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| '91 Prison Riot, War on Crime Pushed Up Inmate Population |
| By Billings Gazette |
| Published: 01/02/2003 |
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Consider the numbers: 1,100 new jail cells in four years. Almost twice as many people behind bars today as 10 years ago. A budget that has almost doubled in six years. Montana's Department of Corrections has been swelling like a prize-winning pumpkin. But the story of how Corrections grew, why it grew and what can be done to stop - or at least slow - the growth is more complicated than the numbers suggest. And the story is particularly important now that the Department of Corrections, along with the rest of state government, is struggling with a budget shortfall that could be as high as $250 million. The story of the Department of Corrections run-up is the story of four hours of murder and melee in 1991 during a wild, deadly prison riot in Deer Lodge. It's the story of Neal Hage, a Montana inmate beaten to death in 1997 in a prison brawl at a private pen in Texas; Hage had been shipped to Texas when Montana ran out of jail cells. It's about methamphetamine, tougher laws, truth in sentencing and a public that seemed more than willing to pay to keep criminals off the streets. It's also the story of dissenters who warned officials years ago that new jail cells alone were not the answer. Most of the growth took place under former Department of Corrections Director Rick Day, now the director of the Washington State Gambling Commission. When he took the post in 1993, Day said, the department hadn't seen major improvements for many years and was paying for it. 'The agency was recovering from the prison riot, which was fairly significant,' Day said. 'There were a number of large lawsuits pending over that.' On Sept. 22, 1991, nine inmates took over the maximum-security building at the Montana State Prison. They snagged the keys of a fleeing corrections officer and freed 68 other convicts. For four hours, rioters unleashed a hell storm: starting fires, hanging other inmates to death with electrical cords, slashing throats. One inmate was flung over a balcony. Corrections officers retook the building after posing as television reporters. Inside, they found five bodies, numerous fires and a floor covered in water and broken glass. An independent report pegged the cause of the riot as a series of security lapses and a failure to notice warning signs. Day said the system had other problems, too. It was overpopulated. 'The infrastructure had really been neglected for almost 100 years,' he said. 'Montana really hadn't built any new prison space for quite some time.' In addition, the following years witnessed a surge of tougher laws for criminals and statutes that guaranteed that people would serve harder time. During Day's stint, the Legislature passed a law requiring 10-year sentences for repeat drunken drivers. Lawmakers, at the department's request, also eliminated 'good time,' the practice of allowing inmates to cut a day off their sentences for every day they behave themselves behind bars. By the mid-1990s, prisons in Montana were hopelessly overcrowded and backing up into county jails, Day said. Day sought relief by shipping more than 250 Montana prisoners to private prisons out of state. He chose the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas. The prisoners moved out in June 1996. Three months later, problems surfaced. One Montana inmate briefly escaped; another was injured when prison officers shot live ammunition to break up a protest of prison conditions staged mostly by Montana inmates. Then-Rep. Dan McGee, R-Laurel, now a state senator, visited the facility with another lawmaker the next January. He said Montana's prisoners had nothing to complain about. 'Our prisoners at Montana State Prison are spoiled,' he said at the time, calling the Texas prison 'a real jail.' McGee was half-joking, but what happened in May 1997 was no laughing matter. A fight broke out in the prison exercise yard between inmates from Montana and Hawaii. Hage, 32, of Butte, was beaten in the head with a barbell weight. At first, prison officials thought Hage was fine. A cut in his head was stitched up at a Lubbock hospital and he was sent back to prison. But days later, Hage was rushed back to the hospital suffering from a blood clot in his brain. He lapsed into a coma and his brain stopped functioning. Hage's wife asked doctors to take her husband off life support; he died a week after the brawl. Montana's inmates were transferred to other private prisons in Tennessee and Arizona. Things got better, but two Montanans escaped in Tennessee. The combination of overcrowding at home and a string of disasters with private prisons out-of-state seemed to guarantee that Montana lawmakers would build lots of new prison cells and build them fast. They did. Between 1998 and today, three regional prisons opened, in Great Falls, Glendive and Missoula. A private prison in Shelby also opened its doors. As a result, the number of people behind bars in Montana grew from 1,310 in 1992 to 2,448 today, corrections statistics show. In 1996, the department' s budget was roughly $54 million. Today, it's $110 million. It's not just the prisons that grew. In 1992, Montana had 140 convicts in pre-release centers. Today, the number is 580. In 1992, the state had 4,169 people on probation and parole; the count today is 6,104. In 1992, there were 5,664 convicts under supervision of the Department of Corrections. Today, there are 9,384. That means there are roughly as many convicts in the penal system as there are people in Red Lodge, Roberts, Belfry, Joliet, Bridger and every other community and ranch house in all of Carbon County. But as current Corrections Director Bill Slaughter and the department's centralized services administrator, Joe Williams, point out, it's not just neglect, overcrowding and a string of crises that drove Montana to build more prisons. Methamphetamine played a big role, Slaughter said. Never before has an addictive drug been so cheap, so easy to come by and so destructive of the lives of people who use it. Drunken drivers also play a role. Montana eventually softened its stance of tossing repeat offenders in prison for 10 years. Today, it's down to 13 months. But that still adds up to a lot of people. Among male convicts in the state, drunken driving is the fifth-most common crime and accounts for about 300 new criminals entering the Corrections Department every year. About 140 of them will end up in prison. In addition, probation and parole officers are more effective at catching violations. In 1999, Slaughter said, the department hired more officers. With more officers, probation and parole started catching more scofflaws. Today, 47 percent of the people in Montana State Prison are convicts who violated the terms of their release and were sent back to prison. Although then-Gov. Marc Racicot strongly supported the growth, it did not go unchallenged. Some people warned that merely putting people behind bars would not stem the tide of new criminals and would only end up costing the state a lot of money. 'My personal feeling is that it was out of control,' said John Mercer, a former House speaker from Polson. 'I felt it was growing at a rate that we could not pay for and that there was not innovative thinking as to what would be other ways we could deal with crime and punishment that would cost less.' |
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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.