By Elise Schmelzer
The Denver Post
DENVER — A radically revised prison population estimate shows that Colorado will likely avoid setting a new record high number of inmates and could give hope to Colorado lawmakers and advocates hoping to address crowded prisons without expanding bed capacity.
Statisticians in December estimated that Colorado’s prison population would steadily increase and reach more than 24,000 by June 2025, which would have been an all-time record for the state. After a recalculation in May, however, the experts now estimate that the population at that time will be approximately 20,878 — far below the system’s peak population in 2009.
“That’s a fairly significant degree of forecast error, even for this forecast,” Greg Sobetski, a staff forecaster with the legislative council, told a committee of lawmakers and criminal justice experts Monday at a meeting to discuss prison population.
Lawmakers for years have struggled to address a crowded prison system, where extremely low vacancy rates sometimes mean less than a hundred of the state’s 14,500 beds are available and private prisons have been used to house thousands of additional inmates. The issue has created a tug-of-war between a Department of Corrections that has repeatedly asked for millions of dollars to address the problem while lawmakers look for other, less-costly methods to reduce the population such as parole and sentencing reform.
The accuracy of population forecasts has often played at the center of the debates. Repeated calls by the prison system for money to address overcrowding — even as the prison population has steadily fallen since a high of 23,200 in 2009 — have been met with growing skepticism by lawmakers as the worst of the predictions have not been realized.
“This specific modeling has been off for years,” state Rep. Leslie Herod, D-Denver, said Monday at the meeting of the interim committee on managing the prison population.
Instead of a steady increase, experts now expect the prison population to remain fairly level or show a slight decline until mid-2021, said Linda Harrison, senior statistical analyst at the state Department of Public Safety. Then the numbers likely will trend slowly upward, reflecting statewide population growth.
The system saw a small increase in the number of people being released, but Sobetski said the biggest factor in the changed forecast was a drop in the number of people admitted to prisons on new charges. The system’s population has dropped every month since February to the 19,951 inmates counted in June, bucking both 2019 and three-year projections.
Sobetski said it’s unclear what is driving that drop. Factors could include changes in policing, less crime, decisions from judges and diversion programs. It’s also unclear what impact a slate of criminal justice reform laws passed this year has had on the numbers.
“If they continue to drop through November, that will have a significant impact on my forecast,” he said.
©2019 The Denver Post