Prior to the legislative session, the Colorado Departments of Justice, Public Safety, and Corrections (CDOC) must publish an annual report outlining the impact of the state's Lifetime Supervision Act on Colorado’s budget and criminal justice bureaucracies.
The Lifetime Act was passed by the legislature in 1998 with the purpose of ensuring sex offenders, of all types, receive mental health treatment prior to release from prison. In short, get treatment - get released, refuse treatment - stay in prison for life. According to these state agencies, the intent of the law was not to keep offenders past their offense specific release date.
This year's report shows a failure of the Lifetime Act to deliver what was promised to the legislature when the bill was proposed. The report gives the appearance of an overwhelmed correctional mental health department and an apparent political bias against those subjected to the Lifetime Act. Somewhere between legislative intent and implementation the idea of rehabilitate and release was lost. Below are some of the highlights from the 2010 annual report.
Annual Report Highlights
- 1,537 inmates are currently incarcerated under the Act.
- If the Lifetime Act was applied to all current offenders whose crimes would now fall under the Act there would be 5,054 or 21.8 percent of the 2010 prison population.
- In the first decade of the Act, eight inmates were paroled, or 0.78 percent of the available population.
- This year 33 inmates were paroled from the eligible pool - a rate of 5 percent. But, 178 new Lifetime inmates came to prison in the same period. (Five times more came in than went out)
- 510 inmates are currently being held past their intended release date, some for more than 10 years. This amounts to 33 percent of all Lifetime Act inmates.
- 547 inmates still require legislatively mandated "modified mental health treatment" for offenders with less serious crimes.
- 928 inmates require the more expensive long-term treatment for more serious crimes.
- 24 Lifetime Act inmates have died waiting for parole past their intended release date.
The CDOC is years behind the legislatively mandated treatment schedule for the Lifetime Act population and is getting further behind each year as five times more inmates are brought in under the Act than are released. The failure to follow the law has generated a class action law suit to be filed in federal court against CDOC later this month. The one-year cost for holding the 510 inmates already past their intended release date is between $9-15 million, or roughly the amount proposed to be taken from D-11 schools this year.
Politics is the 500 pound gorilla in the Lifetime Act that nobody wants to acknowledge. Let's face it, sex offenders have few advocates for some good reasons, and victims groups are rightly quick to point out the dangers of releasing sex offenders without treatment and supervision. The political reality is no lawmaker wants to see their name in print next to legislation considered soft on crime, no governor wants to explain why his parole board released a sex offender, and no one can know what personal bias the members of the board bring to their decisions they are human after all.
Once someone is tagged by the Lifetime Act it is the sole description of the parole board to decide if the inmate will be released. When offenders are sentenced by a judge they are given a "bottom number," what non-Act offenders call a mandatory release date or MRD. The sentence is based on legislatively established guidelines and the judge's assessment of the seriousness of the crime.
In the U.S system of justice the judge has been given the authority to take liberty from a citizen based on the will of the people as expressed by the legislature's sentencing guidelines. However, in Colorado the appointed parole board has assumed absolute power to incarcerate indefinitely, they can, and do, keep people in prison long after the sentence imposed by the judge and intended by the legislature.
The parole board has become the expression of absolute power taken by the executive branch of government - usurping the sentencing authority from the legislative and judicial branches of government to indefinitely take the liberty of state citizens.
The board brings their political gorilla to the equation as seen by the almost nonexistent release of Act inmates. Hundreds of offenders have parole recommendations from their CDOC therapists, but get denied parole year after year. Statistically, murders have a better chance of release than a nonviolent sex offender, and according to state and national recidivism rates, sex offenders are the least likely of all to re-offend.
The annual report shows an unpalatable expanding population and a political expediency to brand everyone under the Lifetime Act as a monster or mentally deranged and an imminent threat to society - a one size fits all expensive public policy. Some fit this label, many do not, but taxpayers diminishing dime is paying millions for them both thanks to the gorilla.
The legislature has the ability to make the Lifetime Act the policy tool for rehabilitation and release that it was meant to be, to change the culture and practice of harsh treatment and hopeless indefinite incarceration. The legislature has the power, but do they have the political will to do what's right for Colorado in the face of certain criticism.
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