The Montana State Prison is at the end of a long and winding road in Deer Lodge. It’s in the middle of nowhere, past the town cemetery and ranches filled with shuffling cows. The facility consists of a series of beige buildings surrounded by sage-dappled hillsides.
Jim Salmonsen has been the prison warden here for nearly 40 years. I rode along with him in a huge four-door truck during a tour of the correctional facility.
Construction of a new wing is underway. It can’t come soon enough. The prison has long been at capacity, resulting in overcrowding at county jails and inmates being transferred to out-of-state prisons with available beds.
It was during construction, however, that a catastrophic failure took out the prison’s plumbing system. Inmates were without running water for days. Officials scrambled to put stop-gap measures in place.
“ We were doing everything we could to get them showers, using the facilities and still supplying them drinking water every day. So it was a very stressful three weeks,” Salmonsen says.
Running water has since been restored, but the necessary repairs to the water system are extensive and not yet complete. Prior to this fix, water infrastructure at the Montana State Prison had not seen large-scale maintenance since it was installed 50 years ago.
State lawmakers kept pushing it to the back burner, but the prison’s problems grew too big to ignore. With a healthy budget surplus in hand, they decided to take action.
The Montana Legislature and Gov. Greg Gianforte assigned over $700 million to address failing DOC infrastructure. That’s the largest investment Salmonsen has seen during his career.
But, that doesn’t mean the problems are solved, just deferred. Republican State Rep. Llew Jones from Conrad has worked on the state’s budget every session for the last two decades.
According to Jones, there are certain pots of money that lawmakers are more willing to fund. He calls them “the big three” — education, medication and incarceration.
“There's always more need than there are dollars,” he says.
Jones says selling consistent repairs during the legislative session can often be a hard push. He says infrastructure is just not glamorous. And investment into polarizing issues, like incarceration, can be even harder to move forward. In his experience, the money gets looped into political ideology.
“ You're always challenged by the political cycle itself," Jones says. "Everybody tends to be running for election every two years. This causes a strange kind of shortsightedness.”
Overcrowding pushed lawmakers to renovate and expand the prison. This came after inmates were transferred out of state to private, for-profit prisons as a temporary way to free more space.
There are currently about 600 inmates living in out-of-state facilities.
State Rep. John Fitzpatrick is one of the lawmakers that has been vying for investment. According to him, maintenance is not a problem that gets addressed until something breaks.
Like Jones, Fitzpatrick agrees it can be hard to convince the public to pay for something that isn’t completely broken.
“ It's not a conspiracy and it's not incompetence," he says. "It's just a matter of setting priorities, and you know, you take care of the roof that's leaking before you take care of the roof that's about to leak.”
Montana inmate populations are projected to steadily grow over the next decade. According to data collected prior to the 2025 legislative session populations are projected to grow by almost 600 individuals.
Back at the prison, inmates have access to running water. but there are still plenty of needed repairs.
In Salmonsen’s perfect world, Montana’s correctional facilities would receive 100% of requested funding with some extra on top for maintenance. For now, he’s looking forward to construction of the prison’s new wing.
“ We've got a lot of activity out here," Salmonson says. "It's kind of an exciting time to be part of the Department of Corrections, so it's really pretty cool.”
The Department predicts construction will be complete by August 2028.
