MT- More prison beds needed, but so is more treatment

8-24-2009 Montana:

It was good to see that a corrections advisory group slashed a consultant's recommendation for new prison beds.

It also was good to see a new emphasis on treatment in plans for corrections growth.

The Montana Corrections Advisory Council headed by Lt. Gov. John Bohlinger says the state should in the next 16 years build a 116-bed treatment center for sex offenders, a 152-bed facility for inmates with mental health issues, 512 new beds for male prisoners and 256 beds for women.

The price tag for the projects would be a hefty $243 million, but that's less than half of what consultant Carter Goble Lee of South Carolina recommended late last year.

The firm's study projected an increase of 70 percent in the population of folks in the corrections system — both incarcerated and non-incarcerated — by 2025, translating into need for more than 3,500 new beds in prisons, pre-release centers and treatment centers.

If Montana's overall population increases dramatically — and at least one Census study suggests that it might — the additional beds recommended by the consultant could be needed.

The advisory panel's 1,000-plus-bed recommendation is more in line with a population projection that continues at the same rate as the past 16 years — assuming a constant rate of incarceration.

All the same, we'd respectfully suggest that the state put even more emphasis on less expensive — and arguably more effective — ways of handling many of its offenders.

America and Montana already lock up a higher percentage of their citizens than any other nation — a highest-ever one in 99 adults nationwide in 2008; about one in 114 in Montana.

It seems possible that the old paradigm of locking 'em up and throwing away the key isn't taking us the direction we want to go.

The advisory group's recommendation does include several hundred beds for treatment centers, and that's good.

For example, the proposed mental-illness treatment center would increase by more than four-fold the number of beds in the system for that purpose at present.

That is the proper emphasis for future growth in the system.

As Bohlinger said in announcing the recommendations, instead of putting every law-breaker behind bars, the administration wants to "help them with their addiction, help them with their mental health issues."

That approach has been shown to reduce recidivism (repeat offenses) and to cost less than the estimated $84 a day it costs to keep someone in prison.

In that connection, a trend that needs to be bucked, or at least thoroughly examined, is political pressure for longer sentences.

"The thing that really drives prison populations are longer sentences," state Corrections Director Mike Ferriter said last winter in response to a Pew Center study of prison populations. ..Source.. by Great Falls Tribune.com