Cascade County Sheriff Slaughter Reveals Truth About For-Profit Jails in Montana

This past week, I had the opportunity to interview Cascade County Sheriff Jesse Slaughter. It's part of a scheduled interview we do every single Tuesday (unless he's tending to important business!) and it gives us the chance to learn more about how they operate and keep the county safe.

This week, we discussed the subject of for-profit jails and Sheriff Slaughter decided to set the record straight.

Full Interview: Sheriff Slaughter and For-Profit Jails

I shared our conversation through a series of videos but had multiple requests for a transcription of the full interview. Maybe it's for transparency or maybe it's because people got sick of seeing my big round head in the interview videos, below is a transcription of our full conversation:

***

Chris: Sheriff, how are you doing this morning?

Sheriff Slaughter: Doing good, Chris, good morning.

Chris: I saw this thing somewhere, I apologize for not knowing exactly where, but it was something about for-profit jails and it was the way it was worded that I was like, well, wait a minute, that sounds like a business and I got to believe that, you know, there's more to it than that, but I was just curious to hear from you about,  one, why this might be coming up  because I don't know where, I apologize again, not knowing exactly where I saw it, but it was just something that stood out to me with 'for-profit jail.'

I thought that's got to have a bad taste in some people's mouth with the connotation that it could have when they just hear 'for-profit jail.' So, I thought it'd be interesting to kind of dive into and just kind of pull back the curtain on that and see what's going on?

Sheriff Slaughter: So, there are private businesses that operate jails.

There's private jails all over the country. For example, like in states like New Mexico, a lot of states, like that's their main type of jail. The reason that they're doing that is jails are so expensive to run.

I mean, they're incredibly expensive. So, there's private sector people out there who have said, okay, we can do it better, cheaper, but they can also make a profit. So, you have CoreCivic, they have a jail up in Shelby that's a private institution that holds state inmates.

ALSO READ: New Bill Could Change Montana Sunrises & Sunsets Forever

Okay, so they basically bill per bed and they, I believe, turn a profit. It's a big corporation that's nationwide, so I don't know if that jail turns a profit because you know how in big corporations, they'll sometimes allow one not to turn a profit because you get a tax write-off or what have you. So, I can't speak to the specific business model as how it works, but there are private companies out there that do it.

Now, we at the Cascade County Sheriff's Office, we technically run our jail kind of like a business. We don't run our jail off of your tax dollars, okay, which is, it's called a revenue-based jail model. So, $4 million of our tax dollars every year go to fund the jail.

The Real Cost of Inmate Care: Debunking the "Arrests for Profit" Myth

Chris: What would you say to someone who then goes, "Well, then you guys are obviously in it for profit, why wouldn't you want to arrest a lot of people to make profit?"

Is that how that works? I mean, I'm just trying to think of, I'm trying to think of what someone would say to that because again, I'm trying to think objectively here on both sides.

Sheriff Slaughter: So, the people we arrest cost us money.

Chris: Oh, okay.

Sheriff Slaughter: So that hurts our budget. So, imagine if you will, we get $4 million in tax dollars to run our jail, but it costs over $13 million a year to run.

Get our free mobile app

So, I have to generate $9 million in revenue to meet my budget.

Chris: And how do you do that?

Sheriff Slaughter: I have to sell beds to other agencies. I have to sell bed space to the United States Marshals. I have to sell bed space to the state of Montana. I have to sell bed space to ICE. They buy those beds because we have a, Conair flies out of here and we have a federal courthouse.

So, because of those things, we are primed for them wanting to buy our beds. The problem with the model is like we have; we're short manning right now. The problem with the model is you can't scale. If we were completely tax funded in our jail, so our jail costs $13 million.

We had $13 million in tax revenue and times get hard and you got to reduce your population because you got to reduce your manning because you're short people. You can just do that. And then you save money, that money goes to capital improvements for the next years.

We can't do that. There's no way we can do that.

Chris: You just don't have the space?

Sheriff Slaughter: It's not about space. We have plenty of space. Everyone always says that, well, your jail's too small, it's overcrowded.

Yeah, it's a little bit overcrowded, but it's not too small. It's too small because we rent all of our beds out. But it's important for people to understand that. Like it's, it's really hard to get that through people. I have done nauseating social media posts on this, videos explaining it.

READ MORE: The Top 5 Most Dangerous Gangs in Montana

And it's really hard for people to understand. It's kind of like explaining people tax code. You know, they just can't wrap their head around how the model works.

But when you really think about it though, I want you to think about this: I want you to think about the fact that there's no way to scale it.

So, we're $9 million in the red every year we start.

And so, if you reduce your population because you have a short, you're short staffed, then guess what? My budget goes into the red automatically and there's no way to stop it.

The Double-Edged Sword of Running a Jail Like a Business

Chris: Gosh, that sounds like a double-edged sword too. Cause now too, as a "business owner", if you were operating as a business, do you guys then have a right to refuse what you sell in terms of beds? So, like, if you're like, hey, you know, like I don't want to sell to this agency...

Sheriff Slaughter: Yeah, but I'm personally liable for the budget. And so, if I do that, if I do that and we go in the red, it's all me.

Chris: It's your head, yeah.

Sheriff Slaughter: And so you're like, you're like, how do you, how do you do it? So here, the struggle I have with trying to get people to understand this conceptually is this: Nobody wants to pay more taxes, including me.

READ MORE: Is This the Most Dangerous Prison in Montana?

The problem we're running up against though with the nobody wants to pay more taxes is revenue-based or for-profit jails and prison facilities are your only option. They're your only option.

Because it, you know, everybody's like, we don't want that type of stuff until you're like, oh, you're going to take out of my bottom line. Okay, well that, that sounds good to me. Let let's do that.

Why Unwinding an Inherited Budget Structure Takes Decades

Chris: So, then what, what's an ideal scenario like in the future? Like in the next five years, if you had like your dream scenario of what, what would be a remedy to, because it sounds like something that would take a long time.

Sheriff Slaughter: There isn't. There isn't one.

Chris: Is there any like first initial step or something?

Sheriff Slaughter: I mean, I've been trying to get the commissioners for a few years now to start building a budget that starts to go towards a tax-based budget. But we're talking about $9 million. We're not talking about, that's going to take 20, 30 years to get there.

So, we've looked in everything you can imagine under the sun, but I think it's just, it's one of those things that unfortunately, when probably four sheriffs ago, probably 10 county commissioners ago, they decided to do this model thinking, oh, it'll, it'll sustain itself forever.

And it's no longer sustaining itself because the expenses are too high and the amount of people who want to work in corrections is too low.

The Corrections Staffing Crisis: Overtime and Employee Burnout

Chris: Yeah. You were saying that with the short manning. So how do you guys grade that in severity? Cause I know you, you made it sound like...

Sheriff Slaughter: Extremely severe. Okay.

Chris: So, then what is that? Is there like a ratio or a number that you're allowed to share for that? And how severe it is? Like with-

ALSO READ: DOJ Shares Update on Drug Crackdowns Across Montana

Sheriff Slaughter: It's really severe. I mean, we're, we've been doing mandatory overtime for a year and a half. We're talking about working seven, eight days a week. Yeah. And I say eight cause you're doing that overnight. Cause we do four-day workweeks.

So, yeah, so it's, it's grueling and it's taken a serious toll and no, it's, we're, it's critical right now. It's absolutely critical.

Inside the Micro-City: The Complex Reality of Managing Jail Infrastructure

Chris: I know there's other projects that have been talked about, especially like with the plumbing. I know that was one thing that's come up recently. Where does stuff like that factor in when it comes to improvements then? Because you already talk about the budgeting and going in the hole. What is it then that you guys can do to improve the jail if you're having to deal with all these other struggles? Or is it just kind of like you have to do it all.

Sheriff Slaughter: You have to do it all. You have to get it all done and you have to get it all done on time. Yeah. You know, cause there's, you know, there's, there's a thousand lawyers out there that are waiting to sue you if you don't.

And you have to find a way to do it all. You have to find a way to run it short staffed. You have to find a way to run it revenue based. And you have to find a way to get all your projects done on time correctly to, you know, cause people don't understand it. Everyone looks at the building on the hill, and they think, "oh, it's just the jail."

No, that's a city.

That's an entire, I mean, if Red Yard, Red Yard Montana has about as many people as are in the jail for scale.

Get our free mobile app

You know? And so, you're like, that is an entire city, 24 hours a day, healthcare, food.

Chris: Its own set of bureaucracy and politics, everything.

Sheriff Slaughter: Yeah. Everything. All the things that we deal with in society are in there in a confined space and people who, for the most part, they're innocent until they're proven guilty. But they have, they have proven that they don't behave well in society.

Inside the Bed Market: How Jail Rates Are Set and Negotiated

Chris: So then, so let me ask you this then. I mean, again, going back to the part where you said you can run it like a business kind of, then do you guys set a cost per bed or can you raise that cost per bed as well?

Sheriff Slaughter: Well, it's kind of, it depends on what the market allows. You know what I mean?

Chris: There's a bed market price?!

Sheriff Slaughter: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. 150%.

Chris: And how does that work?

Sheriff Slaughter: Because if you price your bed too high and no one buys it, then it's empty. And if it's empty, you don't have revenue. If you don't have revenue, you don't meet your budget.

READ MORE: Governor Gianforte Signs Pledge to Protect Montanans from AI Data Centers

Chris: So, there's a whole market... Do you, is it like something you log in like, you know, like on E-Trade or something?

Sheriff Slaughter: No, it's way more, it's way more fluent than that. It's way more like negotiated. It's way more, you know, when you're dealing with customers like the federal government and state and stuff, it's how bad do they need your bed? Now, state, state sets, the legislature sets a price. It's like $82 a day. Because the legislature sets how much the state can spend on a bed.

Chris: Got it.

Sheriff Slaughter: They basically handcuff the DOC director and say, nope, this is your budget per bed. Which I've always thought was weird because that's gonna ebb and flow based on your inmate population.

But they set it up at a set rate. So even if they had a lower amount of inmates they needed to put in county jails, they're still stuck at that 82. They couldn't say, "OK, we're gonna give you more because we really need it."

They don't have the ability to flex it.

Dealing with the Red Tape of Government Bureaucracy and Public Image

Chris: You guys just got like hoop after hoop to jump through.

Sheriff Slaughter: Oh, if you want to get into the utter world of utter and most of the time, useless bureaucracy, it's jails and corrections. There is so much bureaucracy that's created by lawsuits, laws, initiatives, federal laws, state laws, you name it.

There's a lot of legal and political and I say social influence upon the jail issue. That it's one of the biggest bureaucracies in government.

Chris: And I could see why you would draw a lot of eyeballs for folks waiting for y'all to slip when you hear words like "for profit" or "defund the police" and phrases like that back in the day... but it's that kind of thing that I think is important for people to know about because there's all these challenges, things that I can't even wrap my head around, but then it's also the other stuff where you guys have to kind of work on your image, public image, because then you have activist groups going, they just hear "for profit." They hear there's a bed market. There's the byline. "They're trading on [our jail beds]. It's just, it's crazy.

Sheriff Slaughter: And all of it to say this, our number one priority for the Cascade County Jail should and always will be as long as I'm around the public safety of our own community, right? But what's happening is because the expenses are going up so high and because we're a revenue-based jail, we're losing all of our beds over time to out-of-state halts. And then you say, well, your jail's overcrowded.

Well, not technically. If I didn't have to sell all these beds, not technically.

If we were to not have to sell beds and we were county-funded, I mean, we'd be 200 empty beds every day. You know what I mean?

Chris: That's mind-boggling though.

Sheriff Slaughter: It is, it is super mind-boggling.

Chris: I feel like that'll make anybody crazy.

Sheriff Slaughter: And we'd need less staff. We'd have less staff, so then we wouldn't have manning issues, but we could also pay them more because we'd have less so we could give them a better quality of life and keep a better employee. But this revenue-based model is just crazy. I mean, it's just, and it's, you know, I mean, people might [see] this and point their fingers at our current county commissioners.

They had nothing to do with this. So, this was created years and years and years before they got here. And then it just keeps building as time goes on.

Finding a Path Forward: Mill Levies and Chess Moves

Chris: Do you think, just to wrap it up, because we are running out of time, but do you think then to wrap it all up, is there a solution or is this something we just have to kind of wait till it gets to a breaking point to where a sudden change has to happen?

Sheriff Slaughter: Well, there's multiple solutions. You know, one is you can close down the jail because it doesn't work. That's one solution.

That's your, that's a terrible, that's a terrible nuclear catastrophic. Yeah. And what do you do? It's just gonna make crime go crazy. You know? The other thing you can do is you can keep renegotiating your for-revenue beds.

ALSO READ: 26 Questions Answered About What It's Like to Work at Janicki

You can just keep renegotiate those and keep getting better rates and better rates. And the expenses that exist will keep rising and you'll have to keep rising the bar and doing that. And you can just keep running this model in perpetuity and you're always gonna be understaffed and you're always gonna be overcrowded and you're always just gonna have to continue, keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

You can also go to the community for a public safety mill levy to make up the gap between your revenues and the budget. And you have to do that very, very carefully and very responsibly cause you need to reduce costs before you do it.

You need to protect, project a reduced cost to the public, not an upgrade. You know, and then maybe if you do it right, you can build some room for future expansion in there.

You know, and the reality of what I'm saying is it's still cheaper than a new jail. It's still cheaper than hiring, you know, a bunch more staff, you know. So, it's terribly expensive, but it's still the most cost effective.

And then once you're fully county funded, you now have the flexibility to move with the times. Manning gets short, you need to short your population. Manning goes up, you can raise it.

And you can move.

Chris: You have room to operate, literally.

Sheriff Slaughter: Well, and it makes you operate efficiently, safely and morally as you move forward.

Get our free mobile app

And it's just a huge, it's a huge challenge. And I tell people this all the time, running a revenues-based jail is playing chess on a chess board and there's no empty squares.

Chris: Oh, I don't like that. That stresses me out. And I like chess, man.

Sheriff Slaughter: Yeah, but imagine playing chess and you have to make moves on a chess board, but there are no empty pieces.

So, every time you take out a chess piece on the other side, you've totally set yourself up for destruction.

So, it's like, but that's the reality of it in a nutshell.

Chris: Well, I appreciate you sharing that with us. I know I kind of... I feel bad. I feel like I need to buy you a coffee or something. I feel like that's tiresome, man, to think about how many things you got to go around. And you're absolutely right. There's going to be folks that watch this or see this and they're going to have their opinions on it, and that's fine.

And I've made it a point to welcome those. And I thank you for being patient with some of those comments that you might see on our page, see sometimes here or there. But I think if people do their research, they listen, they give themselves context and maybe go and visit - I think that's the big thing. If people live it and see it, and I can't imagine what your guys do, and feel going through that every day.

You said it was like, geez, over time, they're doing four days on, but you said sometimes eight days. So, like they're just going into the following week.

Sheriff Slaughter: Some days all their four days off, they're working.

Chris: Yeah, gosh, man. Well, thank you all for what y'all are doing. I hope it gets better and we'll see what happens, I guess. I mean, that's all you could do is just keep trucking. Well, thank you so much, Sheriff Slaughter. We appreciate you.

Sheriff Slaughter: All right, God bless!