Improving Outcomes and Safely Reducing Revocations from Community Supervision in Montana

Responses to Behaviors and Revocation Procedures
To inform its findings related to responses to behavior, CJI examined current policies and practices, analyzed data provided by DOC on the use of their current graduated sanctions tool and available incentives, and conducted a review of case files for individuals who terminated supervision in 2019 to understand to what extent sanctions aligned with policy and research. CJI examined administrative and statutory responses to violations, factors that influence an officer’s decision-making regarding violation responses, the officer’s level of autonomy, and the use of incentives across the state. Research shows that to effectively change behavior, responses to violations should be proportional to the violation committed, delivered objectively, and focused on the behavior instead of the person. Similarly, incentives should be delivered impartially, focused on the behavior, and used to reinforce continued behavior. Incentives should be used four times more often than sanctions to effectively change behavior.
Decisions around when to seek revocation are inconsistent; staff report a lack of clarity DOC implemented the Montana Incentives and Interventions Grid (MIIG) in 2017 to provide structure and guidance to staff in responding to the behaviors of individuals on supervision. Officers are statutorily authorized to use the MIIG to sanction individuals who violate supervision conditions. The MIIG enables probation and parole officers to respond to supervision violations in a swift, certain, and proportional manner, based on the type of violation and the level of intervention required for the supervisee’s risk level. This approach is intended to remove the ambiguity inherent in a large, decentralized supervision system, where different officers may otherwise treat people in similar circumstances in very different ways.
The MIIG was also intended to standardize officers’ decisions to seek revocation of a person on supervision. Before initiating the revocation process for compliance violations, probation and parole officers are statutorily required to exhaust all other appropriate graduated responses that could be used to intervene and change the individuals behavior, which is informally known as “exhausting the MIIG.” Supervisors must approve an officer’s revocation request before it can be filed, creating a level of quality control, but judges or the Parole Board ultimately decide whether the MIIG has been exhausted in any individual case. Officers are not required to exhaust the MIIG when someone commits a noncompliance violation.
The statute authorizing the MIIG required DOC to create guidance on the process of exhausting the MIIG and documenting the graduated responses that had been used. However, DOC’s existing policy does not clearly define exhaustion of the MIIG; instead, it says only that the exhaustion of appropriate interventions is “individualized,” which leaves room for interpretation among different officers. Some officers said that courts sometimes reject their revocation requests because in the opinion of the court, the officers had not done enough to exhaust the MIIG. This apparent difference between officers’ and courts’ interpretations of what constitutes exhaustion of the MIIG has resulted in confusion and frustration among some officers.
In addition, staff reported during interviews that the MIIG is used differently in different regions, depending on the resources that are available in those areas. For example, places such as Yellowstone or Butte rarely use jail sanctions because there tend to be few jail beds available, while Missoula and Miles City tend to use them more often.