Legislative fiscal staff: Montana prison population, jail holds rising; costly capacity gap looms

Legislative fiscal analysts and Department of Corrections officials told the House Judiciary Committee that Montana faces growing offender populations and expanding jail holds that are straining capacity and budgets, and that filling the gap will require large one‑time construction spending or increased reliance on cheaper contracted beds.

Nick Van Brown of the Legislative Fiscal Division introduced the legislative fiscal office’s MARA (Modernization and Risk Analysis) tools while Walker Hopkins, a corrections analyst with the Legislative Fiscal Division, outlined 20‑year offender projections and bed‑need scenarios. Hopkins said the office is using an exponential‑smoothing time series model weighted toward recent years to reflect the post‑COVID population rebound. “The purpose of MARA is really this forward‑looking idea, looking ahead 20 years,” Hopkins said.

The projections matter because the Department of Corrections’ budget and staffing scale with the number of people in secure custody and the severity of their offenses, Hopkins said. He told lawmakers the data now available stop at Q1 of fiscal 2024 and that more recent increases are likely to raise the forecasts.

MARA outputs and current counts

Hopkins pointed committee members to the LFD tool that combines historical admissions, releases and facility‑by‑facility counts. As of the snapshot he used, the number of people being held in local jails while waiting for DOC placement—so‑called jail holds—had risen to roughly 450 statewide, driven by 328 male and 111 female jail‑hold cases. Hopkins said the female jail‑hold rise is concentrated because Montana has only one state women’s secure facility (the Montana Women’s Prison) operating near capacity for several fiscal years. He said females are about 10% of the overall offender population but account for about 25–30% of jail holds.

Hopkins highlighted…