EDITORIAL: ‘Crowded’ prisons = safer Colorado
Let’s welcome news reported by The Gazette this week that Colorado’s prison population is on the rise, with more lawbreakers reportedly behind bars for parole violations.
That’s encouraging in a state that has weathered an epic crime wave in recent years, often enough at the hands of parolees. The surge in our prison population reflects a renewed commitment by law enforcement — including parole officers, who police parolees and try to keep them on track — to prioritize public safety.
Misguided, out-of-touch advocates of the “justice reform” movement already are wringing their hands over the thought of convicts out on parole being sent back to the slammer for what the justice reformers insist are mere “technical” violations of parole conditions.
“We are sending people back to prison who are not dangerous,” claimed Boulder Democratic state Sen. Judy Amabile, a prime mover of soft-on-crime legislation at the State Capitol. “There’s a wide variety of technical parole violations, but sometimes they can be really inconsequential things, and people still end up back in DOC.”
Oh, the poor dears!
In reality, of course, parole is a privilege, granted conditionally in exchange for shortening an original prison sentence. And those conditions typically include restrictions put in place to help keep the convict out of trouble and give him or her a better chance of staying on the right side of the law en route to reform. Parolees may be ordered, for example, to stay away from former criminal associates. Or, they may be barred from drinking alcohol. Those are not punishments; they are an acknowledgement of a parolee’s weaknesses — indeed, many are substance abusers — that can pull them back into a life of crime.
Ask anyone in law enforcement; parole violations aren’t the “inconsequential things” Amabile thinks they are. They all too often are an urgent warning a parolee is about relapse into lawbreaking.
Which is why swiftly returning them to prison makes society safer. And it’s why any crackdown on parole violations is overdue.
But that good news comes with some troubling news. As noted in The Gazette’s report, the state’s rising prison population now has triggered a 2018 law enacted to curb prison crowding. Since the vacancy rate at the state’s correctional facilities has been under 3% for at least 30 consecutive days, a protracted series of steps will kick in under that law that could lead at some point to granting more parole — reversing the benefits of the crackdown.
Our offender-friendly legislature made matters worse this year when it eliminated about 300 beds from corrections’ facilities in a bid to rein in this year’s budget deficit — which lawmakers’ had caused with their runaway spending. Meaning, they balanced their busted budged in part by sacrificing public safety.
There is a direct correlation between incarceration and crime. As Colorado’s Common Sense Institute found in a groundbreaking 2021 analysis, between 2008 and 2021, Colorado’s prison population declined 23% while the total number of annual crimes increased 47%.
Which means the only responsible solution for prison crowding is to put public safety first — and add as much prison space as needed to achieve that end.
