The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Criminal-justice activists from around the state and nation, along with some local officials, met in Colorado Springs on Tuesday night to discuss the crowding problems facing the jails and prisons, and ways to avoid what even the conservatives on the panel predicted is a looming disaster.

“The train wreck is here, and El Paso County is right in the middle of it,” said El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa, one of the participants, who runs a jail so crowded it no longer accepts nonviolent misdemeanor offenders.

It’s a problem that has united fiscal conservatives, shocked by the growing percentage of the state’s budget going to prisons, and liberals, shocked by the high percentage of Colorado residents imprisoned.

And everyone in the panel discussion agreed it’s not a problem Colorado can get out of by building more prisons.

“Simply put, I think the whole system needs an enema,” said Promise Lee, pastor of Relevant Word Ministries.

The state prison system has dealt with the problem by increasing its reliance on private prisons. When three companies build authorized medium-security prisons for 3,776 inmates by the middle of 2008, one in three Colorado inmates will be housed in for-profit facilities. Another 1,000 will be moved to private prisons out of state.

Locally, the answers aren’t much better. Although El Paso County’s jail completed an 864-bed expansion in recent years, the new wing was open less than four months when county officials were drawing up plans for another jail expansion.

As of Tuesday, 1,434 inmates were in the 1,599-bed jail.

“I don’t have a lot of control over that,” Maketa said.

The panelists recommended a variety of measures, from cutting down on prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, to more reliance on mediation known as “restorative justice,” to a ban on private-prison construction to force the state to deal with the causes of a high incarceration rate. About 22,000 inmates are incarcerated in state prisons.

Jack Ruszczyk, chief probation officer in the 4th Judicial District, said the focus of activists needs to be on lawmakers, who are eager to prove how tough they can be on crime. In recent years, though, they have been less willing to fund new prisons.

“It has to do with political pandering to our fears. People getting elected have to be tough on crime and our jails and prisons fill up,” he said.

Maketa said it is not just lawmakers, though, but the public, which has an out-ofsight, out-of-mind approach to criminal justice. He noted that, though a couple of hundred people attended Tuesday’s forum, plenty of empty seats were in the Victory Outreach Center.

“There exists among a large portion of society an attitude that they don’t want to deal with the problem. They want to lock the door and throw away the key,” he said.

“I don’t think they’re really aware of it,” said Colorado Springs resident Berta Stanfield, who attended the forum out of curiosity about the issue. “I don’t think people really know how much of our tax dollars are going into it.”

The symposium, the first of its kind here, was organized by local nonprofits who work in alternatives to incarceration.
http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1322000&secid=1