Report shows some rural counties send people to prison at higher rates
Most prisoners in Colorado lived on the Front Range before they were imprisoned, a new report found Thursday, but a handful of rural and less-populated counties sent residents to prison at much higher rates than those seen in metro Denver.
About 65% of people in prison in April 2020 came from El Paso, Denver, Arapahoe, Jefferson and Adams counties, with the state’s largest cities — Denver, Colorado Springs and Aurora — sending the most residents to prison, according to a report from Prison Policy Initiative, a national nonprofit focused on criminal justice research.
Yet while most prisoners hailed from the Front Range, rural and less-populated counties led the state in incarceration rates, proportionately sending more of their residents to prison than metro counties, the report found.
“That’s pretty solid evidence that incarceration is not only a problem faced by cities, it’s affecting all parts of the state,” said Emily Widra, a senior research analyst at Prison Policy Initiative.
When the data was collected for the 2020 U.S. Census, 2,712 Denver residents were imprisoned, which, when considering the city’s population, translates to a rate of about 378 people imprisoned for every 100,000 people, according to the report, which used new data made available for the first time by the end of prison gerrymandering to trace prisoners’ last known home addresses. Colorado Springs and Aurora both had similar imprisonment rates in the 300s.
Some rural areas saw much higher rates. The city of Alamosa, in the San Luis Valley, had only 71 residents in prison, but that’s an imprisonment rate of about 719 people per 100,000 given the city’s population, the report found. The city of Pueblo had 684 residents in prison, a rate of about 612 people per 100,000. Those two counties saw the highest imprisonment rates in the state, followed by Bent, Logan and Moffat counties, the researchers found.
A variety of factors likely impact that difference between rural and urban areas, experts said, including poverty rates, access to services designed to keep people out of the criminal justice system, policing tactics and even the culture of a particular court or the approach of a particular prosecutor or judge.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado in 2017 found that one municipal judge in Alamosa issued twice as many arrest warrants as judges in similar municipal courts, routinely sending people to jail for failing to pay fines or for missing court for legitimate reasons, like hospitalization.
Taylor Pendergrass, director of advocacy and strategic alliances at the ACLU of Colorado, said that a single judge or prosecutor can have an “outsized impact” on the justice system in a rural area.
“The most important predictor of a county’s incarceration rate is generally the practices of the local county prosecutors,” he said. “It’s the prosecutor who decides
what charges to bring, whether it is a misdemeanor or a felony, if it has a mandatory sentencing scheme. So the severity of charges they are bringing and the plea bargains they negotiate have an enormous impact on the people who are sentenced to jail or prison.”
In Pueblo County, which has the second-highest incarceration rate in the state, District Attorney Jeff Chostner said he intentionally seeks prison sentences for repeat offenders to try to keep them “off the streets.”
“I try to be a tough prosecutor and we try to handle crime as best we can down here,” he said Wednesday. “My main concern is when 70% of my homicides, officer-involved shootings and my drive-by shootings are committed by people out on some condition of bond, parole, probation. If we could just keep the people we have convicted in jail, if we could keep them there, three-quarters of my problems would go down in those areas.”
He added that he has also embraced programs aimed at reducing incarceration, like behavioral health court, veterans court, a post-incarceration program for drug offenders and a diversion program for juveniles. He said he was not surprised or “impressed one way or another” by the county’s high incarceration rates when compared to the rest of the state.
“We just try to do our job day in and day out and try to make Pueblo a safe community,” he said.
That’s a common attitude in the criminal justice system, said Christie Donner, executive director at the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition and a coauthor on the new report.
“There are not often really good feedback loops between the day-to-day operations that happen in courts all across the state and what the impact of those operations are… What is the impact? They don’t ask themselves those questions because is it outside the four corners of their day job,” she said, adding she hopes the report, which offers the most granular look to date at where Colorado’s prisoners lived prior to incarceration, will spark more local conversations.