With just under three weeks to go in the legislative session, state Democrats have offered up a complex sentencing reform bill designed to reduce Colorado prison populations and cut costs.
It’s a worthy idea and a conversation worth having, but there’s no time left for a proper debate.
Introducing such a far-reaching measure at the end of the session, with the state’s budget woes hanging over the Capitol like Godzilla, is hardly conducive to the creation of good public policy.
Senate Bill 286 should be dropped from consideration this session.
Prosecutors, who have had scant opportunity to study the bill, have serious concerns. Attorney General John Suthers called the bill a “public defender’s wish list.” Indeed, the bill was largely shaped by state Public Defender Doug Wilson.
That’s not to say Suthers and other prosecutors are unwilling to consider sentencing reform. They are.
However, such broad changes must be thoroughly vetted in public by criminal justice experts and other interested parties. Gov. Bill Ritter is correct in saying the Colorado Commission on Criminal & Juvenile Justice, created in 2007, is the right forum for such debate.
The commission has been criticized, and with some justification, for moving too slowly. The commission should work through the summer and fall to craft suggestions the legislature could consider at the beginning of the next session.
SB 286, sponsored by Sen. John Morse, D-Colorado Springs, and Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, offers some good starting ideas. It attempts to reduce sentencing ranges for non-violent, property and some drug crimes.
But it also has serious problems. Mitch Morrissey, Denver’s district attorney, characterized the bill as a vast restructuring of sentencing laws that will shift considerable criminal justice burdens from the state to the county level by downgrading some felonies to misdemeanors.
He has other concerns, including how it would, Morrissey said, hamstring the system’s ability to punish habitual offenders and prosecute identity theft rings.
The state operates under complicated sentencing rules and this bill would change many of them.
Another important issue to consider is the fiscal impact of SB 286. In order to show the value of this measure, proponents should have well-researched estimates as to how much money the state will save from it.
As of late last week, those numbers were very rough and a fiscal note, an approximation of fiscal impact, was not yet available. If the idea is to save money, we ought to know how much.
Despite the bill’s problems, we think sponsors are on the right track. Something must be done to rein in burgeoning prison costs.
Some three decades ago, the state spent only 2.6 percent of its general fund budget on prisons. That has swelled to about 10 percent in recent years.
As legislatures around the country have struggled with the same problem, reform ideas that take the least dangerous people out of prison have been adopted.
Sentencing reform is a timely idea in Colorado, but it would be irresponsible to make such dramatic changes without thoughtful analysis and debate.
