the moment, there's over 400 state inmates being held at county jails waiting for room at the Montana State Prison or some other facility. So that's the — that's sort of their priority here in making these spaces available in other states.

Elinor Smith: So how do those out-of-state transfers impact the Montanans who are sent to serve their sentence in a private facility?

Sam Wilson: Well, it's really hard for families and inmates alike to maintain the kind of connections that they may have had at Montana State Prison or any of the other facilities in the state. You know, it's much further away and to get there to visit is very expensive. And so, you know, if you think about how important maintaining these family relationships are for inmates who will get out at some point, you know, that puts a huge barrier in place.

Elinor Smith: How have inmates who have been sent to this facility in Arizona felt about their situation?

Sam Wilson: The inmates that I've talked to and the family members of inmates that I've talked to have all expressed sort of a resignation. The people that they're sending down there are people who are far away from parole, so they're going to be incarcerated for a while. And there's a feeling of sort of being swept under the rug. And there's a sense that their rehabilitation isn't the priority.

Managing a growing prison population, on the latest episode of Montana PBS Reports: IMPACT.

Elinor Smith: Can you explain how probation or parole policies in the state can feed into overcrowding?

Sam Wilson: So you can think of the prison population as being determined by inputs and outputs, and parole and probation affect the outputs of a prison population.

In Montana's case, the parole rate has been going down as the prison population goes up.

Elinor Smith: How have lawmakers addressed this overcrowding in the past, and what are they planning to do this legislative session?

Sam Wilson: Well, in 2017 there was sort of a push. They were looking at either building more prison beds or sort of rethinking the justice system. And they chose the second option. They passed a raft of bills that addressed inefficiencies in the parole and the probation system. And there was evidence that that was helping with the prison population. A lot of people at the county level, county attorneys, even judges, sort of felt that that took away some of their power in the process. And so, many of those bills have been walked back. You know, thinking about parole as an output there's also a lot of people who are looking at the input. So, trying to keep people out of prison in the first place through programs like drug court or other treatment, mental health. You know, which is a big driver of prison population.

Generally, though, now the solutions on the table are more about building and more about spending to increase capacity. And you know, that's really the decision of the Legislature to drive the direction of the prison population in the future.

Elinor Smith: Okay. Well, Sam, thank you so much for being here with us today.

Sam Wilson: Yeah. Thanks Elinor. Appreciate it.

Elinor is a reporter and the host of evening news on Montana Public Radio.
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