File Photo by Philip B. Poston/Sentinel Colorado
Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee made a problematic decision last week when it rejected a request to fund hundreds of additional jail and prison beds, one that state residents shouldn’t have to live with.
The vote was framed as both fiscal restraint and reform-minded skepticism of the Department of Corrections. In reality, it risks deepening a crisis the Legislature itself has acknowledged for years . It’s one that leaves county jails overcrowded, state prisons understaffed and people cycling out of incarceration no safer, healthier or better prepared than when they went in.
Lawmakers are not wrong about the direction Colorado has chosen. The state is right to pursue prison reforms that emphasize rehabilitation, mental health treatment, substance abuse care and job training over reflexive, long-term incarceration.
Decades of national research and evidence, and Colorado’s own experience, show that locking people up without addressing addiction, mental illness or chronic instability does little to improve public safety or the well-being of convicts.
It is also undeniable that incarceration is expensive. Estimated imprisonment costs are about $80,000 a year, and more than $200 a day for county jails. Housing someone in a Colorado prison costs far more than providing treatment, housing support or community-based supervision, particularly for people jailed for nonviolent offenses such as drug possession, alcohol-related crimes or offenses tied to chronic homelessness.
As the prison population ages, those costs balloon, driven by rising medical expenses, state records and research show.
But good intentions do not excuse bad outcomes. Under the current system, Colorado’s jails and prisons are not equipped to deliver the rehabilitation the Legislature says it wants.
Treatment backlogs keep people incarcerated long after they are eligible for parole.
Staffing shortages compromise safety and limit access to education, therapy and reentry planning.
As even reform advocates concede, the system as it exists today cannot reliably ensure that people released back into the community are less likely to re-offend than when they were locked up.
That’s the contradiction the Joint Budget Committee failed to confront.
Lawmakers this month rejected a request to expand capacity by roughly 900 beds, arguing that the Department of Corrections has not done enough to reduce admissions or increase releases under a 2018 population management law. Those concerns are legitimate. Parole releases have dropped. Technical parole violations have surged. Audits have identified inefficiencies in classification and release planning. The department deserves scrutiny and accountability.
Yet denying needed bed funding does not solve those problems. It shifts them onto county jails and the public.
Colorado already relies on county facilities as overflow holding sites for people sentenced to state prison but stuck waiting for intake. The backlog hovers around 500 people, nearly double what the state budgets for, according to state data.
The committee’s own actions acknowledge the problem. It approved only half the funding requested to pay counties for housing state inmates, even as it declined to meaningfully expand state capacity. That math does not work.
County jails were never designed to function as long-term extensions of the state prison system. They are more expensive per inmate, offer fewer programs and place additional strain on local governments that are already stretched thin.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike warned that denying additional beds would worsen this burden. They were right.
Compounding the problem is an acute staffing shortage within state prisons. Corrections officers are leaving faster than they can be replaced, a crisis acknowledged by Colorado WINS, the union representing state workers.
Fewer staff means fewer functioning beds, less programming and greater safety risks for employees, incarcerated people and the public. Refusing to fund capacity without simultaneously addressing staffing realities is not reform. It’s just wishful thinking.
The Joint Budget Committee should fully fund the jail and prison beds the system demonstrably needs right now, specifically to reduce the county jail backlog and stabilize operations, or at least come much closer to it.
At the same time, lawmakers should require the Department of Corrections, in coordination with local jails, to submit within 30 days a detailed plan to comply with laws already on the books to downsize the prison population through rehabilitation, treatment access, parole reform and smarter use of community corrections.
Colorado has spent years talking about moving away from warehousing people in prison. But last week’s decision to underfund prisons and jails will not move the state in the right direction.
