DOC facility wins Center for Improving Youth Justice award

• July 01 2025

The Center for Improving Youth Justice (CIYJ) recently honored Pine Hills Correctional Facility as a 2025 Barbara Allen-Hagen Award winner for its commitment to treating youth residents and using the Performance-based Standards (PbS) model to achieve positive outcomes.

“Working with juvenile offenders can be an extremely difficult job, but everyone at Pine Hills, from correctional officers to teachers, care deeply about making a positive impact on these young people,” Montana Department of Corrections Director Brian Gootkin said. “This award shines a light on the great work of Warden Steve Ray and his staff for their effort to create a safe environment for residents and staff members.”

The Barbara Allen-Hagen award is given annually to a correctional program that best exemplifies the commitment of the CIYJ to “treat all young people as one of our own and use the continuous improvement model to achieve positive outcomes for young people, staff, and families.” Pine Hills has worked with CIYJ since 2012.

PHCF received the award for its work over the years in reducing youth confinement. After staff members tracked confinement rates for the PbS data requirements, the facility began evaluating different methods to work with residents during incidents that may compromise the security of the facility or safety of participants. As staff members began to rely more heavily on verbal de-escalation tactics, positive-based reinforcement, and increasing youth incentives and programs, the facility saw a change.

“When a national organization looks at the data and research, sees the resulting safe environment that was created for staff and residents, and rewards the staff for the work they do, it’s an amazing feeling,” Ray said. “I couldn’t be prouder of our staff and what they have accomplished. The award is an accumulation of work Pine Hills has done over the last decade to continuously improve.”

The PbS model is a data-driven improvement model that relies on research collected from facilities. It sets performance-based standards to guide facility operations, services, and programs to help serve youth and staff members. The program provides standards for facility safety, security, programming and youth healthcare.

“We’d like to give a huge congratulations to our partners at Pine Hills for working strategically to create sustainable change in reducing youth confinement,” said Kim Godfrey Lovett, CIYJ executive director. “They’ve been persistent with their efforts and relied on data and new tactics to help the youth residents in Montana. It’s especially fun for me to honor longtime partners as I get ready to retire at the end of the year.”