State prison system reaching capacity
Re: “Past errors led to state prison calamity,” Sept. 24 editorial.
The Denver Post recently fingered TABOR and long sentences as the cause of Colorado’s prison overcrowding crisis. While those factors contributed, the root cause is the parole board, which keeps virtually all prisoners behind bars for as long as possible. This is truly a manufactured crisis, as more than one-half of Colorado prisoners are currently eligible for release.
Colorado could stabilize the prison population by forcing the parole board to release less than 8 percent of prisoners when they become eligible. More than 12 prisoners could be kept locked up for every one released early. Surely the board can find one good candidate from every 13 parole-eligible prisoners.
Don’t like that idea? Then perhaps Colorado could build more halfway houses, thereby housing prisoners cheaply and reducing recidivism by requiring prisoners to spend their last 90 days transitioning to free society. This would enable prisoners to find employment and housing prior to being paroled.
We don’t need new prisons. We need new ideas. It’s time we got smart on crime, not just tough on crime.
Greg Bowers, Cañon City
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The Post opines that Colorado has a prison system that “will be at capacity by October. The solutions are not easy or cheap.”
Colorado already uses public- private correctional partnerships to meet some of its need for bed space. Sending offenders out of state isn’t the best solution, but in the short term, it may be your only alternative.
In the longer term, the Association of Private Correctional and Treatment Organizations suggests the following:
Continue to use private companies to provide the investment to design, build and operate prisons.
Look to alternatives to incarceration that can provide treatment and rehabilitative programs to first-time, nonviolent drug and alcohol offenders.
Reduce recidivism by investing in the treatment, education and rehabilitation that offenders need to be successful when they leave prison.
Increase the likelihood that released inmates will not re-offend by providing substantive transitional programs to help released inmates adjust to the community outside the walls of prison.
Paul Doucette, Executive Director, Association of Private Correctional and Treatment Organizations, Washington, D.C.
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Your editorial highlights the exploding public policy issue of “getting tough on crime” without considering the long-term consequences.
If we are unable and unwilling to pay for government-run prisons, we should be seriously rethinking the war on drugs and the ethical and practical implications of prisons for profit. Other Western countries have already expanded the practice of treatment and education over the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” approach to crime. Yet we continue to abandon reason with short-sighted social policy. Private prisons are a glaring example of such failed social policy.
I have worked in a federal prison for 21 years and have come to realize that the toughest thing anybody can do is admit they were wrong. We have to do this as a society, too, not just as individuals.
Timothy D. Allport, Littleton
