This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at coloradosun.com.
Gov. Jared Polis’ office told state lawmakers Wednesday that Colorado must immediately move to open a new prison to handle projected growth in inmate numbers, a revelation that comes as the legislature is cutting social services to address a $1 billion state budget shortfall and despite the General Assembly’s pushback on much smaller funding requests for more beds at existing prisons.
Mark Ferrandino, Polis’ budget chief, warned that one prison — which could cost about $200 million to open — may not be enough to handle the estimated increases in the state’s inmate population.
“We may even need two prisons,” Ferrandino told the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee.
The news was met with incredulity from the JBC, which has been reeling in recent weeks as it cuts Medicaid and other state services to address a gap between how much money it has to spend and the cost of continuing current state programs. The governor’s office had warned JBC that Colorado was likely to need a new prison in the coming years, but it said the decision could wait until after Polis leaves office in early 2027.
State Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who sits on the JBC, said it would be an “obscene misuse of public funds” to open a new prison.
“This is a really challenging thing for us to grapple with — to contemplate the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars additionally when we are in such a budget crisis,” state Rep. Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat and chair of the JBC, told Ferrandino.
Lawmakers have taken steps in recent years to reduce Colorado’s prison population, including by reclassifying crimes and changing sentencing structures. But state analysts still expect the population to increase.
There’s no official reason why. Lawmakers have been told that a jump in crime after the pandemic is a cause as people are just now being sentenced for those offenses given how long the court process can take.
Activist groups blame the Polis administration. Kyle Giddings, deputy director of the advocacy group Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, says stricter parole policies are keeping more people in prison for longer. In the past few years, the state’s parole board has granted discretionary parole to fewer people and returned more people to prison for technical parole violations, he added.
“There is no piece of legislation that did this,” Giddings said. “These are just independent choices of the parole board. And it’s peaking now.”
Colorado’s new prison options
The governor’s office presented two options to the JBC: purchase and renovate a shuttered private prison in southern Colorado or contract with a private prison provider to reopen a facility somewhere in the state.
The first option centers on the Huerfano County Correctional Center in Walsenburg, a roughly 700-bed medium security prison that is owned by the private company CoreCivic. The Governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting believes it would cost between $150 million and $200 million to purchase and renovate the facility, which closed in 2010, and that it could be operational within a year.
The Huerfano County Correctional Center has been in the news lately because CoreCivic offered up the facility to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to house immigrants arrested under the Trump administration’s expanded enforcement operations. There has been public outcry, including protests, against that plan.
The facility was built by CoreCivic, then called Corrections Corporation of America, and opened in 1997 to house Colorado prisoners.
As Colorado’s inmate population declined, CoreCivic moved inmates from other states into the facility. The prison closed in 2010, when Arizona canceled its contract to house inmates there.
Ferrandino said the legislature’s other option is contracting with a private prison provider to reopen a closed facility somewhere in Colorado, such as the Kit Carson Correctional Center in Burlington. It’s unclear exactly how much that would cost, he said, though the state should expect to pay far more than its current contract rate of $67 per inmate per day to account for the costs of reopening a mothballed prison.
“We would also need to contract for at least five years, for a certain number of beds,” Ferrandino said. “Most of our contracts on existing facilities are 10 years.”
Ferrandino said if lawmakers were to embrace the Walsenburg plan, the state could use some accounting maneuvers to prevent a hit to the state budget.
The governor’s office said if the legislature doesn’t approve spending on a new prison, Colorado would face dire consequences in the next year. The Department of Corrections, which last year activated its prison management plan for the first time because of near overcrowding, is already contracting with county jails to hold about 700 inmates because there isn’t room in state prisons.
Without a new prison, that so-called jail backlog will grow. Ferrandino warned that eventually, counties will stop taking on inmates.
“The math is clear: Given current projections, approximately 400 more inmates will be sentenced to state prison than are released to parole in each of the next several years,” the governor’s office said in a briefing document. “While these projections may change, responsible state budgeting requires us to plan with the data we have.”
State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Louisville Democrat on the JBC, pointed out that the Colorado Department of Corrections is already understaffed. He questioned whether the state could find enough officers to work at the Huerfano County Correctional Center.
Ferrandino said the state would tap into the workforces in Pueblo and Cañon City and feels it could find enough officers to operate the Walsenburg prison. If the state decides to contract with a new private prison, it would be up to the company that operates the facility to find staff.
JBC chafes at plan
Amabile said instead of purchasing the Huerfano County Correctional Center, the state should buy a nursing home or hospital to take on inmates awaiting care in prisons and jails.
She and others on the JBC also chided the governor’s office for not taking steps to reduce the state’s existing prison population, pointing out that there are inmates awaiting parole hearings and space in halfway houses that could help address the problem.
A bill making its way through the Capitol would expedite parole review for prisoners who are already past their parole eligibility date and expedite the release of inmates who are within 120 days of their mandatory release date.
Senate Bill 36, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Mike Weissman of Aurora and Julie Gonzales of Denver and Democratic Reps. Jennifer Bacon of Denver and Yara Zokaie of Fort Collins, would also require the state to release inmates within seven days of being granted parole.
Weissman said he expects to introduce another bill this month aimed at prison overcrowding that would allow people in prison who complete education and treatment programs to be eligible for parole sooner.
“Turning the state budget inside out to open new prisons can’t be the only way,” Weissman said. “This is not even morally in alignment with most of the caucus.”
But the proposed remedies might be too late for this crisis.
“What is unfortunate is that if we had done these things in previous years, we might be having a slightly different conversation about the numbers now,” Sirota told Ferrandino on Wednesday.
Even the suggestion of reopening a private prison marks a major departure from one of Polis’ promises from 2018 when he was campaigning for his first term as governor.
“I will end our investment in private prisons and reinvest those dollars into rehabilitation, diversion, alternative and restorative justice programs,” he said at the time.
One privately run prison has closed during his time as governor, the Cheyenne Mountain Reentry Center in Colorado Springs, which was operated by the GEO group. The Bent County Correctional Facility and Crowley County Correctional Facility, both operated by CoreCivic, remain open — and are at capacity.
The 2020 closure of the Cheyenne Mountain Reentry Center was actually a surprise, done proactively by the GEO Group in response to Polis’ skepticism about private prisons, that sent the state scrambling to find space to relocate the inmates held there.
In 2019, state lawmakers passed a bill spending $250,000 on a study to determine how Colorado could end its reliance on private prisons. The study, released in 2021, found that Colorado should maintain its prison capacity.
“Reducing the use of private prison … facilities could run counter to actual capacity needs of the prison system,” the report said.
The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday.
