OVERDUE FOR PRISON, SENTENCING REFORM

Here's your chance, Colorado, to make a real and long-lasting impact
on reducing state spending and government waste.

Gov. Bill Ritter yesterday released his latest proposed budget cuts,
a map to carving almost $1 billion out of state services. The move
is needed as the economy unwinds and tax receipts diminish.

Many of the proposed cuts will be immediately painful, especially
those affecting higher education and social services. Those
reductions come at time when need will be at its greatest.

But cutting millions from the budget by closing two state prisons
offers a unique opportunity.

It isn't as if closing a prison in Rifle and another in Canon City
will mean hundreds of dangerous criminals are going to be let loose.
Instead, they'll simply be packed tighter in other prisons, making
those facilities more dangerous, and making the likelihood that
inmates are rehabilitated even less likely.

Instead, this is an opportunity for Colorado to become more
realistic and practical with how it handles criminal sentencing,
especially when it comes to drug-related crimes.

Colorado's prison system accounts for almost 10 percent of the
state's annual budget, a number that has been steadily growing for
years. Last year, your tax dollars were paying to keep about 24,000
men and women behind bars at the cost of nearly $30,000 a year each.
Compare that with the $6,000 or so the state spends on
each Colorado child to provide them with a public education.

Almost half of these men and women are imprisoned because of drug
habits, alcoholism, conspiracy or other non-violent offenses. More
to the point in Colorado right now, those non-violent offenders who
are being housed in prisons mainly because of mental illness
or drug problems are running up huge taxpayer tabs.

Rather than shuffle these people around at great taxpayer expense,
it would be far cheaper in the short run and the long run to treat
them for the addictions and mental illnesses that brought them into
our expensive criminal justice system.

We're not suggesting that people don't need to be policed and
punished for violating laws, but study after study shows that by
first preventing people from becoming mentally ill, drug addicts or
alcoholics, taxpayers save big by having those potential cell mates
return to society as productive, tax-paying citizens.

The time is right for lawmakers to study how existing inmates can be
returned to society to be productive and law-abiding citizens, and
how future drug addicts and mental patients can be rehabilitated
instead of made into hardened criminals at great taxpayer expense.