Colorado men’s prisons will run out space in next fiscal year, state warns - Denver Post, Reporter-Herald
Thomas Clayton
Colorado men’s prisons will run out space in next fiscal year, state warns
Jump in size of prison population due to drop in early parole releases, uptick in parole revocations
Colorado’s prisons will run out of beds for men in the next fiscal year unless significant changes are made to either reduce the prison population or increase capacity, a state analyst projects in a new report.
A sharp decrease in parole releases coupled with a steady stream of new prisoners entering custody means the state’s prison population is likely to see one of its biggest annual jumps in the last 15 years during the 2026-2027 fiscal year, which begins in July, the analyst found.
“Things are looking extremely difficult, to put it mildly,” Justin Brakke, staff analyst for the General Assembly’s Joint Budget Committee, told lawmakers Friday. “…There are challenges on the increasing population front in prison, and there are challenges on the release side… which shapes this entire situation up to be something that is not looking great.
“To be very blunt, it is not good. I can’t stress that enough.”
The Colorado Department of Corrections can house about 15,077 men across state and privately run prisons. The male population averaged about 15,006 in November, but the population of male prisoners is expected to swell to 16,200 in the 2026 fiscal year and to 16,600 in the fiscal year after that.
The number of women prisoners is expected to decline slightly.
The state has about 900 male prison beds that are currently unused, largely due to inadequate staffing, and those beds could be brought back online with boosted funding and staffing. But even if the prison system reopens those beds — a big if, experts noted — Colorado will still be 230 to 440 beds short in the coming years, according to the 159-page report Brakke presented to the budget committee Friday.
Alondra Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, declined an interview but said in a statement that the prison system was “closely monitoring recent data… which indicates that the male prison population is growing at a higher rate than previously forecast.”
“The CDOC works to balance population fluctuations driven by court sentencing and the parole process, which is independent of CDOC and therefore is not a tool the department can use to slow population growth,” she said in the statement. “Our primary mission is to fulfill our statutory obligation to provide a safe and secure environment for all individuals remanded to our custody, and budget requests will emphasize that obligation.”
The Department of Corrections is seeking a $58 million budget increase for the coming fiscal year, which is about a 5% increase to its current $1.2 billion budget, according to the report. That $58 million would include $8.2 million to open up some 550 new prison beds, most at the Sterling Correctional Facility and the Buena Vista Correctional Complex.
Both prisons have long struggled to hire enough staff to run at full capacity, the report noted.
“It is a very complicated landscape right now and just talking about, ‘Oh, we need to add more beds, it just feels delusional that we could even do that,” said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition. “The good news is we don’t have to. There are plenty of other things we could be doing. And it’s not big sentencing reform, not throwing open the prison doors — just common-sense, efficiency-focused, outcome-focused improvements.”
Why are there more prisoners?
The surge in prisoners can be largely attributed to a year-over-year drop in discretionary parole releases, Brakke found, along with an uptick in parole revocations. The parole board approved 1,284 prisoners for discretionary parole between June and October 2024, compared to just 1,030 prisoners in that five-month period in 2025, a 20% drop.
Discretionary parole happens when an inmate is released before their mandatory parole date. Both discretionary and mandatory parolees are supervised by the Department of Corrections after their release; parolees can be sent back to prison for violating the rules of their parole or for committing new crimes.
Such revocations have increased over the last two years, with about 41% of parolees returning to prison for a rule violation or for committing a new crime in October 2025, compared to about 31% in October 2023. The state’s parole population in November was at its lowest number since 2011, the report found.
The prison system also lost about 1,000 male beds over the last five years, including through the 2020 closing of the Cheyenne Mountain Re-Entry Center in Colorado Springs, a private prison with 710 beds.
Releasing more prisoners to parole, halfway houses or intensive supervision could alleviate the pressure within prisons, the report found, but also raises safety concerns. Parolees have in recent years been accused in a number of high-profile crimes, including the 2023 killing of a parole officer and the random fatal stabbings of two people in Denver.
“The parole population is at a historical low and the number of parole officers has also declined,” the report reads. “It is not clear at this time that the department has the people, practices and funding it needs to safely supervise a larger parole population.”
Together with other systemic factors — including Colorado voters’ approval of Proposition 128, which increases the amount of time some prisoners must serve before they are eligible for parole — the uptick in revocations and the decrease in parole releases has moved up the projection for when Colorado’s prisons will overflow from a few years out to a few months, Brakke told lawmakers.
“You don’t have a couple years,” he said. “You’ll have to make those decisions in this session, unfortunately.”
Colorado’s prisons in August triggered a legislatively mandated process aimed at spee
ding up prisoners’ releases after the prison system’s vacancy rate stayed below 3% for 30 consecutive days. On its current trajectory, the vacancy rate for men will sink to 0.4% by July 2026.
That would push more prisoners into local jails while they wait for space to open up in a state prison — a practice that a coalition of sheriffs spoke against this summer — and likely cost the state several million dollars in payments to the jails, according to the report.
‘Dire’ prison population projections
Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who serves on the Joint Budget Committee, said the prison projections are “dire,” but that the system can take action now to increase releases and lessen the population pressure.
“Part of what is so frustrating is that there are a bunch of things they could be doing, and should be doing, to get people out,” she said. “And they’re not doing those things.”
Amabile pointed to bottlenecks with special needs parole — that is, parole for people with terminal or debilitating illnesses — as well as for prisoners who need to complete sex offender treatment before they are eligible to be released.
“I want them to release people who are not dangerous,” she said, adding she’d also like to see more prisoners released to Community Corrections, more commonly known as halfway houses.
The report noted that the number of people accepted into Community Corrections would have to increase to levels not seen in “well over a decade” in order to keep the prison system’s vacancy rate above 2%.
“Trends in community corrections… suggest this is very unlikely under current law,” the report found.
Donner, the director of the Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, said administrative and bureaucratic inefficiencies within the prison system also slow down releases and keep people in prison longer than is necessary. Changes to those processes, particularly around creating parole plans for inmates, could also alleviate the prison population pressure, she said.
Brakke’s report noted that the state could expand its bed capacity by purchasing or leasing space in privately run prisons, but noted that it is difficult to know how much space will be available and at what cost, especially considering recent interest from the federal government in using private prisons to hold immigration detainees.
Colorado already houses about 3,000 men in two private prisons run by CoreCivic in Bent and Crowley counties, and could not house all of its prisoners without the added capacity from the two private prisons, the report found.
The Department of Corrections is seeking $14.5 million to pay for private prison beds at a higher per diem rate in the next fiscal year, according to the report.
The department currently pays $66.52 per person per day at the private prisons; officials want to raise that rate to $80 to keep up with rising costs. Spending the $14.5 million to house the 3,000 prisoners would be cheaper than expanding the state’s capacity, the report noted.
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