- [Breanna] Coming up on "Impact," Montana's prisons are overflowing, and the state is spending big to make more room.

- Resolving crime and reducing crime is going to be a long-term solution.

- [Breanna] And discussions deepen in southeastern Montana over a plan to store carbon dioxide waste under public grasslands.

Some residents worry the risks outweigh the rewards.

- If we can like let the earth do its job and consume less, maybe that's the actual solution, but that doesn't make money.

- [Brianna] Those stories just ahead on "Impact."

- [Announcer] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from; the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you, who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

- Welcome to Impact, I'm Breanna McCabe.

During his 2025 State of the State address, Governor Greg Gianforte made a clear request to lawmakers to build more prison beds.

Two years ago, the legislature approved a $200 million project in that effort, and now Gianforte asks for another $150 million to add 500 beds to the Montana State Prison.

In the meantime, hundreds of Montana inmates are being transferred to private prisons in Arizona and Mississippi as a stop gap for a prison population growing faster than the state can manage.

Montana PBS's Sam Wilson looks at the impact of prison overcrowding on Montanans and what could be done to help.

- Mama, someone's calling.

- I'm thinking it's dad.

- [Sam] Every evening around 5:00 PM, Ellen Binkley and her two boys wait for a phone call.

- [Automated Voice] Sent to you from John Binkley.

An inmate at Saguaro Correctional Center.

To accept this call, press five.

- [Sam] So when Binkley's husband didn't call for a few days in August of 2024, she knew something was off.

- I hadn't heard from him in a couple days, and so you immediately get that like punch in the gut.

I start looking online at the inmate roster, and that's where you can kind of find the updates on the location.

The next day I called the prison, I was like, is he even alive?

They can't tell me anything, of course, but they could just say he was alive.

I took a few days at least before he could make a phone call.

And then he eventually called me and said that he was down in Arizona.

It took about 24 hours on a bus to get down there.

- [Sam] John Binkley had served three years of a 50 year sentence when he was transferred to the Saguaro Correctional Center, owned by private prison company, CoreCivic.

For his family, that means visits are much rarer, and much more expensive.

- To visit him for like a long weekend, it's three grand if I can do it pretty conservatively for the three of us.

I guess that's just what we do, right?

- [Sam] Binkley and 363 other Montana inmates have been transferred to Arizona because Montana has run out of space.

Every adult prison in the state is at capacity, and more than 400 inmates are stuck in county jails.

And though hundreds of new prison beds are planned for construction at Montana State Prison, ground has yet to be broken.

To make due in the meantime, the Department of Corrections has found empty prison beds in other states.

In 2024, DOC director, Brian Gootkin painted a picture of the situation for legislators during a presentation.

- So we're crystal clear and transparent, we're full.

Not only are we full, we're full in Arizona, we're backed up in the jails.

- [Sam] Overcrowding in prisons is not a new issue in Montana, and it shows no sign of abating.

Since 2000, the resident population of Montana has grown by 26.3%, while the prison population has risen by over 65%.

The rate of incarceration in the US overall has been decreasing.

- We've got a lot of challenges with corrections in our state.

Prisons are overflowing, crime doesn't seem to be going down, and we're not devoting the resources and the right approach that we need to address this problem.

- We're trying to keep people out of the prison, it's expensive.

It's not necessarily good at rehabilitation, although it does have more rehabilitation in the jail.

Very rarely does somebody on their first felony, unless it's a massive felony, go to prison.

- When Dustin Sorlie was charged with this first felony of verbal intimidation in 2022 after a domestic dispute, he says his lawyer told him he would likely get a deferred sentence and counseling.

Instead, Yellowstone County sentenced him to 10 years, with seven suspended.

- It's not fun for sure.

The deputy comes up and handcuffs you, and your whole world gets turned upside down.

And then from there on, it's like you're stuck in quicksand.

And the harder you try to help yourself, the more you sink.

- [Sam] In 2017, legislators in Montana passed a raft of bills to try to help low risk offenders like Sorlie return to their lives, and to avoid needing more prison beds.

The bills were called the Justice Reinvestment Initiative.

- It came with a lot of good innovations.

It talked about that if you were on good behavior for a certain amount of time, you could be on, you could have less supervision.

You could not be fully off probation, but you could have to stop reporting to a probation officer, as long as things were good.

Unfortunately, in 2023, the legislature passed House Bill 689, where essentially we backed away from a standard that would have given judges more flexibility to deal with people who were not committing the most serious violations.

- Josh Racki was the author of HB 689.

He says, many of the 2017 reforms were a step backwards.

- No one goes back to prison unless they, you know, committed another crime, or breaking their probation, right?

So they're doing those things.

And so yes, if we don't check on them, or if we allow them to be unlaw abiding in the community, that's true, we won't send as many people to prison, right?

So that part's true.

But in the end, as I said, I think, what the lesson that teaches some folks is, well, I can get away with this, I can get away with this, I can get away with this.

Now I've done this, well, why can't I get away with this?

Well, it's too late, you're going to prison.

- [Sam] Probation and parole are different.

Probation is administered by the court system, and is built into sentencing.

Parole is determined by the Board of Pardons and Parole, and inmates become eligible after they've served a quarter of their prison time.

Both lead to supervised release, which can easily be revoked.

- Parole is the release valve to overcrowding.

Parole is an individualized look at each person.

I can't tell you the number of people who go into the system, and how different they are when they're getting out.

Some people don't change, some people do.

- [Sam] Nine months into his sentence, Sorlie became eligible for parole.

- They go over everything with you, they have every, they know everything about you.

And my first board hearing, I was granted straight parole and I got told I could go home.

As nerve wracking as it was, and then I'm somewhere down the line, I got that parole taken from me.

I went through a rescission hearing.

- Dustin, where do we go from here?

- Well, I'm just wondering where the violation occurred, sir?

'Cause I never violated any provisions or stipulations of the order of protection.

- [Sam] Also, as part of the 2017 Justice Reinvestment Initiative, the Board of Pardons and Parole became a paid position.

Since then, parole grants have sharply decreased, which means more people stay in prison for longer.

The board declined an interview for this story, but their website says that parole is a privilege, not a right.

For inmates, it can be a frustrating process to navigate.

- It feels like the parole board already knows what they're gonna do with you, but when you walk in there and get rejected, it's pretty cut and dry.

It's, oh, nope, we're gonna deny you at this time, and then we'll see you in a year or two or three, some people face six, and in a place that you can't help yourself, that's what's hard about it.

They can give you recommendations like, I got given a class, well, that class wasn't a priority till I was coming up to see the board again.

I wanted to, I thought, when I walked out of the room, I thought when I got given a victim's impact class, I'm like, okay, I'll get into this class, I'll get going, I'll get this done.

That isn't the case.

I had a year to take a three month class, and they waited till the last three months.

And I'm lucky I got it.

- [Sam] After completing the class, Sorlie walked out of the Montana State Prison on October 24th, 2024, two years and five hearings after he was first granted parole.

- My parole plan has never changed.

It's been the same thing every time.

I've had a lot of support show up, and you're just lost because it, how can something work once and then never work again, and then, oh, work again, and then, like I said, you're a hamster on a, you know, on a wheel and you never, you're never getting anywhere - [Sam] In Cascade County, Josh Racki says, in many cases, getting on the hamster wheel in the first place could be easily avoided with well-funded treatment programs, which can be hard to come by in Montana.

- One of the things we have a trouble with, and this does affect somewhat prison populations, I think, and is kind of sad is, very often we have either someone who's straight mentally ill, but we often have people who are mentally ill and it co-occurs with substance use, that's not uncommon at all.

And if mental treatment's backed up, and it takes you two months to get in, what can they do?

Except for watch it spin outta control when maybe you really want help.

Maybe the person's too far down the road now.

- [Sam] For John Binkley, that road ended in Garrison Montana, after leading police on a high speed chase from Belgrade, during which he fired a gun at a Gallatin County detective.

He had been overusing prescribed medication.

- I had never personally seen someone in psychosis before.

You could not convince him that he was John Binkley.

You could not convince him that we were in the state of Montana.

He didn't know who I was.

I was trying to get him help so badly.

I had law enforcement at my house on a number of occasions.

Everyone kept just saying, I'm sorry we can't get him help.

They said, the best you can do is try and keep him at home, take his keys away, and hope the psychosis passes.

We were trying different medications.

And then eventually he left that night, and, and then what happened, happened, and here we are.

- John waited in the Gallatin County Detention Center for three years before sentencing, where he experienced violent withdrawals and attempted suicide.

- My kids are gonna be 11 and 13 when he gets the opportunity to be out.

I don't know how to explain it to them.

Your classic way of describing criminals in prison doesn't pertain to their dad.

And I don't think it pertains to a lot of people in prison.

(children playing) - Crime is not an easy snap your fingers problem you can just whisk away.

You've got to improve people's healthcare, you've got to give them education, you've got to improve their economic opportunity, or you're gonna just find yourself with full prisons yet again.

- Prevention's hard to measure, and takes time.

So even if you made the most robust programs you could have right now, you're still gonna need all those prison beds for a while, so they're gonna overlap.

You know, you really start to look at, can I save money in 10 years?

Can I save money in 15 years?

But in the meantime, we still have kind of, I guess, the backlog of people who are gonna have to go to prison.

So do we need more prison beds?

Yeah, we probably do.

But do we need more treatment and, you know, robust upfront things to try to prevent them?

We definitely do - [Sam] For Impact, I'm Sam Wilson - Montana just signed a new contract with the private prison company that has no cap on the number of inmates it can house.

So far the company has around 1200 Montana inmates in its custody across multiple states.

The Bureau of Land Management is considering plans to store carbon dioxide waste thousands of feet under public land in southeastern Montana.

But residents are worried about the effects it could have on their environment, and they're asking if the project is worth the potential risks.

Montana PBS's Hannah Kearse reports.

- [Hannah] Jack Owen travels these long gravel roads most days, fixing fences or moving cattle.

They stretch on for miles, taking you further into an expansive rangeland.

And for the most part, only ranchers and hunters use these roads.

But as Jack steers his 1986 Chevy toward where his ranch borders to roughly a hundred thousand acres of the proposed Snowy River CO2 Sequestration project, he fears everything here is about to change.

- It's gonna change the way we live out here when they start doing all this.

This has been a quiet road, really, all it's been for all the years.

When this...

If this project happens, there's gonna be vehicles going up and down this road, totally different than what we've lived with for a hundred years.

That's one of the things that most of us don't wanna see.

It's a remote region, but we like it, we've chosen to stay here because it is.

Or I have, maybe some of the other guys have a different reason, but- - [Hannah] The Snowy River project is a plan for Denbury, an ExxonMobil subsidiary to pump up to 150 million tons of its carbon dioxide emissions underground.

The CO2 would be captured from two natural gas plants in Wyoming, pumped through a pipeline, and then inject it into a deep rock formation beneath Carter County.

This would happen over the course of 20 years, with plans for 15 injection wells across roughly a hundred thousand acres.

ExxonMobil declined an interview with us, but provided a statement, saying that carbon capture sequestration is a proven and safe technology that can significantly reduce emissions in the highest emitting sectors.

Safely storing CO2 in the ground relies on keeping the gas contained throughout the process, and in the desired rock layer, which Denbury says, between 5200 and 8400 feet below the surface.

In certain geologic features at those depths, like layers of hard shale suggest CO2 could stay trapped.

- Collectively, they are a very good seal.

I think they're looking at this layer, the Opeche Shale as being a seal by itself.

But you're also somewhat have a safety backups in some of these others.

And one of the things people get concerned about, of course, is groundwater.

And I mean, this is a huge, huge, huge seal.

I mean, we're talking 3000 feet of mostly shale.

So you know, protection to the surface is very good.

- [Hannah] This is the land Jack's family homesteaded over a hundred years ago.

And like the generations before him, he and his two sons run their ranch in Carter County.

Today, it's a massive jigsaw puzzle of private and public land.

BLM balances multiple uses on its land here, including energy development, conservation, recreational activities, and since 2022, the federal government's broader decarbonization goals, which led to a new policy that ensures consistent processing of right of way applicants for carbon sequestration projects.

The Snowy River project in Carter County is BLM's first attempt to embark on this policy in the state of Montana.

BLM declined an interview with us, but stated in an email that policy direction is guided by the principles of sustainable land management, which seeks to ensure that resources are utilized efficiently while also protecting the environment.

- They've been out here taking an active role in stewardship for all this time now, throw it all out the window, it doesn't matter.

We've got a big company here talking about a pile of money, and stewardship, forget it.

- [Hannah] In its environmental assessment, BLM states that this project would have minimal and mostly temporary disruptions to the permanent grazing and hunting uses.

For ranchers in the area, say that these disruptions could permanently damage the grasslands and wildlife.

- This high quality grassland that we have out here is gonna become a big weed patch.

That's my main concern.

Might not look like high quality grassland, but this is, this is strong range, this is, the nutrient density in this grass is good.

We can put cows and calves out here, we don't have to feed them anything extra, and they come in fat and sassy in the fall.

It's just, it's because, it's just that way.

- [Hannah] Currently Denbury is waiting on BLM's decision on a right of way permit.

This would allow them to install miles of new pipelines, roads, and power lines, as well as construct well pads and use the underground pore space.

As part of the permanent conditions, Denbury would be required to restore any land it disturbed.

That includes monitoring and treating noxious weeds throughout the project's lifetime.

Denbury is also asking BLM to make an exception to the area's designation as a sage grouse priority habitat management area.

However, this designation allows for exceptions, given the right mitigations.

One of the proposed measures includes limiting all project activities to a roughly four month window each year to avoid critical periods for sage grouse and other wildlife in the area.

But local rancher, Liz Barber, doesn't see this mitigation working.

- So that was the kind of a big thing for me was, was the sage grouse habitat because, sage grouse are part of this culture.

You know, the sage grouse are just part of this landscape, part of this culture and the fact that they're becoming endangered feels like something that's definitely worth protecting.

So that was it for me was the, was the wildlife habitat piece of this.

- Liz and her husband Jordan raise their young family on these grasslands.

And as Liz rolls out hay for their cattle this winter, her focus on restoring and preserving the rangeland guides all her management decisions.

And she worries that this project could disrupt the ecosystem they work hard to maintain.

Supporters say carbon capture and storage projects, or CCS, could play a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and slowing the pace of global warming.

But there is a lot of debate over if geologic carbon sequestration is a substantial long-term climate solution.

The CO2, this project proposes to stop from entering our atmosphere amounts to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from 1.6 million cars.

And in 2023, ExxonMobil reported emitting 122.4 million tons of CO2 globally.

For many ranchers like Liz, the potential carbon offset from the Snowy River project seems too low for what's at stake.

- That's my purpose for standing in the middle of all this is, because I believe in climate change, I believe we need to do things differently, which is why we're doing the work we're doing to improve these range lands, to improve native range land species to improve wildlife habitat because, these range lands also draw down carbon in a natural way.

- [Hannah] According to the Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration, CO2 pipelines have a low accident rate.

However, when leaks occur, they can contaminate water and land, causing irreversible damage.

And applications for CCS are on the rise since the federal government increased its tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

If Denbury Snowy River Project reaches its potential carbon storage capacity, the company could earn about $12.7 billion in tax credits.

And many of these projects are looking to rural areas like Carter County where fewer landowners are impacted.

Denbury's plan of development highlights the area's geology as ideal for carbon storage.

Like those layers of shale that act as a seal to trap the injected CO2.

- You say a good candidate, we go back to the things that are the required things.

Do I have the right layers, do they have pore space?

One of the issues is, you know, what's the salinity of the existing water in these layers and so on.

So if all the conditions are reasonable, then there's no reason to think that that's not a good candidate, but there would be other good candidates, I'm sure in Eastern Montana as well.

- [Hannah] The Environmental Protection Agency has a rule that CO2 can't be injected into rock layers that hold fresh water.

It's part of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

And there is some evidence to suggest that the layers of rocks that Denbury is looking at to store CO2 could have fresh water.

- That is one of the issues that I think is a struggle to some extent, I looked at a few wells down in here.

I think there's still some question, and that's one of the things I think Denbury is gonna have to test is what is the salinity?

But right in about here, it's still kind of around that 10,000 cutoffs.

Technically from an EPA point of view, they can't even use those, they can't inject into those.

- [Hannah] And a nearby fault line could also be another problem for the Snowy River project.

And according to geologists, if injected CO2 gets around a fault line, it can cause minor earthquakes.

But all this depends on the fault characteristics, which are unclear.

- I mean, look, their area butts right up against a big fault that's obvious on a map.

So clearly it's something that, you know, you can't just overlook.

Somebody's gotta address it at some point, whether it's them, or EPA, or whoever.

- [Hannah] But above the ground, many of the 1400 people living in Carter County say they're fighting for their home.

- I think your solutions are already here.

Like the solution isn't like, let's just keep producing, let's just keep consuming, let's just continue what we're doing, and we'll just dump it somewhere, and we'll dump it in the earth.

And I think that the earth provides all the solutions that we need, I mean, it's magical what plants do to draw down carbon.

And so like if we can like let the earth do its job and consume less, like maybe that's the actual solution, but that doesn't make money.

- The next step is BLM's decision on the right of way permit, which is currently paused as the agency updates its greater sage grouse management plan.

But if approved Denbury will start construction for its first test well.

For Impact, I'm Hannah Kearse.

- President Trump has pledged to end the Inflation Reduction Act, which introduces some uncertainty to the future of the Montana project.

But bipartisan support of the policy's tax credits is expected to protect the federal funding.

Well that's all for this edition of Impact, but tune in next time when we head to the Capitol, where lawmakers debate the future of Medicaid expansion in Montana.

We'll explore the role this program plays in the state's health insurance landscape.

That's one issue dividing a Republican majority.

We'll take a closer look at where our citizen legislature aligns and divides on the next Impact.

Until then, I'm Breanna McCabe, and from all of us at Montana PBS, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Production of Impact is made possible with support from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(signature tune playing)