What the plan covers
✓Actually keep people safe
✓Make the punishment fit the crime
✓Get the money & quotas out
✓Treat the real drivers
✓Send the right responder
✓Real police accountability
✓Equal justice, whatever your zip code
By the numbers
1 million tips
Congress authorized $60 million a year in 2008 to fund the task forces that hunt online child predators, and we’ve never come close to paying it. In 2024 the national tipline sent about a million tips tied to U.S. states, far more than those units can chase.OJJDP / ICAC appropriation; NCMEC (2024)
7 in 10
Most people Montana sends back to prison from probation or parole never committed a new crime. In 2021, 7 in 10 parole revocations and 6 in 10 probation revocations were for breaking a rule: a missed check-in with their officer, a failed drug test, or a court-ordered treatment program that doesn’t exist within a hundred miles of them.CSG Justice Center, via the Montana Criminal Justice Data Snapshot (Dec. 2023), 2021 data
65%
About two-thirds of the private-prison contracts examined in a national review included lockup quotas: the state guarantees the cells stay full, often 90%, and actually pays a penalty if it locks up fewer people. States have signed contracts that fine them for having less crime. When the beds have to stay full, they get filled with the easiest people to convict: poor people with an overworked public defender and no way to drag a case out. Quotas aren’t making us safer. They’re making the system more racist and more classist.In the Public Interest, 2013 review of private-prison contracts
~600 Montanans
Montana pays a private company about $85 a day to hold roughly 600 Montanans out of state, almost a fifth of the men in our prison system. This year it moved all of them clear across the country to a private prison in Mississippi, far from the families who help them come home and from their lawyers and public defenders.Daily Montanan; Montana Free Press; Prison Legal News
About 25%
Adult drug courts (real treatment instead of a cell for people whose only crime is being sick) cut reoffending by about a quarter, and the results last for years. That means fewer victims down the road. But when a company gets paid for every full bed, treatment is the last thing it’s going to push.NIJ / CrimeSolutions, adult drug courts (rated Promising)
400,000+
On any given day more than 400,000 people sit in jail without being convicted of anything, many simply because they can’t afford bail, while people with money go home to their families for most of the time their case takes. Those waits can stretch on for months, even years. The median felony bail runs about $10,000, while many of the people sitting in those cells make about $15,000 a year.Prison Policy Initiative (2016 bail study; 2025 jail data)
20% / 33%
Native Montanans are about 6.5% of the state, and a fifth of the men and a third of the women in our prisons. Crime rates don’t explain that gap. Bail has turned our justice system into an American caste system, separating the rich from the poor in yet another cruel way. It comes down to who can make bail, who can afford a lawyer, who lives three hours from the treatment a judge ordered, and who can afford the transportation and time off to get there.ACLU Montana, “Blueprint for Smart Justice”
Where she starts
I spent two decades building the cases that put predators and traffickers away, so no one needs to explain to me why crime has to be taken seriously. That work also showed me something most campaigns won’t say out loud: a lot of what we pay for in the name of public safety is quietly making us less safe. Serious crimes go unsolved and victims wait, while we spend a fortune sending people back to prison for breaking a rule of parole, like missing a check-in with their officer, when they haven’t hurt anyone. We’ve aimed the whole system at the wrong targets, and aiming it back at the things that actually keep Montana safe is the whole job. You can’t fix the prison by only looking at the prison, so I won’t reach into a Montana courtroom, but I can move the federal sentencing laws, the federal courts, and the federal money that pushes states one way or the other, and I will.
Actually keep people safe
If we’re serious about crime, we start with the crimes that leave someone hurt. Congress passed a law in 2008 to fund the task forces that hunt online child predators and never came close to paying for it, so those units now get about a million tips a year tied to U.S. states, far more than they can chase. The fund that pays for domestic-violence shelters and rape-crisis centers had its grants cut by about 40% in a single year, and rural states like ours feel it first. We even passed a law to clear the backlog of untested rape kits, then left it underfunded. There’s a pattern: Washington passes the promise and never pays for it. I’d pay for it. And when we catch the people who hurt a child, I’d come down hardest of all.
✓Fully fund the units that hunt child predators: pay for the ICAC task forces and Project Safe Childhood at the level Congress promised, put the crime-victims fund back on stable ground so a shelter isn’t one budget cycle from closing, and finish testing the backlogged rape kits.
✓Come down hardest on those who hurt a child: strengthen the federal penalties for producing and distributing child sexual abuse material and for trafficking a child.
✓Close the jurisdictional seams: stand up federal, state, and tribal task forces that align penalties and let investigators work as one, tighten interstate offender tracking, and strengthen tribal criminal jurisdiction so a reservation is never a loophole, enabling tribal sovereignty rather than steamrolling it.
Make the punishment fit the crime
Then there’s the other failure. We take someone who committed a lesser, non-violent crime and run them through a system that hardens them into a repeat offender they never would have been. We overcharge, so they carry a felony for life, which cuts their shot at a good job roughly in half. We put them on probation with rules built for a life they don’t have, a car, a clinic down the street, so they miss a required check-in with their probation officer, and for that missed check-in, not a new crime, we send them back to prison, which takes the job that was the only thing keeping them steady. We build the reoffending we say we’re afraid of.
✓Roll back mandatory minimums that force a sentence to match a chart instead of a crime.
✓Tear down the record barriers that reach far past the job: the same conviction can bar someone from public housing and even food assistance for years after the sentence is served, and cutting people off from the basics that keep them steady raises reoffending, it doesn’t lower it.
✓Stop imprisoning people for technical violations like a missed meeting when they haven’t hurt anyone.
Get the money and the quotas out
Nobody should make money off a full cell. A cell should be about protecting the public, and nothing else.
✓Get profit out of federal prisons for good and write it into law so the next administration can’t flip it back.
✓Ban lockup quotas by making federal dollars conditional on dropping them, and put real rules on out-of-state transfers so no state can ship people across the country to cut a cost or slip its own rules.
Treat the real drivers
You can’t arrest your way out of addiction and mental illness, which is most of what fills our jails. Every county in Montana is a mental-health provider shortage area, and when there’s no treatment within a hundred miles a cell becomes the default. There’s a better answer, and it isn’t soft: diversion and treatment courts take reoffending from about half down to just over a third and hold for years. That’s the same fight as the mental-health and rural-care work already in my platform, care that reaches people before a crisis becomes a crime.
✓Fund diversion, drug courts, and mental-health courts so people whose only crime is being sick get treatment instead of a cell, and treat the driver upstream so people stop cycling in at all.
Send the right responder, and mean it on accountability
Most of what we ask police to handle isn’t a crime at all. It’s a person in a mental-health or addiction crisis, and we send an armed officer because there’s no one else to send. This isn’t “defund the police.” That slogan was always a trap, and it never made a single family safer. You back the police by not making them the answer to everything. Where a city sends a trained crisis team to the mental-health calls instead of a squad car, it works, and it frees officers to work actual crime.
✓Fund crisis-response and co-responder teams, the 988 line and mobile crisis units, and real de-escalation training, so a mental-health call gets a clinician, not a squad car.
✓Real accountability where there’s misconduct: clear national use-of-force standards with real transparency, independent review when someone dies or is badly hurt in custody, and qualified-immunity reform so an officer who violates your rights can’t hide behind it. That protects good police work as much as it protects the public.
✓Stop sending surplus military equipment to local police. A police force should never look like an occupying army.
Equal justice, whatever your bank balance or zip code
Whether you go to prison shouldn’t come down to money, but too often it does. In federal court, the court-appointed private lawyers who defend many people who can’t afford their own went unpaid from July to November 2025 and kept working to keep the system standing. When the defense is broke, the outcome tilts before the trial starts, and more than 400,000 people sit in jail unconvicted, many simply because they can’t make bail.
✓Fund federal public defense so the right to a real lawyer means something, and help states do the same.
✓End wealth-based pretrial detention: stop locking people up before trial just for being too poor to pay their way out.
Sources: OJJDP / ICAC appropriation and NCMEC (child-exploitation task forces and CyberTipline reports); California Budget Center and RALIANCE (Victims of Crime Act fund); RAINN (Debbie Smith Act rape-kit testing); ACLU Montana, “Set Up to Fail” and “Blueprint for Smart Justice”; CSG Justice Center and Pew (technical violations); In the Public Interest (private-prison lockup quotas); Daily Montanan, Montana Free Press, and Prison Legal News (out-of-state transfers); NIJ / CrimeSolutions (treatment-court recidivism); Prison Policy Initiative (cash bail and pretrial detention); ABA and U.S. Courts (federal defender funding); Treatment Advocacy Center and Vera Institute (police and crisis response); U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Sentencing Project (collateral consequences). Bills are named as introduced; status shifts each Congress.