Montana 2007 SAC

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each State's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each State to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the State, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their States.

Under this award, the Montana SAC will carry out two projects: (1) As a continuation of last year's project to create a data collection effort to determine the extent of detention center overcrowding, the SAC will assist the State's Detention Dilemma Task Force in expanding the reach of useful detention data past where it currently is with Yellowstone County. An analysis will also be performed to determine what methods the proposed offender management committees could use to reduce the overcrowding at the detention centers and increase the relative safety of Montanans both inside and outside of the detention centers; and (2) to continue conducting a crime in tribal lands data collection initiative with the Billings Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assess the presence and impact of drugs on crimes reported by tribal law enforcement. In addition to compiling updated data, the SAC will produce a training manual that can be used at the tribal level to improve the recording and reporting of crime data. Also, the SAC will create and distribute eight tribal brochures containing the most recent crime data for each tribe in Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.

NCA/NCF

The State Justice Statistics (SJS) Program is designed to maintain and enhance each state's capacity to address criminal justice issues through collection and analysis of data. The SJS Program provides support to each state to coordinate and conduct statistical activities within the state, conduct research to estimate impacts of legislative and policy changes, and serve as a liaison in assisting BJS to gather data from respondent agencies within their states.

Under this award, the Montana SAC will continue SJS projects of the past two years in creating a data collection effort to determine the extent of detention center overcrowding and to continue conducting a crime in tribal lands data collection initiative. The SAC will assist the state's Detention Dilemma Task Force in expanding the reach of useful detention data beyond the current reporting for Yellowstone County with only one-quarter of total jails reporting. An analysis will be performed to determine the extent of overcrowding at the detention centers. The SAC will also continue conducting a crime in tribal lands data collection initiative with the Billings Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assess the presence and impact of drugs on crimes reported by tribal law enforcement. In addition to compiling updated data, the SAC will update and distribute tribal brochures containing the most recent crime data for each tribe in Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.

CA/NCF