Making Montana More Just
The Montana Justice Initiative mobilizes campus to examine and improve Montana’s criminal justice system
By Jacob Baynham
Growing up in Gillette, Wyoming, Jake Coolidge had few firsthand opportunities to witness the weaknesses of America’s criminal justice system.
“I didn’t have to confront those issues,” he says. “It’s a very white, very conservative community. There’s a lot of money there. Everyone’s kind of the same.”
But when Coolidge enrolled in St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland, his eyes were opened. “Racially, it was much more diverse,” he says. “There was a lot more poverty. I think I became more aware of how the justice system was actually functioning.”
In his first sociology class, Coolidge studied the theory of criminology and determined that crime was a product of society rather than an individual issue. He started to think deeper about how we make laws to create social order, but how the systems that enforce those laws are flawed.
The more he learned, the more he saw. Coolidge noticed a local sheriff’s deputy parked his cruiser outside his home, where two flagpoles flew the American and Confederate flags. Coolidge wondered how this might change the way African Americans perceived local law enforcement.
The questions continued. Coolidge finished his bachelor’s degree and moved to Missoula to get a master’s in sociology and study law at UM. He turned his attention to Missoula’s municipal criminal justice system. His master’s thesis focused on local panhandling ordinances. Coolidge learned that when people violated these ordinances, they were punished with a fine.
“Fining a panhandler, I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution,” Coolidge says. “But that’s how it’s handled. And if someone can’t pay their fine, they’re often sent to jail. And that takes taxpayers’ money.”
During law school, Coolidge teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union to co-author an extensive report on the conditions of Montana’s county jails. It took three years to finish, but by then he was committed to criminal justice reform. So it only made sense that when UM’s Alexander Blewett III School of Law got the seed money in 2016 to launch an initiative focusing on Montana’s justice system, Coolidge was tapped to lead it.
“I made enough of a fuss through my research, writing and education that people knew my main thing was criminal justice reform,” he says. “It’s kind of a passion of mine. So this was a natural fit.”
The seed money that founded the Montana Justice Initiative came from former Montana state Sen. Dan Weinberg. During his time in the Legislature representing Whitefish, Weinberg had plenty of opportunities to view the shortcomings of the criminal justice system. As chair of the Public Health Committee, he visited the Montana State Penitentiary in Deer Lodge. He also watched as several prisoners in Montana were found to be innocent. His concerns over these issues inspired him to found the Montana Innocence Project in 2008.
The project already has helped exonerate a handful of innocent prisoners, and other cases are ongoing. But Weinberg saw the need for another program in the state — one that explored the flaws in the justice system and tried to fix them so that problems like wrongful convictions might be avoided altogether.
“I’ve been concerned about social justice for my entire adult life,” Weinberg says. “While our country has wealth and opportunity that many countries can only dream about, we lock up more people than any country on Earth. And many people, upon leaving prison, are no better off than when they went in. What is it about our history and culture that produces these results?”
For Weinberg, it’s a question that demands scrutiny from multiple disciplines — historical, sociological, legal and others.
“How can we make a justice system that is more just?” he says. “Finding that answer is the goal of the Montana Justice Initiative.”
Think tanks and academic institutions like New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice have set similar goals. “But we started small,” says Coolidge, “and our approach has been uniquely Montanan. We’re very much focused on what’s happening in Montana.”
Coolidge says in many ways Montana is representative of broader national criminal justice problems. Montana has high pretrial incarceration rates, for example, when people stay in jail because they can’t afford bond.
“Everyone knows that one’s innocent until proven guilty,” Coolidge says. “But bond practices don’t reflect that. You’re innocent until proven guilty if you can post bond. If you can’t, you sit in jail, often in terrible conditions. People with money are treated one way; people without money are treated another way.”
Montana is also similar to the rest of the country in that relatively few criminal offenses go to trial. “At the most cynical level,” Coolidge says, “the prosecutor wants a conviction, the public defender is overworked, and they pursue a plea bargain. The justice system is so overworked right now that if everyone went to trial, it would fall apart.”
Defendants who pursue a plea deal for a felony, however, may jeopardize their voting rights, their immigration status or their eligibility for federal housing.
“Complex decisions about people’s lives are being made through judicial efficiency,” Coolidge says.
On the other hand, Montana has unique criminal justice issues. Native Americans make up just 7 percent of the state’s population, for example, but account for 20 percent of Montana’s male inmates and 34 percent of female inmates. Those figures don’t even account for the many Native Americans prosecuted through federal court.
Montana also stands apart in its use of private prisons. “Any given year,” Coolidge says, “Montana ranks among the top five states for the percentage of prisoners in private custodial care.”
One glaring example is the Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin, a 464-bed, $27 million prison that has remained largely empty since its completion in 2007.
“Private prison contractors encouraged it, built the prison and left,” Coolidge says. “Similar trends happen in other rural, economically depressed areas. They’re very susceptible to private correction facilities.”
The mission of the Montana Justice Initiative, then, is to shine a light on these problems, understand the forces behind them and suggest ways to solve them.
“People might assume that their local justice systems are doing the best things,” Coolidge says, “but often they’re not, when you peel back the layers.”
To help expose those layers, the initiative is funding four research projects at UM. The first is research by Laurie Walker, an associate professor in the School of Social Work. Walker is looking into the dramatic overrepresentation of Native American women in Montana’s prisons. She is working with Native American collaborators on campus and in the community to interview inmates and analyze data to better understand the life circumstances and re-entry needs of incarcerated Native American women.
The initiative also funds a pilot program by Christina Yoshimura, an associate professor of communication studies, which uses family-based counseling in lieu of adjudication for first-time juvenile offenders. Yoshimura already is getting referrals for likely candidates from local courts and judges.
“It’s one idea of how to make the justice system more rehabilitative rather than punitive,” Coolidge says.
The initiative also is funding Tobin Miller Shearer, director of UM’s African-American Studies program, and one of his graduate students to study primary documents that reveal the role of race in the development of Montana’s criminal justice system. Finally, Coolidge is teaming up with the ACLU again to author another report, this one detailing the conditions of Montana’s tribal jails.
All of this research will reveal different dimensions of criminal justice in Montana. But what excites Coolidge the most is the educational angle. The initiative plans to create an interdisciplinary graduate seminar exploring Montana’s criminal justice system that could begin as early as spring semester 2018. The course will pull together students from across campus and will be taught by a professor from a different discipline each week. Students will tackle some of Montana’s most challenging criminal justice issues from different academic perspectives.
Coolidge, who taught criminology courses, is eager to see what they come up with.
“Maybe it’s an advanced proposal of a very specific thing to make the justice system better,” he says. “Or maybe it’s just creating 30 people who go out into their lives with a much stronger understanding of how the justice system is operating.”
Either way, Coolidge will count the conversation as a success. And Coolidge’s personal journey in criminal justice reform isn’t finished. In October, he started working as an attorney at Missoula’s Office of the Public Defender.
His successor, D’Shane Barnett, a faculty member in the UM sociology department, says, “Jake did such a great job in laying the foundation of the project and creating a vision of how our work can help Montana become a national example of how to reform a justice system so that it better serves the people. I am very excited to help this project take its next steps.” •
