By Tom Lutey
Billings Gazette
GLENDIVE, Mont. — Sheriff Craig Anderson scans the inmate roster for Dawson County Detention Center and sees real problems. There’s an inmate charged with murder and another for petty crime. He can’t put them in cells together, but he’s four inmates over capacity, so he can’t easily keep them apart.
“Do you really want to put an 18-year-old, no registration, no driver’s license, in with Levi Stark? Neither has been convicted. So, we’re separating there,” Anderson said. Awaiting trial, Stark is accused of stabbing a man to death. “Now you have post-conviction misdemeanor and felony. Throw in sex offenders. Then we have gangbangers and co-defendants. So we’re challenged on that front as well,” he said. “Ideally, you want two cells open so you can manage a population within a population, but we don’t have that.”
No space available
There aren’t many jails in the footprint of the Bakken oil boom. And the jails that are here are full. Dawson County’s jail, one of the region’s largest, with 24 beds and four holding cells, was at or near capacity all but two months during 2013. In Sidney, Mont., a community flanked by hundreds of half-frozen fifth-wheel camper trailers occupied by roughnecks, the Richland County Detention Center is filled beyond capacity.
The 24-bed facility maxed out in July and began housing overflow inmates in a separate wing normally reserved for juveniles. Two days after Christmas, inmates there numbered 29. The juvenile wing was again occupied by adults. In Williston, N.D., ground zero for the hydraulic fracking bonanza now producing a million barrels of oil a day, the 116-bed Williams County Detention Center, built five years ago, had 101 inmates Friday.
The jail, which Williams County was supposed to grow into over several decades, is most often packed. It isn’t uncommon for North Dakota sheriffs to look west toward Montana for available room when things are tight. But because so many rural Montana counties lack a jail, there’s usually no room at the inn for out-of-staters.
“The last time I had to arrange to ship an inmate, I had to call as far away as Lewis and Clark County,” 511 miles away in Helena, said Deputy Scott Nelson. He oversees the Sheridan County Jail in Plentywood, a far northeastern Montana town within walking distance of Canada and 36 miles from North Dakota.
Sheridan County has 16 jail beds, but its cells date back to 1901 and sport the iron bars now considered a liability for suicide by hanging. The facility also lacks a recreation yard, which raises the ire of civil rights groups. Consequently, Nelson said the county can only hold an inmate for three days before it must hunt for better accommodations.
In 2012, Custer County moved its inmates out of the county after the American Civil Liberties Union of Montana complained that Custer’s basement jail in Miles City lacked sunlight and was moldy. In September, Custer County voters approved funding for a new jail.
Typically, counties sending inmates to another county are charged about $60 per inmate per day.
The impacts of the oil boom have reached South Dakota, too. Just this week, the Belle Fourche Police Department announced it had received a state drug-enforcement grant to buy new rifles. The stronger firepower was needed, officials said, because Belle Fourche lies along highways that lead to the oil fields.
Full story: ND oil boom filling Montana’s jails