Colorado Legislature’s New Jail Oversight Committee Not Weighted in Detainees’ Favor
On June 3, 2024, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed HB 1054 into law, extending the life of a Legislative Oversight Committee to enforce jail standards in the state, while also letting a companion Legislative Oversight Commission on jail standards die at the end of June 2024.
The devil was in the details though; the Committee’s seven members will include just one member representing the interests of incarcerated citizens, another representing medical and mental health providers who serve them and a third who is a public defender. The remaining four committee seats were split between sheriffs and the county commissioners who fund their budgets, including payouts for detainee injuries and deaths.
That largely preserves a status quo established when the current Committee and Commission were established with passage of H.B. 1063 in 2022 after Sheriffs in the state successfully beat back lawmakers’ initial version of the bill that would have established a regulatory agency to provide jail oversight. The compromise bill that resulted created the twin bodies and their limited mission to study the idea for two years.
Now, the 22-member Commission is gone. But the new bill also established an advisory committee to assess compliance with state jail standards and make recommendations for revisions to them, as well as any actions necessary to comply with them. Lawmakers also provided $369,000 for associated costs the first year. Finding sources of funding beyond that was footballed to the state Department of Public Safety’s Criminal Justice Division. The new committee was scheduled to begin meeting in July 2024 and make its first assessments one year later. See: Colo. H.B.1054 (2024).
Opponents of the initial version of H.B. 1063 resented its attempt to rein in Sheriffs in operation of their jails—putting some Sheriffs in a “reactionary position,” Weld County Sheriff Steve Reams (R) said. He and others like him hashed out the compromise that paved the way for the new law. Yet that turned out to be so toothless that another oversight opponent, state Rep. Rod Brockenfeld (R-Watkins), said that he “could not believe, with the high cost of putting this committee together, that this isn’t a duplication of government.”
Additional sources: Colorado Politics, Colorado Sun
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