Colorado Lawmakers Take a Pass on Cash Assistance for Released Prisoners
by Douglas Ankney
Colorado lawmakers wasted little time in this year’s session before killing Senate Bill 12 (SB 12) on February 7, 2024. Though the state has one of the country’s highest recidivism rates—about 50%—the one-year pilot program that would provide up to $3,000 in conditional cash assistance upon release from state prisons died in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
As PLN reported, a pilot program called Just Income GNV was launched with private donations in Florida’s Alachua County in 2022, paying up to $7,600 to county residents during their first year of release from a Florida lockup. A similar privately funded program begun in California in 2020 by nonprofits For the People and the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) offered $2,750 in cash to 50 prisoners released under a law that encouraging prosecutors to “recommend release for people who received excessive sentences or rehabilitated themselves in prison.” [See: PLN, Aug. 2022, p.50.]
With a $22.5 million price tag, SB 12 would have made Colorado the first state to publicly fund such an effort. CEO was on deck to manage the proposed program. But the swing vote of Democratic Sen. Dylan Roberts, 34, who is also Deputy District Attorney for rural Eagle County, blocked the effort on the five-member state Senate Judiciary Committee.
Proponents argued SB 12 was a modest investment compared to the $50,000 annual cost to incarcerate a state prisoner. At that rate, the state Department of Corrections (DOC) sucks up almost $1 billion annually from state taxpayers while releasing half its prisoners through a revolving door. Critics of SB 12 included DOC chief lobbyist Adrienne Sanchez, who carped that the bill “was written with a single vendor in mind”—CEO. Though she fretted that “this risked an anticompetitive process,” she failed to identify any other groups.
State prisoners currently earn less than a dollar per day for work while incarcerated and upon release are given a paltry $100 in “gate money.” Tristan Gorman, a lobbyist for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said that “the state seems to have plenty of money to react to crime with punishment, no matter how much it costs taxpayers or how ineffective it is at preventing crime.”
Through its Returning Citizens Stimulus, CEO has channeled $24 million in private-donor funds to over 10,000 released prisoners. A September 2021 study of the results showed that within five months of the distributions, 42% of recipients were gainfully employed—5% better than Prison Policy Initiative found in a 2010 study of all prisoners.
Source: Bolts Magazine
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