Colorado lawmakers in 2018 unanimously approved a law that was meant to speed up the release of eligible people behind bars when state prisons got too full. But the law hasn’t worked as intended since it was triggered for the first time in mid-2025.

The so-called prison population management measures have barely made a dent in the Colorado Department of Corrections’ vacancy rate after four months, meaning state prisons remain at or near capacity without enough room for the growing prison population.

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The vacancy rate in state prisons stood at 1.92 percent as of Aug. 16, marking the 30th consecutive day the department maintained a vacancy rate below 3 percent. House Bill 18-1410 requires that once that threshold is reached, the department must begin to take steps to reduce the incarcerated population in coordination with the state parole board and the Office of Community Corrections, which oversees halfway houses. At the end of December, the vacancy rate in prisons stood at 2.91 percent.

The law was intended to expedite existing processes to better manage the state’s prison population, not release additional people who are not eligible for parole, Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, said.

“There aren’t going to be big numbers of releases — it’s not intended to be that — but it’s a way of identifying and expediting processes, removing some of the barriers so that there can be a responsiveness to when they’re running out of beds,” Donner said.

Rändi Moore, chair of the Colorado State Board of Parole, said the board has reviewed 88 people who met the criteria of the prison population management measures law. Of those reviewed, only 29 have been released from prison.

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An incarcerated person needs to have a parole plan approved by the DOC’s Division of Adult Parole before the parole board evaluates the viability of housing and employment options in the plan, Moore said. DOC spokesperson Alondra Garcia-Gonzalez said the department secures and vets housing for someone eligible for parole, but the parole board has the final authority to approve a plan.

I think the short answer is it's not doing much.

Some paroles, when they occur after an incarcerated person’s eligibility but before their mandatory parole date, are discretionary. But discretionary parole releases have dropped since the law took effect.

When during a recent meeting Colorado lawmakers asked about the effectiveness of the state’s prison population management measures, Justin Brakke, a nonpartisan legislative policy analyst, said, “I think the short answer is it’s not doing much.”

Parole qualifications under the law are very restrictive, and it excludes certain violent crimes, Brakke said. The Office of Community Corrections is required by the law to identify open beds that DOC can use on a weekly basis until the vacancy rate rises above 4 percent for 30 consecutive days. But Brakke said the DOC doesn’t have authority to put people in those beds — the local boards of those community corrections centers do.

Community corrections has higher turnover rates, which makes bed counts more fluid, and many halfway houses are coed with fewer women than men, while the need remains higher for men, said Brian Hulse, chair-elect for the Colorado Community Corrections Coalition.

The average length of stay for someone in community corrections during the 2024-2025 fiscal year was 259 days, Division of Criminal Justice spokesperson Paula Vargas said. People can be sentenced right to community corrections so they don’t have to go to prison, but others go to community corrections while transitioning out of prison.

Community corrections programs that are coed have a set number of beds for men and for women, Hulse said, but when there aren’t women to fill their designated beds, those available beds will sit empty despite the demand for the male population.

The location of open community corrections beds affects availability too, because halfway houses are meant to reintegrate people back into the community they came from, Hulse said.

“We might have beds open in a rural area, but not necessarily the right fit for clients that need to go to that community, whereas the demand might be in an urban area where a particular program or jurisdiction might be at capacity too,” Hulse said.

Mark Wester, the outgoing chair of the Colorado Community Corrections Coalition, said that while there is always opportunity to maximize unused capacity in community corrections, providers have seen an uptick since the prison population management measures took effect. But the need for more community corrections beds is there, too.

“I think that the entire system is trying to respond to the increased demand from prisons, and we’re very aware that the Department of Corrections is at the 3 percent vacancy threshold,” Wester said. “So the coalition members have been really working hard to make sure that we accommodate as many people as possible.”

County jail backlog

The backlog of people in county jail waiting to be transferred to state prisons further exacerbates population issues. The Joint Budget Committee approved funding in September for 153 additional beds specifically intended to address the backlog. While those beds helped the department make progress in October and November, when the backlog dropped to about 330 people, Garcia-Gonzalez said it is back up to 590 people awaiting intake. The state budgets for just over 250 people to be temporarily held in county jails.

Now that the prison population management measures law has been “beta tested,” Donner said, she hopes the department and state legislators will seek to make changes to improve the effectiveness of the law.

“There are things that we can be doing to manage the prison population, so our hope is there’s appetite for that,” Donner said.

Donner said she would want to see more specific actions outlined that everyone within the system needs to take to reduce the prison population, because the law in its current form only requires that state leaders — including the governor, the parole board and district attorneys — are notified of the low vacancy threshold. Hulse said the law has heightened awareness among providers, at least in community corrections, of the need and the demand.

“Awareness around what the state is facing from a prison population management standpoint I think brings more acuity to decisions made and efficiency in which those decisions are made,” Hulse said.