Think Outside the Cage

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.

Sunday, September 20, 2015

CCJRC 2015 Voices for Justice Sponsors

We simply cannot thank these folks enough for being part of our event. A huge thanks also to all those who donated to the silent auction!!

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Pell Grants to be restored to prisoners

Finally after two decades prisoners will be allowed to take college classes. More information will be available on Friday when the official announcement comes from the White House
Wall Street Journal

Josh Mitchell and

Joe Palazzolo

Updated July 27, 2015 7:32 p.m. ET

The Obama administration plans to restore federal funding for prison inmates to take college courses, a potentially controversial move that comes amid a broader push to overhaul the criminal justice system.
The plan, set to be unveiled Friday by the secretary of education and the attorney general, would allow potentially thousands of inmates in the U.S. to gain access to Pell grants, the main form of federal aid for low-income college students. The grants cover up to $5,775 a year in tuition, fees, books and other education-related expenses.
Prisoners received $34 million in Pell grants in 1993, according to figures the Department of Education provided to Congress at the time. But a year later, Congress prohibited state and federal prison inmates from getting Pell grants as part of broad anticrime legislation, leading to a sharp drop in the number of in-prison college programs. Supporters of the ban contended federal aid should only go to law-abiding citizens.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

Obama, in Oklahoma, takes reform message to the prison cell block

the New York Times

EL RENO, Okla. — They opened the door to Cell 123 and President Obama stared inside. In the space of 9 feet by 10, he saw three bunks, a toilet with no seat, a small sink, metal cabinets, a little wooden night table with a dictionary and other books, and the life he might have had.

As it turns out, there is a fine line between president and prisoner. As Mr. Obama became the first occupant of his high office to visit a federal correctional facility, he said he could not help reflecting on what might have been. After all, as a young man, he had smoked marijuana and tried cocaine. But he did not end up with a prison term, let alone one lasting decades.

“There but for the grace of God,” Mr. Obama said after his tour. “And that is something we all have to think about.”

Close to one in every 12 black men ages 25 to 54 are imprisoned, compared with one in 60 nonblack men in that age group.

Mr. Obama came here to showcase a bid to overhaul America’s criminal justice system in a way none of his predecessors have tried to do, at least not in modern times. Where other presidents worked to make life harder for criminals, Mr. Obama wants to make their conditions better.

With 18 months left in office, he has embarked on a new effort to reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders; to make it easier for former convicts to re-enter society; and to revamp prison life by easing overcrowding, cracking down on inmate rape and limiting solitary confinement.

What was once politically unthinkable has become a bipartisan venture. Mr. Obama is making common cause with Republicans and Democrats who have come to the conclusion that the United States has given excessive sentences to too many nonviolent offenders, at an enormous moral and financial cost to the country. This week, Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 46 such prisoners and gave a speech calling for legislation to overhaul the criminal justice system by the end of the year.

He came to the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution on Thursday to get a firsthand look at what he is focused on. Accompanied by aides, correctional officials and a phalanx of Secret Service agents, he crossed through multiple layers of metal gates and fences topped by concertina wire to tour the prison and talk with some of the nonviolent drug offenders he says should not be serving such long sentences.

The prison was locked down for his visit. He was brought to Cell Block B, which had been emptied for the occasion. Only security personnel were outside on the carefully trimmed grass yards. The only inmates Mr. Obama saw were six nonviolent drug offenders who were selected to have a conversation with him recorded by the news organization Vice for a documentary on the criminal justice system that will air on HBO in the fall.

But those six made an impression. “When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different from the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made,” Mr. Obama told reporters afterward. “The difference is, they did not have the kind of support structures, the second chances, the resources that would allow them to survive those mistakes.”

He added that “we have a tendency sometimes to take for granted or think it’s normal” that so many young people have been locked up for drug crimes. “It’s not normal,” he said. “It’s not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is normal is young people who make mistakes.”

If they had the same advantages he and others have had, Mr. Obama added, they “could be thriving in the way we are.”

Still, he made a distinction between nonviolent drug offenders like those he was introduced to here and other criminals guilty of crimes like murder, rape and assault. “There are people who need to be in prison,” Mr. Obama said. “I don’t have tolerance for violent criminals; many of them may have made mistakes, but we need to keep our communities safe.”

More than 2.2 million Americans are behind bars, and one study found that the size of the state and federal prison population is seven times what it was 40 years ago. Although the United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it has more than 20 percent of its prison population

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

5 Ways President Obama Wants To Overhaul The Criminal Justice System

The White House is Working for Criminal Justice Reform

Obama's Criminal Justice Reform ProposalsPresident Obama wants to put justice back in the justice system:
Posted by AJ+ on Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

California's Plan to Curb America's Overmedication of Foster Kids

Governing

In the United States, low-income and foster-care kids are prescribed psychotropic drugs at an alarmingly higher rate than their peers in America or abroad. Governing recently wrote about the problem and what states are doing to deal with it in March. But since then, California began closing in on a package of bills that could make the state a leader in controlling overmedication.

Earlier this month, the California state Senate unanimously passed four bills that would strengthen the state’s monitoring system for foster kids' prescriptions, require stronger evidence documenting the need for medications, add more medical expertise in the area of oversight and force group homes that overprescribe to develop plans to change their practices. Some of those ideas aren't new, but experts say adopting all of them together could make California a model.

"We feel pretty confident that this package of four bills is really more comprehensive and targets so many different aspects of the problem that other states really have not been targeting,” said Bill Grimm of the National Center for Youth Law, the group behind the legislation.

Psychotropic drugs range from amphetamines, which are often prescribed for ADHD, to antidepressants and antipsychotics. Antipsychotics were originally intended for the treatment of severe mental health illnesses but have increasingly been prescribed to children with behavior issues since the 1990s. Numerous studies show low-income children, particularly those in foster care, are prescribed psychotropic drugs at rates far above privately insured kids. The Office of Inspector General has raised alarms in numerous reports. Since 2011, federal authorities have required states to report annually about steps they’re taking to curb psychotropic prescriptions.

California is one of only a few states that requires a judge to approve prescriptions for psychotropic drugs, but according to an investigative newspaper series, it still prescribed them to about a quarter of foster kids (compared to just 4.8 percent of privately insured children), over the past decade. The bills would revamp the court system of prior approval. The form that doctors submit to judges, for instance, would have to show that doctors tried other therapeutic services first. Judges would also have the power to request a second opinion or return the form for more information, and doctors would have to get the written consent of children 14 and older. The bill also offers training to everyone from judges to group-home employees on the appropriate uses of these drugs and expands data-sharing between the Medicaid system that pays for care and the child welfare system.

The two most notable changes, though, are increased monitoring of group homes and expanded use of nurses -- both of which are uncommon. The newspaper series highlighted links between group homes for foster kids and high rates of prescription medications, which children often had to take as a condition of staying there. With better data-sharing, state officials would flag group homes with the highest rates of psychotropic prescribing and require them to make plans to reduce overmedication. Nurses, meanwhile, would monitor the side effects of antipsychotics such as serious weight gain, diabetes and neurological disorders.

The bills haven’t encountered opposition, but they still need to pass the California Assembly and get the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown who's been fairly quiet on the issue even though it generated a lot of interest after the newspaper investigation. The bills come at an estimated cost of $5 million in the first year, with about $4 million thereafter. To Anna Johnson, a policy analyst with the National Center for Youth Law, Brown's reputation as a budget hawk means he's less likely to support the bill package.
“His main legacy here has been that he’s had this balanced budget, but for foster kids [for] whom every day feels like a rainy day, we feel like he could do more to protect them,” she said.
When asked for his opinion on the package of bills, his press office said Brown doesn’t typically comment on pending legislation.

Shadi Houshyar, vice president of child welfare policy at the advocacy group First Focus, agrees that the bills would be a positive step, but she also thinks states are generally behind on an element that’s critical to actually replace drugs: access to services like intensive counseling and individualized case management.
“The biggest challenge is how you increase the use of evidence-based therapies for kids in addition to the monitoring strategies,” she said.

The way to do that, according to Houshyar, is to offer those services through Medicaid, which allows states to leverage federal funding, and make them accessible through child welfare departments. Some notable examples of places that do that are Arizona -- which has a Medicaid plan specifically for foster children -- Michigan and New Jersey.

For California, the money is there, said Grimm. Since 2004, the state has raised $13 billion for mental health services from a ballot measure that raised taxes on people earning more than $1 million a year. But an independent state oversight agency found recently that much of the spending is unaccountable and poorly prioritized, with little sense of exactly how the money is being spent and what it’s producing. Grimm’s group wants to ensure that money is going to children in the foster-care system.

“There is a considerable amount of money and resources out there,” he said. “The question is to what extent is that money being used for children?”

Chris Kardish | Staff Writer

ckardish@governing.com | @ckardish

Healthcare matters

Germany's Kinder, Gentler, Safer Prisons

The Marshall Project

On Sunday, bleary after an overnight flight from New York, a group of American criminal justice professionals squeezed into a private room in a downtown Berlin restaurant. They were preparing to visit German prisons and meet German prison officials. The trip, organized by the Vera Institute, a think tank based in New York, is all about studying another system so that we might better understand our own.

From the brief introductions, it was clear that this trip would be as much about the United States as about Europe. Germany’s system of sentencing (15 years is the longest most people go to prison here unless they are demonstrably dangerous) and incarceration (open, sunny prisons, full of fresh air, where prisoners wear their own clothes) serves as a reference point for reflecting on the punitive mentality that has come to define the U.S. justice system.

In Germany, then, we would see ourselves—but through a looking glass.

The American travelers—corrections officials, district attorneys, academics, and activists—represent the variety of perspectives that fall under what journalists have taken to calling the “emerging consensus” on criminal justice reform. There are the guys who run prisons and worry about recidivism numbers. There are elected district attorneys wondering how the public responds to such short sentences. And then there are reform activists determined to see prisoners treated humanely.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Women in Prison

Basket Registry

Colorado Prison Facts

After A Year Of Freedom, Parolee Kevin Monteiro Still Carries Weight Of His Past -

NPR

One year ago -- on June 10, 2014 -- Kevin Monteiro was released after nearly 30 years in prison for second-degree murder. That day, Monteiro was dropped off by a prison van at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Denver with a prison-issued debit card, and says he felt completely lost.
“I had a hundred dollars in my pocket and a box of books," remembers Monteiro. "No family, nobody.”

Now, a year after his first day of freedom, Monteiro told Colorado Matters host Ryan Warner that he's built a life for himself. He has a steady job, his own apartment, and he's reconnecting with relatives. Putting all of that together wasn't easy though.

“Prison is a funny thing. At first when you go in you hate it. There’s a stage you go through. Then you come to accept it. Then you come to depend on it," he said.

Breaking out of the routine took a lot of time, effort and luck, Monteiro said. It was bad enough that at one point he actually wanted to go back to prison. But those days are now passed, he said.

“I don’t miss prison. There’s times I miss some of the people I left behind in prison," he said. "There are some good people inside and they are worth saving.”

Click the audio player above to hear the full conversation, and read highlights below.

- See more at: https://www.cpr.org/news/story/after-year-freedom-parolee-kevin-monteiro-still-carries-weight-his-past#sthash.E0Wrllja.KYvhthiF.dpuf

“Prison is a funny thing. At first when you go in you hate it. There’s a stage you go through. Then you come to accept it. Then you come to depend on it," he said.

Breaking out of the routine took a lot of time, effort and luck, Monteiro said. It was bad enough that at one point he actually wanted to go back to prison. But those days are now passed, he said.

“I don’t miss prison. There’s times I miss some of the people I left behind in prison," he said. "There are some good people inside and they are worth saving.”

Click the audio player above to hear the full conversation, and read highlights below.

On the difference between what he planned and what's happened
"My plans were totally different. What I planned ... is totally different to what’s happening in my life now. There’s a big difference when you have friends. Coming out of prison with no family, with no one that really cares is one thing. But when you come out and people care about you and people give you a chance, that’s really amazing.”
On having a weak immune system after decades inside
“Because I did so much time, and a lot of my time was in isolation, so when I did come out of prison, I noticed that I catch colds a lot. This last cold I had, I actually went to the hospital and they actually had to give me a steroid and antibiotics. But when [a nurse] took the blood and did an examination on me, she said your immune system is very weak and very low. So I kind of drag colds along with me.”
On giving advice to fellow parolees
“What an ex-offender or parolee has to do is, number one, be very honest with themselves. And always remember that the number one thing in an offender’s life is his victim. Always remember your victim. Don’t ever separate that. I took a life. ... [T]hat’s something I can never fix. So that victim is always in my mind.”
- See more at: https://www.cpr.org/news/story/after-year-freedom-parolee-kevin-monteiro-still-carries-weight-his-past#sthash.E0Wrllja.KYvhthiF.dpuf