RIVERTON, MT - The director of the state Department of Corrections says a judge was wrong to claim that the number of violent convicts at the minimum-security Wyoming Honor Farm has risen dramatically.

Corrections Director Bob Lampert said he believes the Honor Farm is safer than it was 13 years ago, in part because of an inmate classification system.

"Prior to 1993, there was no formal classification system," Lampert said Monday. "Basically, regardless of the nature of their crime or length of their sentence, inmates could be placed at the Honor Farm based on institutional performance - basically how good of an inmate they were.

"It's now actually a lot more difficult to be placed on the Honor Farm."

According to figures from the department, of the 230 inmates at the Honor Farm, 50 are there for sex offenses, 19 for assault and battery, and one for felony murder.

Fremont County District Judge Norman Young heaped criticism on the department in a June 29 sentencing hearing for Floyd DeWayne Grady, who was convicted after a trial in Jackson of murdering Honor Farm nurse Tammy Sue Watts, 39, in 2004.

Young said the department had turned the Honor Farm into a place where the typical inmate is more likely to be a violent sex offender than a writer of bad checks. "This isn't your father's Honor Farm," he said.

The facility's name, he said, was out of date. "It was tabbed 'the Honor Farm' at a time when it was a true minimum-security facility, at a time when it was populated mainly by persons who had committed nonviolent property crimes," Young said.

Young said he was flabbergasted that Grady, 30, was transferred to a minimum-security prison. Grady was originally sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old at knifepoint, the judge noted.

"And he's not alone," Young said. "Counsel made the point that there were several people in the vicinity when Ms. Watts was murdered who had committed crimes of the same or similar nature."

He said violent inmates were being housed at the Honor Farm because of overcrowding at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins and because of the placement in recent years of a sexual offender treatment unit at the Honor Farm.

Lampert, however, said the department's inmate classification system works. "Escapes from the Honor Farm are now nonexistent, whereas before people escaped from time to time," he said.

He said human behavior is not 100 percent predictable and that Grady was a "chameleon."

"There was nothing to indicate that Grady wasn't qualified and eligible for minimum placement," he said.

Lampert noted that because of the severity of Grady's 1995 rape conviction, Grady had to score very high in other classification categories, including his behavior in prison, to be considered for the Honor Farm.

Grady went through sex offender treatment and served nearly 10 years of his 10- to 30-year sentence when he was transferred to the Honor Farm.