CORRECTIONS SEEKING NEW PRISON

HELENA - Corrections officials are looking to build a new kind of treatment
prison in the next 18 months, focusing on mentally ill, drug-addicted or
elderly convicts.

Exactly which kind of "special needs" inmate the new prison might house and
how many will end up there remains to be seen, said Joe Williams,
administrator of the agency's Centralized Services Division.

"It's really going to be pretty wide open," he said of the possibilities
the agency is willing to consider.

The 2005 Legislature allocated several million dollars to the department to
hire a private contractor to open a new kind of prison with room for up to
256 inmates.

Corrections officials recently put out a call to contractors to come up
with ideas on how to spend the money. The best idea will get the contract,
which is expected to be issued in October, information shows. The new
prison is expected to open by October of 2006.

At this point, Williams said, no one knows exactly what the facility may
look like, who it will serve or what it will cost, as many of those
questions will be answered by the kinds of proposals private companies come
up with.

"We're going to shop around," he said. "It's almost like, in some sense, a
buffet."

For the last decade, Montana has greatly expanded the number of prison
cells in the state. That was necessary, Williams said, but now the state
finds itself at a crossroads: Prisons are filling with inmates addicted to
methamphetamine, suffering from mental illness and sometimes both. Prisons
are facing other problems, too. Inmates are older. Some are seriously ill.
Some are involved in gangs.

The agency now hopes to reserve lockdown prison for the most violent and
habitual convicts, an estimated 20 percent of the people convicted of
crimes, Williams said. The remaining 80 percent should serve their
sentences in an environment that eases them back into the community,
ideally by treating the drug addiction or other underlying condition that
landed the inmates behind bars in the first place, Williams said.

"This is the first step," Williams said of the proposed new prison. "We
want to start with this."

The agency's first priority is dealing with meth, Williams said.

"That's what's really pushing us over the barrel," he said. "Behind it all
is that darned methamphetamine. What we're really trying to do is get to
the root causes of dependency, not just hack away at the limbs."

Bernadette Franks-Ongoy, executive director of the Montana Advocacy
Program, which advocates for the mentally ill, praised the agency for
looking at corrections in a new light.

"I think that we need to just acknowledge and commend the department for
being forward thinking," she said.

Franks-Ongoy said traditional prisons could exacerbate mental illness. A
prison dedicated exclusively to the mentally ill, including treatment to
help inmates deal with their mental illness, is a new, progressive way to
address the problem of prisons ending up as the state's largest, de facto
mental health facility, she said.

It's not that the mentally ill should be excused for their crimes,
Franks-Ongoy said. But there may be better ways to rehabilitate the
mentally ill and keep them from ending up behind bars again than what's
currently offered.

Franks-Ongoy said the agency's plans deserve praise even if the treatment
prison now in the works ends up not serving the mentally ill exclusively.

"We think this is great," she said.