The Cascade County Detention Center had a population of 415 on the morning of Oct. 1. The stated capacity of the jail, built around 25 years ago, is 372.Overcrowding isn’t a new issue at the jail. It played a role in a 2018 riot after the population swelled to more than 500 and former Sheriff Bob Edwards temporarily stopped accepting non-felony offenders in an attempt to ease tensions.Sheriff Jesse Slaughter, Edwards’ successor, took to social media in 2020 for an hourlong Facebook Live video. In it, he talked about the detention center’s overcrowding balancing act to keep offenders off the streets, minimize chronic overcrowding, honor agreements with other jurisdictions and meet its budget.Slaughter covered many of the same themes this week, again on Facebook, and said the balancing act is no longer financially sustainable. Slaughter is leading a social media campaign, offering budget insights and making the case that his jail needs more resources. And he knows that the community he’s speaking to isn’t holding open its pocketbook.“The challenge I’m up against is raising people’s taxes or levying more money is not an option,” Slaughter told MTFP. “So we are going to have to get way outside the box and come up with a solution that fully funds our jail for all the people we arrest on the street. And to meet our upcoming challenge with things like the Sentinel project. That’s going to massively increase our population.”The Sentinel project is the massive Department of Defense upgrade to its nuclear missile system, which is expected to bring an influx of workers to the Great Falls area in the coming decade.Cascade County public safety departments are finalizing two programs that could help relieve the jail of certain low-level felony offenders and people who would be better served by mental health professionals.Slaughter said he had just over $12 million in jail expenses in the last fiscal year and about $7.9 million in revenues, a large portion of which comes from the federal government paying Cascade County to hold federal inmates. That budget left about $4.1 million that the county residents pick up, largely through property taxes.Slaughter says expenses are growing in areas like nursing and medicine costs, food and newly negotiated union contracts. To minimize the taxpayer burden, Slaughter said that he feels pressure to fill “revenue beds” or take inmates by contract from an outside jurisdiction. Right now, the main source of contract inmates is from federal cases.Three years ago, Cascade County ended a deal with the Montana Department of Corrections to hold state prison inmates. Many of those spots were replaced with federal inmates, for which Cascade County receives reimbursement from the U.S. Marshals Service.“Federal inmates, we’re not guaranteed any certain amount,” Slaughter said. “The numbers kind of come and go. They generally don’t drop below 100.”They are set to drop a bit, however, as Slaughter said a few dozen federal inmates will move to a detention facility in Missoula. That eases the jail population, but it also reduces revenue. The county’s first diversion program is the addition of pre-trial services for those charged with certain low-level felonies. The general idea is to fund monitoring services to keep eligible people out of jail while they await trial. Similar programs have been active in other counties for years, and it has been long planned in Cascade County.“There was just no money for it,” Cascade County Attorney Josh Racki said of plans that go back as far as 2020. “When we went out for that safety levy, we added that as part of the safety levy.”That levy, which voters approved in 2022, gave the program its startup funding — estimated around $400,000. It involves contracting with a company called Compliance Monitoring Services to provide monitoring equipment and the hiring of a county liaison who started less than a week ago.The program itself is expected to begin this fall.Determining who is eligible for pre-trial monitoring involves screening potential participants through a scoring system that is used by the Montana Supreme Court. The system evaluates how likely someone is to maintain contact with the justice system and meet their court obligations. At the district court in Cascade County, judges will be able to use that scoring system and have discretion over when it’s used. This system differs from other versions of supervised release in that the county pays the monitoring cost, which can be $10 or $15 daily, Racki said.But it’s not a perfect system. Racki said that the scoring metric, called Public Safety Assessment (PSA), doesn’t take into account victim rights, for example.“The problem with the PSA from a prosecutor’s standpoint is that it leans heavily on whether or not they’ll show up for trial, which is one of the core reasons for bail,” Racki said. “But it also doesn’t take into account their victimization of a person and our ability to protect that person.”Still, the system does automatically disqualify those charged with certain crimes, like deliberate or mitigated homicide and sexual offenses. Partner family member assault cases increase the minimum level of monitoring required in the program.Overall, Racki said he supports the program and has worked closely with Slaughter to bring it to the courts.“Our goal is to not put dangerous offenders out on the street,” Slaughter said. “You still have to make public safety our top priority, but we have a lot of offenders who don’t belong in jail.”Another group of people whom Slaughter said doesn’t always belong in jail are those suffering from acute or chronic mental health crises. Slaughter addressed this issue in July, again on Facebook, following the suicides of three inmates in two weeks.One year ago, the county settled a wrongful death lawsuit for $550,000 related to a jail suicide. A separate federal lawsuit involving an inmate who died by suicide in 2022 is headed for a settlement conference in November.Slaughter maintains that jail staff aren’t equipped to handle people who need more comprehensive mental health care. And he has said that it has become a long and difficult process to transfer patients to the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs.“We literally have become Warm Springs for the state of Montana,” Slaughter said. “The mentally ill are suffering in our community.”“Our goal is to not put dangerous offenders out on the street. You still have to make public safety our top priority, but we have a lot of offenders who don’t belong in jail.” Cascade County Sheriff Jesse SlaughterIn the past, law enforcement in Cascade County has brought mental health assistance rather than a police presence to certain police calls. This program, called a Mobile Response Team, requires a mental health professional to be available 24/7 to respond to a call where health care would work better than law enforcement.Great Falls Police Chief Jeff Newton called the program “very successful.” He said that sometimes, officers would arrive at a call and determine that a mental health professional should step in. Other times, emergency dispatchers would transfer the call to the mobile response team — no officer needed.“There are certain calls that law enforcement shouldn’t go to,” Newton said.The local mobile response team closed late last year when Alluvion Health ended its participation as the provider of mental health professionals. The program has been funded by grants, and money actually became available to restart the program earlier this year. But Newton said they couldn’t identify a mental health partner that was able to provide a staff member at all hours.“We had to return the grant money because we didn’t have a local provider that would partner with us within the parameters of the grant,” Newton said.At the county level, Slaughter’s office has been working with the state to finalize a mental health diversion grant that could potentially restart a mobile response team. He’s also looking at funding a “crisis bed” at the jail that could offer better mental health care.Slaughter said the county has been awarded $1.5 million of the $3 million in requested state grant funds, and the status of the remaining balance is pending. Once the funds are fully awarded, he said county stakeholders will be able to determine where to use them.If these diversion programs are successful at easing overcrowding, there’s still a funding gap to cover. Add more revenue beds to close the gap and the jail risks more capacity issues. He said he’s trying to thread the needle between the revenue problem and the overcrowding problem. “There are solutions to these problems,” he said. “But we have to educate the public about what we’re up against, so that when you offer solutions they don’t fall on deaf ears.”In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who know your town.The post In Cascade County, jail diversion programs aim to address perennial issues appeared first on Montana Free Press.