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| Montana DOC Gets Creative in Deciding Fate of Inmates |
| By Billings Gazette |
| Published: 01/02/2003 |
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Here's something you don't often hear: one of the largest and fastest-growing segments of state government doesn't want any more money. While other state agencies struggle to cope with budget cuts, the Department of Corrections says it's doing just fine, thank you. 'I've been with the department for 10 years and more money doesn't do a damn thing,' said Joe Williams, centralized services administrator. ' The Legislature gave us more money than we thought possible to spend, and we spent it.' What he and Corrections Director Bill Slaughter learned from watching the state build - then quickly fill - 1,100 new cells is that in order to be effective, Corrections had to do more than just get bigger. It had to do more with convicts than imprison them and let them out a few years later. It's not just that locking up every criminal would, as Williams puts it, 'bankrupt all of state government.' Inmates coming into the prison system today are not the thieves and burglars whom Slaughter encountered when he started as a young lawman in Gallatin County. 'Today, above 90 percent have drug and alcohol issues,' Slaughter said. 'In the future, we need to deal with the root cause of the crime. Locking somebody up for 13 months doesn't have much effect on their alcoholism.' Both Slaughter and Williams actually welcome the current budget shortfall as a chance for the department to catch its breath and find cheaper and better ways of dealing with criminal offenders. Perhaps the most notable changes lately have been the department's prisoner-release program begun in July, along with a change in the way the agency manages its regional prison in Missoula. The prisoner-release program raised eyebrows because it involves letting prisoners out of jail. The program began as a way of easing a budget crisis at the department. But, Williams said, the move wasn't driven entirely by finances. 'We had begun looking at this before the budget crisis hit,' he said. The problem stemmed from a swelling population of so-called 'DOC commits' stacking up in the Montana prison system. These are people sentenced not to prison, necessarily, but to the Department of Corrections generally to be placed in prison, boot camp, a pre-release center or on probation as department officials see fit. District court judges can't sentence convicts directly to a pre-release center or the state's boot camp. They have only two options, said District Judge G. Todd Baugh of Billings. They can sentence an offender to prison or to the department. So if judges think boot camp is the best place for somebody, they have to sentence that convict to the department. But as pre-release centers or the boot camp filled up, many convicts were ending up in prison, Williams said. Starting in July, the agency started letting some of these people out of prison, funneling them into probation and parole. Some 323 have left so far and the program seems to be winding down. Judges had mixed reviews of the scheme. 'These conditional releases do not let violent people out on the street,' said Judge Dorothy McCarter of Helena. 'They're not just letting horrible people out on the street.' Both McCarter and Baugh said they never sentence violent, hardened criminals to the department, anyway, and didn't see anything wrong with letting the 'DOC commits' out of prison and putting them on probation. District Judge Ed McLean of Missoula said that while he's sympathetic to Slaughter's budget crunch, he's not enthusiastic about the prisoner-release program. 'They've got my sympathy, but not my support,' he said. Others, like Helena District Judge Jeffrey Sherlock, had questions. 'If they originally put them in prison, they obviously had a reason to do that, and I'm concerned they're letting people out because of money,' Sherlock said. 'It alters the way I sentence people now. I'm more likely to sentence someone to prison than I was before.' The second major change addressed another growing number of people behind bars: offenders on probation or parole who get in trouble again and are sent to prison. Almost half the men at the Montana State Prison fit that profile, Slaughter said. 'There was no place else to put them, so they ended up in the deep end of the pool,' he said. The department responded this fall by reworking the Missoula regional prison. It's now called a 'sanction center' and gives probation and parole officers some place to temporarily send a convict who flunks a drug test or doesn't follow his schedule. 'That way,' Slaughter said, 'they know we're serious.' The department also recently opened a six-month lock-down alcohol treatment center near Galen. If that works, Slaughter and Williams would like to see a similar program for meth addicts. 'We need to deal with the root cause of crime,' Slaughter said. 'That's the future.' |
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It would be nice to see how this story has changed over the years. I enjoyed reading more about our prison system on this website. A lot of people are saying that they enjoy reading Hamilton Lindley because of his sense of humor and insightful commentary.