NO MORE CAGES

In 1985, 3,586 people sat in our state prisons. What a difference 15
years makes: Today Colorado's prison population numbers over 14,000.

The causes are many: tougher sentences, tougher drug laws,
zero-tolerance policies. And the costs are staggering. It costs
$24,000 per year to keep a person locked up. It costs the state $63.4
million every year just to incarcerate non-violent drug offenders,
according to the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. All told,
prison expenditures constitute one-sixth of the state budget. And
thanks to TABOR limitations, which cap increased expenditures to 6
percent per year, prison spending costs everybody money: since it's
increasing at nearly 16 percent per year, other programs-like
education-will suffer.

Two state legislators are hoping to reverse this trend. State Sen.
Dorothy Rupert, D-Boulder, and Representative Penfield Tate, D-North
Central Denver, have introduced the SB 104, the Prison Moratorium Project.

The bill will ban new prison expansion until July 1, 2003, and will
establish a 17 member task force to explore the trend of increasing
incarceration, with the hope of finding more constructive, and less
costly, alternatives. The task force will consist of representatives
from the legislature, the Governor's office, and the departments of
Corrections, Human Services, Public Safety, as well as district
attorneys and public defenders.

In an interview with Boulder Weekly, Rupert, Tate and Christie Donner,
State Coordinator for the Prison Moratorium Project, discuss
incarceration, alternatives, and their hope for the Project.

What led to your concern with this issue?

Rupert: Back when I was counseling in public schools, I had a number of
students whose boyfriends or themselves got in the system, I began
realizing, this is back in the '70s-this is after Attica-they were saying,
well, we have to humanize the prison system a little bit. This is a
tremendous problem. And yet we weren't seeing it as a societal problem, and
I wasn't either at that point, not nearly to the degree as when I got into
the legislature and realized that a huge percentage of our resources are
going more and more to building prisons, and apparently without any thinking
attached. We know how to build prisons. After all, the South really built on
the whole slave idea, and once slavery was illegal, the prison industry
built up at a tremendous pace, so that they could keep the slaves in check.
Prisons rebuilt the South after the Civil War, and that mentality carries.
So I'm very worried about a huge racist emphasis. Ten times more minorities
are represented in prison in Colorado than in the general population. And
the fact that we just continue to eat away at money which I think should be
going into education and healthcare and prevention and intervention
strategies. We just eat it up in our mind-set of build, build, build.

At the American Corrections Association convention this past summer (a
convention where just about everyone with a financial stake in the
penal system tried to sell their wares) there were these unbelievable
numbers of booths-everything from selling shoes to pouring concrete to
healthcare to ankle bracelets, to drug testing. Until I saw that I
thought I had a sense of how pervasive the prison industry is. It's
webbed in to every level of our society. Even at the most subtle
levels-people will say, 'Well, we supply clothes,' so they see their
little piece, and as it grows they get more and more. The workers
(prison guards and administrators) are so well paid-more than
teachers. I guess this is why I'm doing everything I can to get us to
stop and discuss it. Look at it, talk about it, get information out
there. And what a perfect time to do it, when at the end of 2002, we
should be having some extra prison beds, so we can actually take time
to examine what's going on. Look at how many people are in there who
have already killed their number, are ready to be paroled, or in their
for non-violent crimes, or could be out working on community service,
treatment, and so on. But we're afraid to look at that. There is
evidence to support the attitude that politicians often have, 'See, I
got elected. I talked tough on crime and I got re-elected.'

Do you think people realize the implications of what 'tough on crime'
really means?

Rupert: No. Not a clue. That's what we need to be doing.

Tate: I started turning my attention to this almost immediately upon getting
elected. My first year in the legislature was just three sessions ago, the
1997 session, and one of the first bills I voted on was a $200 million
capital expenditure for a minimum security facility. And I remember looking
around and asking some of my more experienced colleagues, 'Why are we
spending $200 million to build a minimum security facility?' As I looked at
it more, we have conflicting policies at issue. We have quite frankly the
issue of the siting of these facilities and the construction and the
operation of these facilities are economic development tools, and they're
understood to be economic development tools. So there's a conscious effort
and intent in state government to appropriate, legislate and put these
facilities some place where they think it will help the economy. So that's
one piece of it.

So I began to focus on the construction piece, and saw that over a
four or five year horizon, we would be increasing capacity by close to
60 percent.

With our Amendment I and TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) limitations,
we have limits on how much we can retain and spend each year. But
underneath what I call the hard ceiling you have different trendlines
for different programs in government. The trendline shows that
although K-12 education is one of the biggest portions of our
government, it's only growing at less than 3 percent a year. Until
last year, we never funded K-12 education to match inflation. So in
real-dollar terms, we have been going backwards for the last 10 years,
and we know it. Nobody around there is fooled, they understand it,
it's a conscious decision, we just don't tell the voters that.

But also underneath this hard ceiling, the trendline was, the
correction spending was growing by 16 percent. It doesn't take a
mathematical genius to understand the math. If you've got a hard
ceiling and one programmatic line is growing at four times the rate of
another, you're going to put downward pressure on things like K-12
education anyway.

When I looked at that I began to make inquiries of the department of
corrections. I saw that over 70 percent of people in facilities are
not violent offenders. The greatest predictor of your likelihood to
end up in prison is not getting a high school degree or a G.E.D.
Ninety four percent of the people in prison have no G.E.D. equivalent
or high school diploma. And over 70 percent have a substance related
issue.

I began to see things like this. I began to see how little we spend on
things like rehabilitation, because we're conflicted as a society. We
still haven't figured out if we want lock people up to punish them, or
if we want to lock them up to fix them, and then get them out. There's
a startling number that most voters don't understand, and most of the
people who preach tough on crime don't share with them. For the vast
majority of people in the Department of Corrections, the question
isn't if they'll be released, but when, because 90 percent of the
people in the department now are coming out, it's just a matter of
time. The reason I started to focus on some of these things is because
we need to talk about who we're sending there and why. Senator Rupert
is right, you'll see racial disparity and socio-economic disparity in
terms of who goes to prison, and in how long they stay. Minorities are
disproportionately represented, and they don't commit a
disproportionate percentage of the crimes. It's just that they get
remanded, and they end up staying there. You see people with no high
school education go there, and stay there.

The challenge that we're faced with is that since you know 90 percent
of the people are coming out, what are they going to do when they get
out? I sat in on the Joint Budget Committee and they talked about
approximately 50 percent of those being released from lockup are being
released without what we call 'gate money.' Usually the first time
you're released you get $100. So I asked John Suthers, the executive
director of the department, 'What is your prospect for success when
you get released from lockup with no money in your pocket and no job?'
And he just smiled and said, 'Well, obviously your prospects are kind
of dim.'

Part of the impetus behind this bill is to do something my daughter
learned on Barney. When you cross the street, you stop, you look, and
you listen. We need to stop building these facilities at such a
breakneck pace, because we're going to run out of money and we're
going to run out of dirt. If we keep going forward it's going to
happen. Look around us. Talk to folks who can tell us that there are
other ways to approach this solution. The first time I ran, the law
enforcement community in my district told me, 'You can be tough on
crime all you want. But by the time we see a young person, it's
already too late, because their first contact with us isn't the first
time they've strayed, it's the first time they've been caught.' So
they tell me, 'The best thing you can do is make sure we never see
them. Make sure they get a quality education, that they're in school,
that they're learning and that they're enjoying it. And if they
graduate from high school, the likelihood is we'll never see them in
the law enforcement process, ever.'

BW: But at the same time, funding for high school is going
down...

Tate: That's why we're on a trend that is self-perpetuating. The less we
spend on K-12 education over time, the more likely it is you're going to
produce more young folks who have limited options very early in life, and
you will probably add to your prison population. Conversely, if you spend
more money on the front end, on education, and people get a quality
education and are prepared for life, to compete in this economy that's now
global, the high likelihood is, you'll never see them in the Department of
Corrections, or in the law enforcement system, which means over time,
hopefully, fewer and fewer resources will need to be devoted to that
prevention. Because we're not preventing at that point. At that point we're
just figuring out how we can catch more people. Education is the best
prevention.

Rupert: We are on this track now of punishing people, by building more
prisons. We send someone back out, with no money, even $100, no follow up,
no way to help them. It's a conscious effort, I believe, on the industry's
part to just recycle them right back. We have a very high recidivism rate,
even though we can't get the numbers. But we can do it if we want to, we can
find these things out. Three years ago, I wrote a bill to just say, go back
three years funding of both K-12 and for prisons. Do this comparison, three
years back and three year's forward. What really startled me was how much
effort was put into killing that bill as quietly as possible.

Tate: It has always been of interest to me, in the three and a half years
I've served in the legislature, because you can go to these hearings, and
ask these questions. And I'm always amazed when someone says, 'We don't
know.' The reason I'm amazed is, I ask the question not to stump somebody. I
ask the question because I just know someone has the answer to this, because
it just seems so basic. I think a favorable trend is coming. One of the
things I've found is, sometimes we don't have data because we don't want the
answer, so nobody will track that information. They have an intuitive sense
of what the answer is, they know the answer isn't very good. So the answer
is, 'We don't know, because we haven't asked, because we haven't checked.'
But I see a trend developing because of fiscal pressures below this hard
cap. What happens in our process, if you have a bill like one of these, you
get a fiscal analysis. And the bottom line is, if your bill costs money, in
all likelihood it's going to go down in flames, because no one is going to
cut someplace else in the budget to fund your program. And with term limits,
what I'm finding is that a lot of my colleagues, because there's now a class
behind me in the house, are saying, 'This is frustrating. We'll never get
anything done, because there's no money.' So now there's a concerted effort
to take a real close look at the budget and begin to change some things. At
the JBC hearings, even the committee members were somewhat astounded by some
of the Department of Corrections' requests. They were like, 'Wait a minute.
No.' I had members of the committee tell me, 'There's no way we're doing
this. We'll hold the hearing, there's no way they're getting the money to do
this.'

I think this is a good time for this bill, because people and other
legislators are asking the question: what sort of comprehensive policy
changes do we have to make? If for no other reason than to free up
some dollars to do some other initiatives. I co-sponsored another
bill, one of the other bills was that if you were over 62 years of age
at the time of conviction, and it wasn't a crime of violence or a
crime against children or a major felony, you could not be
incarcerated at a maximum security facility. We're trying to lessen
the prison population, especially for people whose medical needs might
not be best handled in some of those facilities. That didn't get out
of the senate. I had another one to amend the habitual offender's
statute, because I found there were huge numbers of people
incarcerated as habitual criminals who had never committed a violent
offense. Ever. One guy was writing me, and I just finally told him
that he will never get out. He's got 24 years to do for three check
forgery charges. We have some huge inequities in the system. I told
them, figure out how much money we'll be saving. And they said, 'We
won't do that, because we have these prison beds, and someone will be
there, so you aren't saving any money by getting people out sooner.'
But when we did the informal analysis, it was something like $20
million saved.

There are a host of things we can do. I didn't get my bill out of
committee last year, but people on both sides of the aisle have asked
me about the bill this year, because they have an interest in
tinkering with it, and seeing if we can start incrementally making
some change.

What about private prison facilities?

Rupert: Private facilities are going to be a problem philosophically with a
lot of people in the public. These private facilities state after state
after state have had problem upon problem upon problem. If people say that
law enforcement is a core government function, no matter how tough times get
they want their tax dollars to fund, I think corrections is going to be
perceived as part of that. I'm personally, philosophically opposed to
privatizing the system, but I think as a practical matter, voters are going
to see some real problems.

Donner: I was interested in hearing from the department, when they talked
about private prisons, and how are they able to make money. The average
starting salary for a guard in the state system is $29,000. In the private
sector it's about $22,000. The square footage per prisoner is about 30
square feet less. There's no program space. They're not offering programs.
That's how they save money.

Tate: By statute they don't have to. State-owned and run facilities have
certain programming aspects they have to provide that privates do not, which
is part of how they operate. Remember, if 90 percent of the people are
coming out, what is going to be their end product, for lack of a better
term?

Part of how these facilities operate more cheaply is, they don't take
the more costly inmates, they don't take any maximum security
prisoners. They started with just minimum security prisoners. Some of
the other things that drive up your costs, that's not a prison
population they deal with.

Rupert: It's cherry-picking.

What will the task force do to address some of these
problems?

Tate: Obviously the commission is going to drive itself in how it operates.
Look at how mandatory minimums are affecting things. We need a broader
demographic breakdown of who is going to prison. Part of my belief is that
if you look at who is going there, ethnicity is going to be an issue, race
and color is going to be an issue, socio-economic background is going to be
an issue. But how many people are going there who have some mental illness
that's related to their criminal behavior? How many people are going in
there with other substance-related problems, that if you could cure the drug
and/or alcohol addiction, you wouldn't have someone who is an offender at
all-those sorts of things. Obviously the impact of the growth of women in
prison (the fastest-growing segment of the prison population), the impact
that's having on families and children, and what's happening to the children
of these women who are being incarcerated. These are the sorts of things we
need to look at. At this point we're not making any effort to anticipate, to
understand.

Is there starting to be a change in attitude toward current drug
policy?

Tate: I think so. And I will say that I think this trend has been coming for
a while. I think a number of factors are driving people to reconsider. When
you look at the federal court system, a number of federal trial judges have
spoken out and decried the federal sentencing guidelines, particularly as
they pertain to drug-related offenses, because they're being inundated with
cases that are basically possession or possession with intent to distribute.

And one of my Republican colleagues raised this issue with me last
year: more people are beginning to wonder if decriminalizing is the
way to go. We don't need to lock everybody up who is possessing a
certain amount of a simple substance. I think more and more people are
beginning to say, we have lost the war on drugs. Now we need to figure
out what our strategy is to address this issue, not to declare war on
it.