DENVER—A military-style boot camp at Colorado’s Buena Vista prison is shutting down after disappointing recidivism rates and because of rising costs.
The boot camp started in 1993 and included a GED program, substance abuse treatment and consequences for bad behavior. The last graduating class Thursday had 23 prisoners.
Prisoners who enrolled in the program were nonviolent offenders and became eligible for sentence reductions.
But the Colorado Department of Corrections says about 51 percent of the 155 prisoners who graduated from the program through fiscal year 2007 are back in prison. That was 2 percentage points better than the record of inmates convicted of crimes such as robbery and murder.
“You would’ve expected a huge change difference in recidivism,” said Katherine Sanguinetti, DOC spokeswoman.
It was money that triggered the boot camp’s closure, however, as the cost for each inmate in the program has also risen from $78 to $110 per day in the last year. Less inmates were also volunteering for the boot camp.
Prison officials say 322 inmates signed up for the program in 2008, compared to 540 in 1999.
Sanguinetti says the DOC was forced to shift funding for the boot camp to higher-security prisons because of budget restrictions.
Results in other states with a prison boot camp program also reported disappointed results, including Pennsylvania, where a 2000 study showed that inmates in the program were only slightly less likely than other prisoners to commit new crimes. The study also found that those in the program were more likely to fail at complying with their rules of parole after their release.
In Colorado, 33 percent of the prisoners in the program, or 2,570, dropped out of the boot camp through March 2008.
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Information from: The Denver Post,
