A dramatic decrease in the number of people in prison being granted parole and a slew of recent laws that lengthen sentences is causing Colorado’s adult prison population to balloon, experts and advocates say, even as crime in the state has fallen.
It’s gotten so bad that Gov. Jared Polis is failing to make good, possibly even backtracking, on a key campaign promise to end Colorado’s contracts with private prison companies and reinvest those dollars in alternatives to incarceration.
Polis is now proposing expanding the state’s correctional system by reopening at least one, but maybe two, prisons. Without another prison, Polis’ office said, the Department of Corrections will have to house more than 100 people on sled beds — plastic floor cots — in a gym.
And so at a time when Colorado lawmakers are cutting social services, like health care for people with low incomes, to manage a $1.5 billion budget gap, they’re also considering how to find money for another prison, an outcome no one seems happy about.
“Nobody wants to fund prison beds,” Rep. Kyle Brown, D-Louisville, a member of the Joint Budget Committee, said at a caucus meeting last week.
So how did we get here?
Advocates, incarcerated people and some Democratic legislators say they have been raising alarm bells about overcrowding and understaffing in Colorado’s prisons in recent years. They point to missed or ignored warnings about this crisis, as well as new laws that have increased punishments for certain crimes or created new ones. Some blame Polis, who oversees the DOC, for failing to intervene before it was too late.
It’s not that the state is sentencing more people to prison. New admissions are expected to decrease by 3% this fiscal year and crime rates have fallen.
But the state isn’t letting as many people out as it could. By the end of June, the DOC’s most recent projection shows a 12% decrease in the number of incarcerated people granted parole this fiscal year compared with last.
A recent DOC audit shows about 4,600 people — more than one-fourth of adults incarcerated in state and private prisons — are past their parole eligibility dates.
The result is one of the largest expected annual increases in the state’s prison population in the last 14 years.
In an interview, Polis said under his watch prison staffing levels have improved — going from a vacancy rate of about 23% in 2023 to around 15% last fiscal year, according to his staff. DOC Director Andre Stancil said the agency has helped reduce the shortage by offering housing to new recruits and hiring people from Puerto Rico to work in state prisons.
Gov. Jared Polis speaks to reporters before signing housing bills into law at the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Wednesday, March 25, 2026. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)A private prison company, GEO Group, closed its Cheyenne Mountain Reentry Center in Colorado Springs in 2020, a surprise in response to Polis’ skepticism about private prisons that sent the state scrambling to find space to relocate the people held there. The state shut down the Colorado Correctional Center, known as Camp George West, in Golden in 2022 as part of a land swap with the National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Polis said it is the state’s job to house however many people end up in the prison system.
“We have a responsibility to keep Colorado safe, and to do that when somebody is sentenced to a term in prison, we have to make sure that there’s a place for them, it’s properly staffed, and if they have the opportunity to, appropriately under law, gain earned time by engaging in activities like education and getting skills,” he said.
Parole eligibility dates are when people are first considered for release, Polis said, and parole decisions are up to members of the parole board, all of whom are appointed by the governor.
Warning signs
From its peak in 2008, Colorado’s prison population steadily declined as lawmakers made reforms to sentencing, bolstered by evidence that harsher punishments don’t deter crime.
But since then, Colorado’s incarcerated population has steadily ticked back up, increasing 19% from its low in 2021, according to DOC data.
Advocates with the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition raised alarms in 2023, warning in a report that the understaffing at state prisons had become so dire that the DOC was routinely reassigning teachers and case managers to security positions and causing a “debilitating impact on the DOC’s ability to provide essential programming to inmates.” Programming is often required as a condition for parole.
Prisons were chronically understaffed despite the DOC’s efforts to boost hiring by lowering minimum age requirements and reducing drug testing and training standards, the report said.
A report the following year from CCJRC and the union that represents state prison workers, Colorado WINS, again warned about staff being diverted from programming roles to security roles. The department’s hiring efforts were a wash, the report said, because the prison population was still climbing.
In a July 2024 letter to the governor, CCJRC and Colorado WINS called on Polis to use his executive power to create a comprehensive plan and working group to address what they called a staffing crisis. They asked the governor to expand the measures the DOC can use to reduce the prison population when the system gets overcrowded and create a DOC oversight commission to examine the programming situation, among other things.
Those interventions didn’t happen.
Instead, DOC staff became more strained, advocates and the union say, as lawmakers and voters passed policies to enhance punishments and create new crimes.
In 2024, voters approved Proposition 128, which extends prison time for people convicted of some violent crimes. Polis remained neutral on the initiative, which was brought and financed by conservative activists.
Bills passed by the legislature and signed into law by the governor in recent years have lengthened sentencing guidelines for human trafficking crimes and increased penalties for car thefts, among other things.
Located in Canon City, the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, shown here in a Dec. 9, 2020, photo, is the state’s oldest prison. Built in 1871, it preceded the state’s admission to the Union by five years. (Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun)At the same time, lawmakers have also passed bills signed into the law by the governor aimed at reducing the prison population by diverting people to mental health service providers and speeding up release for people with nonviolent felony convictions who complete college degrees or other credential programs.
But those efforts failed to make a meaningful impact, even as crime rates dropped, including auto thefts, which Polis pointed to as evidence that his public safety strategy was working. Yet the prison population continued to rise.
Each year, the DOC requested more money from the legislature to fund more prison beds.
“The state has been running full speed toward a cliff ignoring there is a cliff, and now we’re at the cliff,” said CCJRC Executive Director Christie Donner.
In August of last year, Colorado prisons became so overcrowded that the DOC for the first time triggered a 2018 state law that mandates the agency speed up inmate releases. For the first five months after the law was triggered, the parole board released just 29 people from a list of 237 deemed medium or low risk by the DOC.
Then, in December, a dire warning came from nonpartisan legislative staff.
Discretionary parole releases were expected to drop so dramatically this fiscal year compared with last, a JBC staff report said, that the state was about to experience an unmanageable surge in the incarcerated population.
“An easy Band-Aid”
In January, state Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat who sits on the JBC, the bipartisan group of legislators charged with setting the state budget, sent a letter to Polis urging him to work with Colorado WINS to determine how to safely staff prisons. It also called for working with the DOC to address the parole bottleneck with performance benchmarks for the agency before considering any future prison growth.
In February, CCJRC and Colorado WINS sent another letter to Polis again asking him to “move swiftly” to create a working group to make recommendations on hiring, retention, programming and release processes.
Then, in March, the governor’s office shocked the JBC, saying that lawmakers would need to approve funding to immediately reopen one, possibly two, prisons to handle the projected increase in the prison population.
The JBC is effectively proposing giving Polis permission to engage in negotiations with a private prison company to reopen and manage one of their shuttered facilities, at an estimated startup cost of $6 million and then an annual cost of $40 million. Lawmakers signaled they will approve an emergency funding request if and when adding a prison becomes necessary, even if it comes when the legislature isn’t in session.
Polis wanted lawmakers to approve money to buy a shuttered private prison and have the state operate it.
The full legislature is now considering the private prison proposal, and many lawmakers appear skeptical.
DENVER, COLORADO — Jan. 26, 2026: Assistant House Minority Leader Jennifer Bacon, D-Denver, speaks at a news conference at the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Monday, Jan. 26, 2026. (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)“I don’t want to vote for it,” said Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, D-Denver, who has sponsored sentencing reform bills.
Bacon said she would like to see a more comprehensive plan from the governor.
“If a budget is a moral document, is this what your statement is?” said Bacon. “I’m concerned that the default is to keep people incarcerated on this theme of safety, instead of to move people through. … If we had executive leadership who wanted to do these things, he’d figure out how to do it.”
State prison employees do not want to see another prison open either, said Hilary Glasgow, executive director of Colorado WINS. Case managers and teachers are still being reassigned to security jobs at existing prisons, she said, and increasingly worried about safety.
“We are at a point where we’re injecting cash into opening more prisons, instead of making the prisons that we have run really well,” she said.
Advocates worry a new prison will face the same problems that existing facilities have, mainly not enough staff and not enough people getting out on parole.
“If you add another prison, you haven’t really addressed the wound, you haven’t addressed what’s causing the symptoms,” said David Carrillo, a paralegal at the Korey Wise Innocence Project at the University of Colorado Law School and lead facilitator for the Legislation Inside Program, in which incarcerated people advice on policy.
“It feels like an easy Band-Aid, a quick solution to a very complex problem,” Carrillo said.
Waiting for treatment
During one of his most recent stints in state prison, Alex Corr, 45, experienced firsthand what he describes as the dysfunction keeping prisons full.
In 2022, Corr was sentenced to five years in prison for eluding an officer in traffic, one of the latest in a long list of crimes that has kept him coming back to prison in Colorado since 2002.
It wasn’t until eight days after his parole eligibility date in March 2024 that the DOC put him in the treatment program he needed to complete in order to get paroled.
Alex Corr, 45, poses for a portrait on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, at a park in Commerce City, Colorado. He’s holding a puppy named Boomer. It wasn’t until eight days after his parole eligibility date that he was placed in the treatment program that he needed to complete in order to get out of prison. “Why did they wait until my parole eligibility to get me in that class?” he said. “Colorado doesn’t know how to manage people, money or resources. Opening another prison is not the thing to do.” (Jesse Paul, The Colorado Sun)The parole board set his next hearing for nine months later because the program was supposed to take nine months to finish. Instead, it took a year.
Some people in the program with him did not have enough time to finish it before their mandatory release dates, he said.
“Why did they wait until my parole eligibility to get me in that class?” he said. “Colorado doesn’t know how to manage people, money or resources. Opening another prison is not the thing to do.”
Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia, a spokesperson for the DOC, said Corr’s placement in the treatment program after his eligibility date “is consistent with our goal of prompt placement,” and a one-year completion is “the standard timeframe … ensuring the individual receives the full depth of treatment required for a successful and safe transition.”
There are currently about 4,500 incarcerated people on the waitlist for Corr’s treatment program, Gonzalez-Garcia said.
Staff who run the program are not reassigned to security roles, Gonzalez-Garcia said. Other program staff, like teachers and case managers, are posted to security roles for one to two days of their work week, she said.
Polis said he is “not aware of any deterioration of opportunities for people behind bars to get better education.”
“We’ve actually worked hard to increase those over the last few years,” he said.
In recent years, some lawmakers have tried to free up prison beds for people who would actually be in prison long enough to complete required programming, only to receive pushback from Polis.
Last year, Rep. Chad Clifford, D-Centennial, and Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, brought a bill that would have required the DOC to notify judges about how long people are going to spend in prison after getting credit for time spent in jail before sentencing. The state would also have to provide alternatives if their remaining sentence is too short to complete any programming.
The interior of Centennial Correctional Facility South in Cañon City, photographed in July 2019. (John Herrick, Special to The Colorado Trust)Clifford said the bill was a direct response to his conversations with the warden at the DOC intake center in Denver, who told him that many people sentenced for low-level crimes aren’t imprisoned long enough to complete any treatment.
The bill passed in three House committees. Then, Clifford said, the governor’s staff made it clear to him that Polis would veto it. The bill never got a full vote in the House.
“It was abhorrent to me because they wouldn’t even discuss it,” he said of the DOC and the governor’s office. “I don’t know how to govern this area where the executive is literally a blockade. We are not dealing with things that we know are problems.”
Polis spokesperson Eric Maruyama said the governor was concerned the bill would hurt public safety.
“We need to pass laws”
Democrats are pushing new legislation to reduce the prison population, but the clock’s ticking. There are just weeks left in this year’s lawmaking term.
A bill making its way through the Capitol would expedite parole review for people who are already past their parole eligibility date and expedite the release of inmates who are within 180 days of their mandatory release date when prisons become overcrowded.
Senate Bill 36, sponsored by Bacon, Gonzales, Democratic Sen. Mike Weissman of Aurora and Rep. Yara Zokaie of Fort Collins, would also require the state to release inmates within seven days of being granted parole. Carrillo’s group of current inmates who are part of the Legislation Inside Program support the bill, he said.
Another bill, Senate Bill 159, sponsored by Gonzales, Weissman, and Democratic Reps. Javier Mabrey of Denver and Matthew Martinez of Rio Grande County, would speed up release for people in prison who meet certain criteria and create a working group tasked with drafting a prison capacity management plan for the DOC by December.
In a briefing document last month, the governor’s office said it was engaged in conversations with legislators on these efforts.
Polis told The Sun he’ll consider legislation.
“Our North Star has to be: Does this improve public safety or not?” he said.
Without changes to laws, the legislature could be back in the same situation next year, facing more prison population growth and more requests for money and beds, members of the JBC have warned.
“If the General Assembly is serious about changing that dynamic, then we need to pass laws that will change when people get out, that will make sure that they get the treatment that they need, that will turn our correction system not into just our security system with a rehabilitation problem, but a real system that is performing and rehabilitating and getting folks out into the community safely,” Brown said.
In November, voters will weigh at least two ballot measures that would increase the prison population again. One would enhance penalties for fentanyl-related felonies and another would require life in prison without parole for people convicted of human trafficking a child.
Neither comes with more money for the DOC.
Hence then, the article about jared polis says colorado needs a new prison asap even as crime has fallen how did we get here was published today ( ) and is available on Colorado Sun ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Jared Polis says Colorado needs a new prison ASAP, even as crime has fallen. How did we get here? )
Also on site :