OPINION: Prison politics
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.
We've all heard the conservative buzz phrases "tough on crime," which wins elections, and "soft on crime," which loses elections. In addition to winning elections, the "tough on crime" label justifies more prisons and long sentences even for non-violent offenders.
As a result of tough-on-crime politics, and the belief prisons provide economic development, the criminal justice system has become a malignancy that voraciously consumes state resources. Just 15 years ago, Colorado spent 4 percent of the state's budget on prisons that housed 9,622 convicts. Since then, the state's general population has grown by a third. But the prisoner population has more than doubled, to 23,152.
Instead of spending 4 percent of the budget on prisons, we spend 10 percent.
David Michaud, chairman of the Colorado Parole Board, was a cop back in 1963. Back then Colorado had two prisons. Today we have 29. Michaud told Gazette reporter Dean Toda the tough-on-crime mantra he hears from the public: "You're on the Parole Board? Good for you! Keep all those sons of bitches locked up!"
As part of the review process initiated by Morse, politicians, law enforcement officials and victims' rights advocates met Thursday and Friday in Golden with a 26-member Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice. The commission has been instructed by the Legislature to devise a plan to rein in the prison menace.
An overarching concern involved the soft-on-crime label that will be slapped on anyone who advocates sentence reductions. Don Quick, the state district attorney in Brighton, said long prison sentences "keep that violent offender from re-offending during the time that he's in prison."
Nobody's advocating early release or lighter sentences for violent offenders. They are the reason we need prisons in the first place. Some people should be caged until they die, or until they're too old to pose substantial harm.
The prison conundrum rests in the fact nonviolent drug offenders comprise one fifth of the prison population. Nonviolent technical parole violators - meaning paroled felons who missed court appearances, or parole meetings and such - make up an additional 10 percent of the prison population.
We must stop incurring the costs of incarcerating nonviolent offenders of any kind. In most cases, if the crime didn't involve assault, murder, rape or an armed threat of violence, prison is overkill. We can no longer afford to indulge a mindless approach to "tough on crime" politics.
Members of the commission, please get past concerns about soft-on-crime labels. Do what's right, without reverence for the political idiocy that caused this mess.
