Who is the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition?

Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 7,000 individual members and over 100 faith and community organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform.

Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.

If you would like to be involved please go to our website and become a member.


Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Opinion: Prison Politics

The Gazette

Colorado, like other states, is in financial peril. Taxpayers have been losing their jobs, or coping with pay cuts and furloughs. They don't have more money to give state government, making it difficult for the state to maintain roads and fund schools.

Yet hope is not lost. State government has hemorrhaged billions in past decades on a wasteful expense that should be immediately slashed: prisons. State officials must act quickly to facilitate significantly less spending on prisons, with a goal of shutting several of them down.

This column has repeatedly questioned the wisdom of the state's tough-on-crime, lock-'em-up and throw-away-the-key corrections politics. It has chastised politicians who know so little about basic economic principles that they view prisons and inmates as economic development.

At least one member of our local legislative delegation gets it. Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, is the former Fountain police chief and author of a bill that started a sentencing review process designed to address Colorado's embarrassing and expensive overpopulation of prisoners.

Traditionally, Republicans have been the party of limited government and maximized freedom. The party long ago lost sight of those principles in order to embrace the imposition of social engineering, in which government is grown at taxpayer expense in order to enforce pseudo-conservative ideals. In Colorado, prisons provide the best example of big-government Republicanism.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amen to that. They are not longer places where they can be
rehabilitated prisoners are just looked at being money for the people running them. I say, incarcerate in a criminal but send out a person trained and rehabilitated enough to be successful in society. Do not consider them just $$