A visit to prison, and snail mail

By Micah Drew, Jordan Hansen and Keila Szpaller

“The government has failed the survivors. There’s no question about that, and that dates back five presidential administrations.” — House Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., before a panel to question former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi about the Epstein Files.

Last week I had the chance to go to a training session for correctional officers at Montana State Prison, outside of Deer Lodge. The Montana Department of Corrections hasn’t had the opportunity to host its own basic correctional/detention officer training before, a training regime that is overseen by the Public Safety Officer Standards and Training (POST) Council, which is in turn overseen by the state Department of Justice.

During that time, correctional officers were practicing restraints and holds in a training room with mats on the floor. I saw about 20 minutes of their 160 hours of training, which is done over three weeks.

Beyond getting a better understanding of how training correctional officers work, I think it’s important to spend time on the ground with the people and agencies that I’m covering. Corrections reporting isn’t something you can only do over phone calls, you have to make the effort to show up — a lesson that I think holds true across a variety of topics. And it’s one of the reasons your support means so much, because it allows us to get out and go tell some of these stories.

Corrections is not something I ever thought I’d be writing about on a consistent basis, but over the past year I’ve found myself get deeper into reporting on our state’s correctional system - it’s an important topic, complex, nuanced and there’s hundreds of millions of dollars at play, too.

~ Jordan Hansen

I mentioned I was on vacation last week, and one satisfying thing on the trip was mailing postcards. About 10 of them!

Also saw a giant snail start making a u-turn. It was an incredible sight. (I didn’t stick around for the full turn.)

I’ll send you snail mail if you email me your address, [email protected].

One thing I wanted to share here is that people sometimes don’t want to be a named source for information, but they do believe the information is important enough to be shared.

You probably know this, but we get material sometimes without knowing who provided it. It comes in the mail without a return address, or from a funky email address.

If we can verify the material, we can use it, even if we don’t know who our “Secret Santa” is.

One thing that is scary to me is the ability of AI to lead us astray by creating fake documents, and States Newsroom, our parent organization, has an AI policy to help make sure you get only real journalism from us and our sister outlets.

If you ever want to be a Secret Santa yourself and need a mailing address, just call or email.

~ Keila Szpaller

I finished “Baited,” by Colleen O’Brien, while on vacation, and I wanted a new book before I could get to a bookstore.

The significant other wasn’t done reading “Moonraker,” by Ian Fleming, so I couldn’t swipe it from him.

But the place we stayed had a business center of sorts, and in it, a bookshelf with a sharing library.

Guess whose name popped up, in giant letters? Jo Nesbø. Hooray! The library had a novel of his that I hadn’t read before, “Macbeth.”

Nesbø writes dark mysteries, and in this one, one of the main characters struggles with addiction, both to a drug and to power.

Always great to learn a new word, and I had to look up “pillion.” It’s the saddle seat for a motorcycle passenger, if you’re not familiar either.

The paperback is a large print edition, and that’s a new one for me too. A friend said it’s fun to flip the pages so fast, and I agree.

Back to snail mail, I’ll send this book to you once I’m done if you’d like to read it and are the first to send your address.

What’s on your reading list? [email protected].

~ Keila Szpaller

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