The Colorado Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee reversed course on its denial of more funding for prison beds.

The committee voted 5-1 Wednesday to approve funding for 788 prison beds in the Colorado Department of Corrections after hearing more from the department and the governor’s office earlier this week about why the beds are needed.

When the committee does not appropriate funds for beds, it results in a heavier reliance on jails to hold people sentenced to state prison until beds become available, Mark Ferrandino, the director of the governor’s Office of State Planning and Budgeting, told the committee Monday. He said the state will spend the requested money regardless, because if it doesn’t go to state prisons for more beds, it will go to county jails that are holding the people awaiting transfer.

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The backlog of people in county jails awaiting transfer reached just under 700 as of Jan. 20, and without more prison beds that number could surpass 1,000 by June, Ferrandino said. Someone being held in a county jail does not have access to the full medical services and programming that prisons offer for rehabilitation, and it costs the state more to pay for beds in county jails than it does to pay for beds in prisons.

The state will need to lease or purchase another facility to address capacity shortages, Ferrandino said, because efforts to reduce recidivism and prison population management measures required by a 2018 law will not open up enough beds. He said the governor’s office is reviewing a bill introduced this year that would expand the prison population management measures, which were activated for the first time last year when the state prison vacancy rate fell below 3 percent for 30 consecutive days.

The committee unanimously approved the department’s full request for funding to pay local jails for the beds they use to house people awaiting intake to a state prison, as well as its full request for medical care. Last week, the committee had only approved 50 percent of those requests.

We understand that the Joint Budget Committee wanted to act in the short term, but now we must turn our attention to the bigger, long term crisis plaguing DOC.

Senator Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat, was the only vote against approving the beds, though other Democrats on the committee signaled their support was conditional on a more comprehensive plan to address prison capacity. Amabile emphasized that Colorado WINS, the union that represents state employees including those who work in state prisons, asked the committee to deny the beds due to safety concerns and a lack of appropriate staffing.

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Hilary Glasgow, executive director of Colorado WINS, said the prison staffing crisis puts its members, the incarcerated population and the public at risk, which is why WINS for the first time opposed the department’s request for more beds.

“We understand that the Joint Budget Committee wanted to act in the short term, but now we must turn our attention to the bigger, long term crisis plaguing DOC, and that means making sure existing funding is being spent where it should be, and more funding is allocated to fix staffing,” Glasgow said in a statement.

Senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Weld County Republican, said the DOC, community corrections and the parole board need to find a joint solution to getting people already approved for parole out of prison, because the department does not have complete control over who is released from state prisons.

Representative Emily Sirota, a Denver Democrat, and Senator Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat, both said they supported the additional beds because it would end up costing the state more to pay county jails.

In 2010, Colorado had 23,000 people in its state prison system, which represented about 0.45 percent of the state’s population, according to Ferrandino. The state has closed seven prisons since then and reduced capacity by 12 percent. By the end of 2025 the population was about 16,500, which is about 0.27 percent of the state’s population, he said.

People convicted of nonviolent crimes make up 38.6 percent of the population in state prisons. That includes crimes like burglary, motor vehicle theft and arson, Ferrandino said.