State Department of Corrections Director Mike Ferriter doesn’t think prison is easy.

But it’s not as stressful, he said, as being forced to get a job, stay clean, come straight home every night and deal with a family long ignored by the often-chaotic behavior of a felon.

That, he said, is where rehabilitation gets real.

It “is one of the most logical things we do in corrections,” he said. “You really see people have some pride in themselves for the first time.”

Ferriter, 53, took command of Montana’s correctional system 18 months ago. He represents a new direction for corrections, said Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who appointed him after the previous director, Bill Slaughter, resigned amid a personnel and harassment scandal.

Unlike the corrections’ chiefs of the past 13 years, Ferriter’s background is not law enforcement. Instead, Ferriter came up through the professional ranks, specializing in what is known as “community corrections,” programs like probation and parole and pre-release, where felons serve their sentences outside a prison cell, often in programs that stress clean living and responsibility.

Now, Schweitzer and Ferriter have a new goal for corrections. They want to reserve the state’s prison cells for the 20 percent of incorrigible, dangerous felons who cannot be safely rehabilitated “on the outside.” And they want to handle the remaining 80 percent in some kind of community corrections program.

Doing so, Schweitzer said, is not only cheaper to taxpayers, but often safer. People who get help for their drug and alcohol problems, for their mental health issues and who have a probation or parole officer holding their feet to the fire and helping them succeed are less likely to commit crimes again. It’s also part of Schweitzer’s desire to make “better fathers, better brothers, better mothers” out of the more than 13,000 Montanans who have broken the law and are now in the custody of the Department of Corrections.

Football and family

The grandson of Yugoslavic and Irish immigrant underground miners, Ferriter was born and raised in Butte. In keeping with Butte tradition, Ferriter seems to have two passions: family and sport, particularly football. Even in his 50s, he is brawny, but back in high school, said Mike Mahoney, warden of the Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Ferriter was an imposing, aggressive player who could “let the ape out of the cage” and dominate the gridiron.

“He was a very good athlete,” said Mahoney, who, ended up playing football with Ferriter at Butte Central Catholic High School. The two future colleagues played on back-to-back championship teams in the early 1970s.

It seems to run in the family. Ask Ferriter what he likes to do outside of the office and he ticks off a list of sports he and his wife, Betty, like to watch their five children play and succeed at. Son Mike Ferriter, a junior at the University of Montana, is a starting wide receiver for the Grizzlies, with a nearly perfect GPA. One daughter, Colleen, 24, played soccer at Eastern Washington University; another son, Mark, 26, was a successful high school soccer player in Helena. Kevin Ferriter, 16, is a standout football player at Helena High School. Erin Ferriter, 28, was an all-state soccer player in high school and played three years at Carroll College.

“I’ve coached a lot,” Ferriter said. “I’ve coached a lot of soccer. That’s been good for me to see the positive side of people and families. I really enjoyed coaching soccer at the lowest level. There’s nothing more fun than a first- and second-grade soccer game. They’re all gathered around the ball.”

Family is another passion. Ferriter talks about his wife’s “gift with small children” their own and dozens of others. Betty ran a day care center out of their Montana City home for years and the Ferriter house was always filled with children.

“That was fun,” Ferriter said.

Ferriter started his corrections career with kids. After turning down an athletic scholarship to UM to pursue his education at what is now Montana State University-Billings, Ferriter landed an internship working with juvenile delinquents.

The work suited him.

From his first job out of school as youth court officer in 1973, Ferriter became a juvenile probation officer in Missoula before working with adult felons as manager of the Missoula prerelease Center in 1979. In 1982, he moved to Helena to manage the state’s entire probation and parole system. He took over all of community corrections in 1995. Ferriter can easily recite the statistics of Montana felons: Better than 90 percent of the people in Montana’s prerelease centers are addicted to either alcohol or drugs. Almost 70 percent of women and more than 40 percent of men in such facilities have a mental health problem.

“That tells me it’s not just about criminal behavior,” he said. “You don’t get a felony (fourth) DUI without having a drinking problem.”

As Ferriter describes it, community corrections is a fine line: Felons need to be appropriately sanctioned for their crimes, but they also need help to keep them from straying back into their criminal lifestyle. And it’s not just felons outside prison walls. The average length of stay at Montana State Prison is about three years. That means those inmates will be getting out and coming home. To succeed, they need job skills and treatment for their addictions and mental health problems.

Expansion

In the 1990s, Montana launched a prison cell building boom. Regional prisons popped up in Glendive, Great Falls and Missoula. The state also built its first private prison in Shelby.

But under Ferriter, community corrections also saw a boom, particularly the number of felons in prerelease centers, which swelled from 256 in 1995 when Ferriter took over the division to 810 in 2007 when he left. Even before Schweitzer was elected, the “cuff and stuff” philosophy of corrections was beginning to wane. A budget crisis in 2002 forced corrections to release some 359 inmates from prison as part of a conditional release program. Additionally, Republican Gov. Judy Martz presided over the completion of Montana’s first lockdown alcohol treatment center.

Ferriter, as head of community corrections, oversaw both efforts.

In part because of his efforts and new programs begun under Schweitzer, Montana’s correctional sys

tem looks very different

today than it did when Ferriter began working in the field 30 years ago.

Felons in state custody might serve their sentence in prison or get a suspended sentence and be on probation. They might go to one of six prerelease centers around the state or one of two lockdown meth treatment centers. Montana also has a boot camp for younger adult offenders, two lockdown alcohol treatment centers and what’s called a “sanction center,” a kind of baby-step toward prison that gives probationers a short taste of life behind bars in an effort to get their attention. The state also has two treatment centers for addicted felons and those with mental illnesses that are more like prerelease centers, where inmates work in the community. Many of those innovations came about when Ferriter was running community corrections.

“I think he was pretty visionary in looking at every possible option there was to place people in the community and keep them in the community safely,” said Pam Bunke, now the current head of community corrections and a former probation and parole officer in Billings. “He was creative in coming up with different program and in meeting the needs of offenders.”

The philosophy seems to be paying off. The U.S Justice Department concluded in a December report that Montana had the 17th lowest growth of its prison population of all 50 states.

It’s cheaper. Keeping a felon on probation and parole cost taxpayers about $4 a day, according to corrections statistics. The same felon in prison would cost an average of $76 a day.

It’s safe, too. Ferriter said his proudest accomplishment is going to bed each night knowing the system is working.

No riots are breaking out in prison and the thousands of felons living in Montana communities are not out committing new crimes.

Scott Crichton, executive director of the Montana American Civil Liberties Union, which in the past has sued the state to improve conditions at the prison, also praised Ferriter as a leader. However, he said that there’s still room for improvement in corrections.

The 172 cells reserved for treatment at the men’s prison are a good start.

But there are 3,000 men behind bars in Deer Lodge and many have some sort of drug addiction or mental health problem. There are still long waiting lists to get into those kinds of treatment programs behind bars.

“I think he’s a good pick; they’re focusing in the right direction,” Crichton said. “But there are still huge issues for Ferriter to address.”