Since 2016, 120 prisoners from Montana’s Department of Corrections have been sent to a privately run jail in Arizona that is run by CoreCivic per year. The department told the Daily Montanan last week that they had sent an extra 120 prisoners there, bringing the total number of prisoners there to 364.
CoreCivic announced another deal with the State of Montana on Thursday. This time, it will house an extra 240 prisoners at its facility in Tutwiler, Mississippi. This brings the total number of prisoners in Montana under CoreCivic’s private management to 600, excluding the prisoners at its privately run facility in Shelby, Montana.
In order to handle the prison population and make needed upgrades and additions to the main state-run facility in Deer Lodge, Montana DOC officials say that moving the prisoners is the only way to do it. But some politicians aren’t sure about the practice, and civil rights groups are worried about the fact that the work is being outsourced from a public body to a private one without much oversight.
CoreCivic runs the Shelby Crossroads facility in northern Montana, which has 664 inmates. By the end of the first quarter of 2025, the private company will have been in charge of more than 1,200 criminals in Montana.
The Montana Department of Corrections website says that as of Wednesday, 2,953 adults are being held in state prisons every day.
The director of the Montana Department of Corrections, Brian Gootkin, said that the department is working with the legislature and the governor’s office to “develop a long-term solution to the critical capacity challenges within Montana’s prison system.” The man told the Daily Montanan that they will keep using services from other states until more infrastructure is built in Montana.
Officials from the Montana DOC also say that the price is good. According to information given to the Daily Montanan, it costs the state $112.12 per day for each prisoner to house them on average. CoreCivic gets paid $90 a day per prisoner at the Arizona jail where they work.
Officials said that they decide which prisoners go out of state and which stay in in-state or state-run facilities by looking at a number of factors, such as the length of time they have been locked up, how close they are to being eligible for parole, how actively they are participating in treatment or other programs, their medical needs, their mental health, and their safety concerns.
“The DOC sends inmates who are not close to their parole eligibility dates so that they don’t have to move around as much,” Gootkin said.
The fees given to CoreCivic cover the costs of getting to and from the facilities, so there are no extra costs on top of what was agreed upon. It was said that only four of the 223 prisoners from the Saguaro jail in Arizona who were sent there in 2023 and 2024 came back, but the department did not say why.
The legal head for the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana, Alex Rate, said that the people of Montana should be worried about all the people who are being sent out of state, no matter how much it costs.
He said, “We’ve been giving our prisoners to a private, out-of-state company that doesn’t have to answer to the taxpayers.”
He said that prisoners and their families are afraid about how they will be able to get to the legal libraries, Montana lawyers and courts, and their families when they are thousands or even hundreds of miles away.
The Department of Corrections said that inmates can watch their parole hearings from home.
According to Gootkin, family and friends can stay in touch with their loved ones at the out-of-state center through messaging, phone calls, video visits, and in-person visits.
The Tallahatchie County Correctional prison is in Tutwiler, Mississippi, which is about 1,860 miles away from Deer Lodge, and the Saguaro prison is in Eloy, Arizona, which is about 1,170 miles away.
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