OFFICIALS OPPOSE RELEASE OF DRUG OFFENDERS

The Independence Institute is naive if it thinks Colorado can release 2,000
drug offenders from jail and still keep the streets safe, a group of
law-enforcement officials said Thursday.

The Independence Institute, a conservative think tank in Golden, opposes
Referendums C and D on the Nov. 1 ballot, and has suggested Colorado's
budget shortfall could be reduced by finding alternatives to jail for drug
offenders.

But a half dozen law officers, including the heads of both the Colorado
sheriffs' and police associations, called a press conference Thursday to
say that most people in Colorado prisons for drug crimes are multiple
offenders who were deeply involved in drug trafficking or violence.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, said his group never
advocated releasing violent criminals from prison.

"We want all criminals punished appropriately," Caldara said. "But that
doesn't mean we have to put non-violent criminals into $30,000-a-year
hotels with cable TVs," he said, referring to state prisons.

"We could use house arrest or ankle bracelets or community service. They
could be out working for the public."

At the Capitol press conference, Adams County Sheriff Doug Darr said people
should not be fooled by drug offenders.

"These people aren't going to prison for smoking a joint or possessing an
ounce," he said. Instead, they're in prison because they've created
methamphetamine labs that endanger children, or been involved in gunfights
with rival gangs or police, or have blown several chances to stay out of
prison, he said.

Darr, who is on metro Denver's task force on violent gangs, said its best
tool to get them off the streets is to charge them with drug crimes.

Darr and the others at the Capitol press conference shared the rap sheets
of four drug offenders in prison. One, Anthony Lewis Andrusyk, had been
arrested 10 times and charged with 25 crimes including trespassing,
larceny, assault, felony possession of a weapon, obstructing a police
officer and manufacturing dangerous drugs.

"They may be serving time only on the drug charges, but they've been
arrested for very serious offenses," said George Epp, the former Boulder
County Sheriff who now is executive director of County Sheriffs of Colorado.

"These people on average have three felony convictions," he said. Each of
the 3,932 people in Colorado prisons for drug convictions had had at least
one other arrest or contact with law officers, he said.

Epp said state budget cuts have exacerbated the problems in prisons, and
finds it ironic that the solution posed by some is to keep cutting the budget.

Epp noted that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, but that doesn't
mean he wasn't one of the Prohibition era's most violent gangsters.

Caldara retorted that if convicts are violent drug offenders, "they damn
well should be labeled violent drug offenders."

The proponents of C and D are trying to "scare taxpayers into a tax
increase," he said.

Epp noted that 14 years ago, just 2 percent of Colorado's inmates were
diagnosed with mental illness.

Fourteen years later, 16 percent of the prison population has a mental
illness - using the same scale as in 1991, he said.

The reason is because state cuts in mental health services and in
substance-abuse treatment programs have left mentally ill people with no
place to go, he said.

So, "When cops are called because a guy is acting crazy, the only option is
to bring him to jail, where he's caught up in the whirlpool of the justice
system."

Adams County District Attorney Don Quick said of drug offenders: "You can't
just release them. It's a simple sound bite, rather than a sound solution."

Because of cuts brought on by the spending limits of the Taxpayers Bill of
Rights, the state's parole system has been decimated, and drug treatment
programs have been slashed, Quick said.

While 20 percent of the DOC's inmates are there because of drug
convictions, 80 percent actually have some kind of substance abuse problem,
he said. Because of the cuts, the only option for most as they leave prison
is to pay for their own treatment. "You can imagine how well that works,"
Quick said.

Meanwhile, said Epp, the state has cut the budget for housing criminals in
county jails. It now pays just $41 a day, down from $49 a day, for sheriffs
to keep offenders in county jails.

"In metro Denver, $41 a day covers just two-thirds of the actual cost," Epp
said.

Epp said he's voting for Referendum C. "I don't want to be saying 'I told
you so' a few years from now when people will be saying we should have
spent the money back then, before the drug gangs took over our communities."

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he agrees with the DAs and sheriffs on
needing to keep drug offenders in prisons, but that he is opposed to C and D.

"They're just a massive tax increase," he said. "I see nothing in them that
is going to help law enforcement, other than the police and fire pension
funds. I'd rather have the money in my own pocket - it would be better for
the economy."