Missoula pretrial moves in-house, no longer with Missoula Correctional Services (2024)

Pretrial services in Missoula County are moving in-house after its current vendor and the county failed to reach a new contract.

After 30 yearsof beingrun by Missoula Correctional Services (MCS), Missoula’s pretrial program is moving under the umbrella of the county’s Community Justice Department. Pretrial is a way for the criminal justice system to monitor people accused of crimes before they’re either convicted or acquitted of charges.

“Missoula County and MCS jointly decided not to renew the current pretrial contract due to the county’s increased administrative and reporting requirements without increased funding to support these changes,” Shantelle Gaynor, director of the Missoula County Community Justice Department, said in an email.

"The County is grateful for MCS and the excellent work they have done in our community over the last few decades," she added.

The Missoulian previously reportedthat contract negotiations were stalled, and MCS Executive Director Sue Wilkins said there were operational requirements the county was asking for that weren’t workable for MCS, which ran pretrial services in Missoula from 1998 until this year’s switch.

At any given time, pretrial officers have roughly 300 clients.

Kim Lahiff, Missoula County Pretrial Services program manager, spearheaded the new department. It started taking new clients at the end of April. Clients actively working with MCS started making the shift to the county program, which staff expect to be finished in June.

Missoula County Pretrial Services will run mostly the same as MCS, but with some changes.

Pretrial services won’t charge a monthly fee, Lahiff said in a phone call, which is different from how MCS operated (they billed clients $25 a month).

Lahiff said the work group tasked with developing the county’s new program wanted to design a system that incentivized clients to stay sober and move their cases forward, so the county will cover alcohol, drug and electronic monitoring (if someone is court-ordered to do so) for 90 days.

After that, defendants will self-pay for monitoring services.

“The idea behind it was to have clients have the skin in the game for themselves,” Lahiff said.

Gaynor said this is similar to other counties in the state, like Flathead County. Costs vary depending on what’s ordered by a judge, but generally, GPS monitoring is $10.50 per day and testing averages at about $7 a day.

“At the end of 90 days, the defendant will need to self-pay for testing/monitoring services,” she said. “Their attorney would need to petition the court to take them off or reduce testing and monitoring if it is not needed. If a case closes, the person will obviously come off pretrial services including testing and monitoring.”

If someone still has a pending criminal case and can’t afford fees, it’ll be up to their attorney and judge to figure out a solution, Gaynor said.

Pretrial services aims to protect public safety while addressing overcrowding in Missoula’s jail, assess needs of individual defendants, facilitate people’s court appearances and help defendants connect with services like housing, employment, mental health and substance abuse care.

The program will be staffed with Lahiff, who recently retired after 23 years working at the Montana Department of Corrections. As program manager, she’ll have a caseload and oversee two pretrial officers and an administrative assistant.

Additionally, instead of being housed next to the jail on Mullan Road, the new program will run out of the northwest corner of the Engen Building downtown.

Money allocated for the county’s contract with MCS will be shifted to cover the new program, along with other non-tax revenue, including opioid settlement funds, so it won’t have a major impact on Missoula taxpayers, Gaynor explained.

“The average cost for the county to provide these services is around $15 a day for each participant, which is significantly less than the daily cost to house an inmate at the detention facility,” she said.

MCS still has an active contract with the Montana Department of Correction to provide prerelease services for the Missoula area, set to expire in 2025, Carolynn Stocker, communications director for the DOC, said. Prerelease centers are designed to support defendants with their transition from a jail or prison back into local communities.

MCS and Missoula County are collaborating on the transition process.