About the Montana Coalition for Public Safety
The Montana Coalition for Public Safety is a diverse group of organizations and stakeholders united to build a just, fair, and accurate justice system in Montana — a system that makes our communities safer.
Montana’s justice system must be guided by the following principles:
Focus on Public Safety
To make our communities safer, Montana must address the root causes of crime, recognize substance use disorders as a public health issue, provide an array of community-based mental health services, keep children out of the adult justice system, remove unnecessary hurdles to reentry, and ensure that punishments are proportionate and evidence-based. Far too many things carry criminal penalties that are disconnected from protecting public safety.
Protect Taxpayers
To protect taxpayers, Montana must prioritize public safety policies and practices that are efficient, effective, and data-driven. Montana spends nearly 200 million dollars a year on corrections and nearly 70 million (or 35%) of that is spent on supervising people on probation or parole. Sending too many people to prison for too long is a poor use of taxpayer resources and is much more expensive than effective diversion programs and re-entry programs.
Eliminate Racial and Geographical Disparities
To ensure justice, Montana must eliminate the racial and geographical disparities that exist throughout its criminal justice system. Currently, Indigenous people are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than white people, and black people are incarcerated at a rate six times higher than white people. People under state supervision in rural areas have little to no access to the services necessary to maintain stability and often become stuck in urban centers because of probation and parole conditions, disconnected from their families and communities. Race and geography should not influence or determine the criminal justice outcomes of Montanans.
Require Transparency and Accountability
To strengthen public trust, Montana must require all public safety agencies to create and implement cultures of transparency and accountability. The power to take life and liberty must be accompanied with collection of basic data about public safety actions (e.g. use of force, court fines and fees, racial profiling, civil asset forfeiture, prosecutorial charging decisions) and the presumption that this information and data is public.
Prioritize Accuracy
Montana must protect the principles of due process in its justice system to ensure that innocent people are not incarcerated. With the third highest exoneration rate in the nation, it is clear that Montana is falling short. Prosecutorial abuse, false testimony, ineffective assistance of counsel, false confessions, faulty or misleading forensic science, mistaken identification, and pretrial detention continue to send innocent people into Montana’s jails and prisons. When we strengthen the accuracy of our justice system, we also make our communities safer. When an innocent person is incarcerated, the person who committed the crime remains free.
End the criminalization of poverty
Montana must stop the effective criminalization poor people. Montana has a two-tiered justice system — where involvement in and the collateral harms of Montana’s criminal justice system are often determined by one’s wealth rather than their actions. For example, 61 percent of people in Montana’s jails have not been convicted of a crime — they are there simply because they cannot afford bail. People without ready access to cash find themselves in escalating cycles of court debt, incarceration, and life-altering criminal records. In addition, public safety officials must focus on the fair administration of justice, not the collection of local revenues through fines, fees, and court costs.
