The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Legislators add $31 million to Corrections
By JENNIFER McKEE
Gazette State Bureau

HELENA - Lawmakers on Monday essentially axed plans to build a new 256-cell prison for inmates with special needs in Warm Springs but still pumped an extra $31.7 million into the Department of Corrections budget.

"I feel good about it," said Corrections Director Bill Slaughter, adding that lawmakers seem to share both his and the governor's goal of finding better ways to punish nonviolent inmates, many of whom are serving time in prison for drug offenses.

The move is only the latest in the long process of balancing the state's overall $7 billion, all-funds, two-year budget. Of that, $2.6 billion comes from the state's general fund, or checking account, funded primarily by state income taxes on individuals and businesses.

The Department of Corrections gets 97 percent of its budget from general fund dollars.

The House Appropriations Committee is in the process of crafting the state budget and finalized Correction's part of the equation Monday.

Montana's prison population is expected to increase between 5 percent and 6 percent over the next two years, and most of the new millions of dollars will go to accommodate the increased number of convicts.

Lawmakers approved converting a wing of the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge to a new 85-bed revocation center. Prisoners on probation would be sent to the center instead of prison for certain probation violations. Lawmakers also approved hiring 56 employees to run the center.

They approved adding 287 beds in pre-release centers around the state, a proposition that could result in an entirely new pre-release center being built. They approved displacing up to 88 federal inmates currently housed at the state's only private prison in Shelby with Montana inmates. The state has first dibs on all the cells, and Shelby and can pre-empt the contract the facility currently has with the U.S. marshal's office in Billings.

Lawmakers allocated $1.4 million for more probation and parole officers and agreed to increase the amount of money the state spends per day to house inmates at the Shelby prison, at pre-release centers and at the county-run regional prisons throughout Montana.

Rep. John Sinrud, R-Bozeman, at the request of the governor's office, made several attempts to cut money from the budget, as it represented about $5.8 million more than the amount of money Gov. Brian Schweitzer suggested spending for the department.

Only one of those attempts, which cut $2 million from the agency's budget, succeeded.

Without that money, Slaughter said, the department probably wouldn't be able to go forward with a proposed special needs prison to be run by a nonprofit business in Warm Springs. That idea, endorsed last month by a separate panel of lawmakers dedicated solely to crafting Corrections' budget, would have housed elderly inmates, the chronically ill, sex offenders and drug addicts.

Slaughter said he didn't think the idea of a special needs prison would disappear - there's just a lot of worthy things for the state to spend its money on, and this time, a special needs prison may not make the cut.

He also said the agency could start concentrating inmates with certain medical and psychological problems in wings of the existing prison, as they already do with some mentally ill inmates.

The panel also approved studying corrections over the next two years to find out how the agency should expand to accommodate the ever-increasing population of felons in Montana.

"I'll bet (the special needs prison concept) will be back next time," Slaughter said. "It's not going away.

Rep. Tim Callahan, D-Great Falls, a member of the committee and head of the panel that studied Corrections' budget in-depth, said he was disappointed the special needs prison idea was cut.

"We're going to have to do something about it," he said. "This is less expensive in the long run."

Despite the $2 million cut, the budget approved Monday is still about $2 million more than the balanced budget Schweitzer proposed to lawmakers.

Party-line politics blurred in Monday's corrections debate with Democrats and Republics often crossing lines on votes. In some cases, a clear "party line" was difficult to discern at all.

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