Prison Spending Or Anything Else....

This year the legislature created the Colorado Criminal and Juvenile Justice Commission, tasked with examining the state’s sentencing structure and making recommendations to the legislature to address the ever-increasing prison.

But if lawmakers lack the will to actually act on sentencing, then the commission will be largely irrelevant, and Colorado taxpayers will be on the hook for a long-term — and hugely expensive — prison expansion project.

Colorado’s current prison population is over 22,500 inmates, and all available prison capacity is full. In 2006, there were just over 10,000 admissions and just under 9,000 releases from Colorado prisons. So Colorado had a net gain of over a thousand inmates. This in turn requires Colorado to build, lease or otherwise find and pay for a thousand new beds to house them.

No end in sight

This is only going to continue.

Prison population projections by the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice and the Legislative Council Staff average out to around 29,000 inmates by 2012.

But even if the state started building today, by 2012 Colorado would be in the same position as now — prisons full and more needed — because expansion plans are only pacing, and not exceeding, prison population growth. In other words, if the legislature does nothing but appropriate more money, the 1,000-bed-per-year scenario simply continues as far as the eye can see.

It costs around $100,000 to build one new prison bed and another $28,000 in annual operations money. So Colorado is looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending for prisons.


the denver daily