Montana Switches to Sending Prisoners to a Private Prison in Mississippi
The Montana state Department of Corrections (DOC) announced on March 23, 2026 that it will no longer send prisoners to a private prison in Arizona. Instead, it will send the roughly 600 out-of-state prisoners to a facility in Mississippi controlled by the same profiteer.
Montana, like other states that have locked up more people than they have space for, exports prisoners as a way to decrease overcrowding. In 2023, the DOC began sending prisoners to the Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, a facility run by the for-profit company CoreCivic. While around 360 Montana prisoners remain incarcerated at Saguaro, 240 have already been transferred to the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, a lockup that is also owned and operated by CoreCivic. The state intends to rely exclusively on the Tallahatchie prison for out-of-state transfers, although it did not provide a timeline on when the switch would be complete, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.
CoreCivic, as PLN has extensively covered for years, has a long record of understaffing, guards committing physical and sexual abuse, medical negligence, and wrongful death settlements in the dozens of prisons and jails it controls across the country. [See: PLN, Jun. 2024, p.47.] Roughly 20% of Montana’s male prison population is held in an out-of-state, CoreCivic-run prison. But the total percentage of the state’s male prisoners locked up in a CoreCivic facility is closer to just under 50%, as the DOC locks up more than 650 prisoners in the private Crossroads Correctional Facility in Shelby.
Source: Bozeman Daily Chronicle
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