20181023-112811-21

Priority Area: Ensure the Montana Department of Corrections (MDOC) prison programming reflects evidence-based practices.
Background: Justice reinvestment legislation, SB 59 requires MDOC to adopt evidence-based prison programming. In order to comply with the legislation, MDOC has set up a programming committee to review all programming in MDOC facilities, standardize the programming offered across facilities, and ensure that resources are focused on programs that are most likely to reduce recidivism.

Update: In July, CSG Justice Center staff continued to guide the MDOC programming committee in conducting a comprehensive review of facility programming and shifting prison all prison programs to adopt evidence-based practices. MDOC continues the review process to evaluate internal MDOC programs to ensure they meet best practice standards. MDOC has incorporated a process to allow contract providers to submit programs for review to the programming committee with the goal of all providers facilitating effective, high quality programs.

Next Steps:
• Continue to provide guidance to MDOC as they work to align facility programming with evidence-based practices.
• Support MDOC in restructuring their treatment beds and contract facility referrals as needed.

Priority Area: Update the Montana Incentives and Interventions Grid (MIIG) to align with evidence-based practices.
Background: Montana’s JR legislation requires the Probation and Parole Division (PPD) to strengthen probation and parole supervision practices by updating the MIIG to align with evidence-based practices and institute short-term custodial sanctions for supervision violation.

Update: PPD used the MIIG statewide for the second month.

Next Steps:
• Continue to provide guidance on the MIIG statewide roll-out and provide booster training sessions for PPD staff as needed.
• Continue to develop a MIIG for contract facilities.

Priority Area: Professionalize Montana Board of Pardons and Parole (MBPP) and adopt parole decision-making guidelines.
Background: Prior to 2017, Montana had a part-time, volunteer staff in charge of all release, revocation, and pardoning decisions. The result was an unpredictable process that lacked transparency and was driven by “gut instincts.” Montana adopted justice reinvestment policies that transitioned the board to a full-time, professional decision-making body. The statutes further required the new board to fully adopt paroling best practices including structured release decision-making guidelines.

Update: In July, CSG Justice Center staff conducted the final site visit to work with MBPP. During this site visit, CSG Justice Center staff trained MBPP’s newest member, a retired judge who replaced the former chair of the board, and helped MBPP finish up strategic planning activities to guide their work over the next few years.

CSG Justice Center staff is also helping MBPP validate the decision-making guidelines. However, this process has been delayed for several reasons. Data collection on parole decisions has previously been very spotty and it has been difficult to get a robust data set to track outcomes of people who have been released by the board. After finally identifying a cohort of 100 people to use for the validation study, CSG Justice Center staff learned that one parole board member has been misinterpreting one of the guideline elements, so now cases scored by that member need to be pulled out of the data analysis. Additionally, CSG Justice Center staff are working with DOC IT staff and the MBPP chair to find the necessary back-up documentation to see how historic cases would have scored out on the guidelines.

Next Steps:
• Continue to help MDOC analyze parole decision-making data to validate the guidelines tool.
• Provide Montana Board of Pardons and Parole (MBPP) with recommendations for the finalization of parole guidelines.

Priority Area: Engage and educate Montana stakeholders on justice reinvestment legislation to promote oversight and sustainability.
Background: SB 59 established the Criminal Justice Oversight Council (CJOC) to oversee implementation activities. The council has many duties, including analyzing data related to justice reinvestment policies and reporting these findings to the governor and legislature. The council may also request legislation to enact changes to the state's criminal justice system based on council recommendations. During the active implementation assistance period, CSG Justice Center staff report to CJOC on implementation progress and trends from state monitoring data. CSG Justice Center staff also work with CJOC committee members to help with stakeholder education as needed.

Update: MDOC worked to identify potential clean-up legislation policies to vet with the CJOC and the Law and Justice legislative interim committee. Additionally, CSG Justice Center staff worked with MDOC research and IT staff to prepare a robust data analysis for the October CJOC meeting (see below).
Next Steps:
• The next and final meeting of CJOC will take place the first week in October, in conjunction with the Montana Forum on Public Safety.
• CJOC will propose any justice reinvestment clean-up legislation it thinks is necessary to the Law and Justice legislative interim committee in September.

New Insights:
MDOC staff have been considering proposing clean-up legislation that will remove risk and needs assessment (RNA) from pre-sentence investigations (PSIs). CSG Justice Center staff have strongly cautioned against this move, warning that it would be more of a rollback of justice reinvestment legislation rather than “clean-up” and that it would be out of step with national best practices. Instead, CSG Justice Center staff recommended ramping up stakeholder engagement and judicial education efforts as RNA is now required to be used in Montana in supervision practices, programming, and conditional discharge decisions, along with the PSI. If DOC wants to modify the statutory language around the PSI, CSG Justice Center staff would encourage Montana to add additional structure for how to use RNA results in decision-making – for example, that it is not used to determine sentence lengths, but as a way to guide conditions setting for probation sentences.

Priority Area: Use BJA subaward funds to build capacity for JR implementation.
Background: A $500,000 subaward grant is available to Montana to help overcome implementation barriers and build state capacity to sustain JR policies.

Update: Montana re-submitted an edited version of the category 2 grant application to the CSG Justice Center. This new version includes a request from the Bureau of Crime Control (BOCC) to partially fund the Montana Forum on Public Safety. CSG Justice Center staff began to the review process of the new application to ensure its readiness for submission to BJA.

Next steps:
• CSG Justice Center staff will continue to review Montana’s category 2 application and submit the final version to BJA.
• CSG Justice Center staff will conduct a training for MDOC staff on subaward reporting and reimbursement.

Priority Area: Set up regular data monitoring.
Background: As part of justice reinvestment implementation, states are required to identify and submit regular data tracking metrics to the CSG Justice Center.

Update: CSG Justice Center staff met with an interagency data workgroup to plan for the next data analysis for the October CJOC meeting. This workgroup consists of key staff members from DOC, the Administrative Office of the Courts, the Montana Department of Justice (MDOJ), and the Office of the Public Defender (OPD). The workgroup discussed obstacles to tracking justice reinvestment implementation outcomes, in particular tracking the impact of misdemeanor sentencing changes from HB 133. The group also had an extensive discussion of ongoing challenges in data collection, quality, and tracking in the state in order to report these challenges to CJOC, as required by statute.

New insights: In July, the additional conversations with the data workgroup confirmed what had started to become apparent in previous months – it is impossible to track misdemeanor sentencing changes because no one consistently enters dispositions into any data systems in the state of Montana. DOC is able to track felony dispositions because they input sentencing data for everyone who comes under their jurisdiction. However, Montana Courts of Limited Jurisdiction (misdemeanor courts) do not all reliably enter collect disposition data, and those that do some sort of data collection do not enter data into a system in a machine-readable format. Similar to the felony disposition data, the only misdemeanor data that is available to analyze will be when courts send sentencing orders to other agency, who then input it in their own data systems. Because of this, CSG Justice Center is working on putting together a patchwork data analysis for the October CJOC meeting consisting of misdemeanor sentencing data from MDOJ and OPD databases.

Next steps:
• Montana will continue submitting data monitoring metrics to CSG Justice Center staff.
• CSG Justice Center staff will analyze data submissions for CJOC meetings.
• The interagency data workgroup will continue to meet to discuss key research questions.