Lawmakers say they may have to consider additional space at Montana State Prison

The plan to replace the low-security inmate housing at the Montana State Prison now includes blueprints of what the new facilities will look like, and costs for the project are coming in at or under the $156 million budget, planning and construction officials told an interim committee tracking the project on Tuesday.

Lawmakers on the Select Committee on Corrections Facility Capacity and System Development heard from Department of Corrections Director Brian Gootkin and representatives for DLR Group and Sletten Construction, which are managing the design and construction phases of the rebuild.

The project will replace three deteriorating housing units at the state prison in Deer Lodge with three new ones that will house 256 inmates each.

Currently, the prison is operating at 803 beds in buildings that were only supposed to house 373 inmates, meaning every room has bunks, some inmates are staying in closets and offices, and more than 15 inmates are sharing one toilet at a time.

It was the select committee’s first meeting since December, and in the months since, Gootkin, DLR Group’s civic design leader Andrew Cupples, and Sletten Construction senior vice president Tony Ewalt toured newly built prisons in Washington and Tennessee to glean more insight into what will work in Montana, and have been laying out a timeline and budget.

Gootkin said the teams and process so far, paired with DOC’s hitting full staffing levels in what he said was “the first time people can remember,” have meant a good start for the year for DOC.

But as he and the project managers dived into plans and timelines for the project, the other question at the heart of the committee’s considerations during the interim of how many prison beds the state will need in the future remained a central question, and lawmakers on Wednesday started toying with the idea they might need to budget in construction of a fourth 256-bed housing unit for the state prison in the 2025 session.

In the short-term, the team is planning to build the three 256-bed units, which will be separated into two wings of 128 beds each, each with their own common area and a combined outdoor recreation area and a monitoring area in between each wing.

Learning from their Tennessee and Washington trips, Gootkin and the team members said they wanted to keep the footprint of the new housing small, while allowing correctional officers sightlines throughout each building to reduce the number of cameras needed and the number of officers necessary to patrol.

The layout of the planned units would allow for five or six officers to monitor one building per day, and two at night, since the cells will be able to be locked. The smaller layout would also reduce crossover between different classifications of inmates that officials in Washington said they were dealing with due to having a larger campus, Gootkin said.

The team wants to put the new housing on the south end of the prison campus so they can fully cordon it off during construction to not affect any other part of the prison, and planned to build the units so plumbing and other maintenance points can be accessed without needing to get inside of the housing side of the facility itself – another way they said maintenance delays and conflicts could be avoided. There will also be parts of each unit that can be used for vocational training and personal time.

Gootkin said the current design plan takes a lot of what the team liked in Tennessee and Washington.

“When you walk into these units, you can see how open and big and bright it is. So not only (do inmates have) their own rooms to be able to go into, not only do they have the day room, but then they also have the rec area,” Gootkin said. “When we walked in and the unit was full, it still did not feel full, and it was. And I never felt unsafe. It was a totally different environment than what we’re dealing with right now at low side (low security).”

Ewalt said Sletten Construction has spent the past couple of months working with DLR to flesh out the design concept and has put together a cost analysis of materials – the team plans to use modular builds where it can – at the current market rate. He said the analysis so far has looked into prices for each individual cell, door, hardware, concrete, and different security systems, among other things.

He said that building the three 256-bed units can be done at current costs within the $156 million budget for that part of the project. That includes connecting utilities to the infrastructure that is already in place, but a deeper infrastructure analysis is underway to determine the costs of the rest of the infrastructure buildout and should be ready in June.

The bulk of the low-security housing project will be built between the spring of 2025 and fall of 2027, but other parts of the full prison project will get kicked off starting in May, Ewalt said.

Replacing roofing at the prison will start this summer, and infrastructure upgrades will as well once the site study is complete. The perimeter fence for the new housing will come next, with high-security housing and the remodel of Unit D, which contains another 152 beds, further down the road.

The team is also planning out what “further down the road” means exactly, as the state’s prison population is forecast to grow, lawmakers heard in December, and capacity throughout the corrections system is still nonexistent.

“So we’re crystal clear and transparent: We’re full,” Gootkin said. “Not only are we full; we’re full in Arizona, we’re backed up in the jails.”

Gootkin, Cupples and Ewalt told lawmakers they had built into the plans a site for a fourth housing unit that would go next to the other three that are planned, as well as another general building, should Montana decide it needs to further expand the prison.

“We wanted to plan this so if and when the decision was made to add additional housing units, the infrastructure and everything was ready to roll, and to be able to give you that option,” Gootkin told the committee.

With the 768 beds in the low-security phase and 152 beds coming later in the Unit D remodel, there would be 920 beds at the prison. But adding a fourth unit would give MSP 373 more beds than it currently has available in modern facilities, he said.

Since lawmakers on the committee are tasked with both monitoring the longterm project and other facets of the corrections issues in Montana and coming up with recommendations for next year’s legislative session, Gootkin and the team offered some thoughts on costs of a potential fourth unit and how they could change over time.

He said at today’s costs, a fourth 256-bed unit would cost $53 million, the additional general support building would cost $27 million, and DOC would need about 14 full-time equivalent employees to run the extra unit, he said.

The rest of the team forecasted that building that same project 10 years in the future would cost about $81 million for the housing unit and $41 million for the general support building.

Lawmakers from both parties praised the three for the work so far and the look into the future, saying it was likely a prescient move to start those conversations now instead of running up against another capacity issue down the road and having to pay more for the same building.

Between now and June, the committee has to come up with recommendations to two other committees to prepare reports to be presented in the late summer and fall. Along with likely including recommendations about future beds, lawmakers said they also wanted to look further into why the prison and corrections populations are continuing to grow and what kind of policy choices could be made to try to stem the tide.

Committee chairman Sen. John Esp, R-Big Timber, said it was “healthy” that both the legislature and DOC were looking longer term at the issues they are facing and looking for long-term solutions.

“I’m assuming this future building will show up in House Bill 5 or somewhere next time, and that we’ll be asked to look at funding that. And I think we’ll be asking to look at funding it at a much lower rate than it would have been if we don’t include it in this project. So, I think that’s probably wise too,” he said.

Blair Miller is a Helena-based reporter. The Daily Montanan is a nonprofit newsroom.