There is middle ground between mercy and justice. That is what Colorado’s leaders should search for in its criminal justice system.

For more than a decade, Colorado has devoted extraordinary energy to reshaping its criminal justice system trying to meet this balance.  

Reformers, in good faith, have pushed to reduce incarceration, expand alternatives to prison, and emphasize treatment over punishment. These priorities emerged from a sincere belief that a modern justice system should accomplish more than warehousing offenders. Rehabilitation and reintegration are noble ends. Mercy and proportionality matter.

For all this attention, however, something in Colorado attempts has not worked for the greater safety of the public.

Colorado’s incarcerated population has shrunk in the past decade, but at the same time its violent crime rate has surged. Doubtless, the pandemic’s economics played a role, but so did policies.

In the 1980s and 1990s, legislation imposed longer sentences and stricter parole rules for violent and habitual offenders. Then the 2000s ushered in modest reforms to earned time and parole supervision.

Beginning in the 2010s, the state pivoted sharply toward rehabilitation and away from incarceration. Lawmakers reduced penalties for nonviolent and drug-related crimes, expanded diversion and special-needs parole, and reclassified numerous felonies as misdemeanors.

Some of these measures included:

•     HB98-1156 (1998): Colorado Sex Offender Lifetime Supervision Act — created indeterminate “life to natural life” sentencing for felony sex offenders.

•     HB10-1352 (2010): Reduced penalties for drug possession and separated drug use from distribution crimes.

•     SB13-250 (2013): Established a new drug-sentencing grid, lowering the severity and penalties for many drug crimes.

•     HB19-1263 (2019): Reclassified several low-level drug felonies as misdemeanors, reducing felony filings and incarceration rates.

The number of arrests is declining, meaning repeat offenders may be cycling through communities. The Common Sense Institute’s data reveals important trends related to Colorado’s criminal justice reforms in the past 15 years. Public safety has likely been compromised.

To be clear, Colorado has not erred in trying to address rehabilitation. It has only erred in the method.

A functional criminal justice system must protect the public and keep offenders from offending while rehabilitating them after they do. The pendulum shifted in the last 20 years at the former’s cost.

Recidivism is a key component, and a revealing one. Between 2008 and 2019, the share of released inmates returning to custody within three years fell by 40%. In the space of a decade, Colorado went from having one of the nation’s highest recidivism rates to having an average one.

This reduction in recidivism has been accompanied by a thinning-out of the prison population.

From 2008 to 2023, arrest rates have dropped by 48%, outpacing declines in both three-year and two-year recidivism. Colorado’s arrest rate has nearly halved in the last 15 years. From 2008 to 2023, arrest rates plummeted from 452.36 per 100,000 citizens to 237.1, a drop of 47.6%.

In the back half of the 2010s, there were around 20,000 inmates in the Colorado Department of Corrections. That dipped considerably in the 2020s – by nearly 5,000 inmates. It has since recovered somewhat, but not nearly to the pre-pandemic levels. There are roughly 2,500 fewer inmates now than there were before.

Both these reductions look like a victory, but they need the appropriate context.

Neither incarceration levels nor recidivism rates have been accompanied by better outcomes for the public when reviewing crime data. Colorado’s violent crime rate rose more than 55% from 2013 to 2024.

From December 2019 to December 2021, the Colorado incarcerated population fell by more than 20% while the violent crime rate rose by nearly 25%. Since then, its incarcerated population has remained below pre-pandemic levels.

The relationship between them is unsurprisingly strong – statistically strong, in fact. Economists at the Common Sense Institute ran a correlation analysis between several factors, including recidivism, incarceration, violent crime and property crime. In statistics, any relationship between two sets of numbers has a “coefficient” ranging from 0 to 1. Anything 0.7 or higher is a “strong relationship.”

Incarceration levels and violent crime had a correlation coefficient of -0.82, a strong inverse relationship. In short, Colorado’s violent crime in the past decade goes up when prison population goes down.

Strong or not, of course, statistical relationships do not by themselves prove causation. They do, however, demand attention in a state in which violent crime was among the top 10 in the nation in 2022 and 2023, according to FBI data. When incarceration and accountability fall fastest in the years violent crime rises fastest, policymakers should not look away.

This is especially true in light of the last two decades worth of reforms, aimed in large part at reducing the corrections population.

These reforms were built largely on noble intentions. The bulk of them in some way reduced punishments for drug use, avoided unnecessary incarceration, prevented technical parole violations from sending people back to prison. 

The intent is defensible. In theory, it does not serve the state to have prisons full of low-level offenders.

In practice, however, things are more complicated. The low-level offenders kept out of prison may be simply between larger crimes, or so habitual that the impacts cause larger ripples. An overly lenient system without effective behavior-changing programs does not reduce crime. It simply tolerates more of it.

Colorado is now seeing the outcome of the imbalance between proportionality and safety. Reform promised to reduce harm, but unintentionally ended up allowing more of it.

This isn’t speculation. Recent Colorado history has shown that policy changes can change crime trajectories, sometimes with rapid speed.

Fentanyl overdose deaths surged after drug possession penalties were weakened in 2019. In 2022, the legislature reinstated felony charges for possession of one gram of fentanyl. Overdose trends slowed immediately afterwards – a trend also seen in other Western states as they brought more fentanyl-specific legislation forward.

Similarly, Colorado became the nation’s auto theft capital in the early 2020s, when auto theft penalties were still tied to the vehicle’s value. Lawmakers restored felony penalties after understanding data and trends produced by CSI for all auto theft in 2023, and rates started to decline immediately after.

Criminals respond to incentives just like any person or any business, pursuing reward and avoiding pain. When the system signals that consequences are real, behavior changes — and communities are safer.

This is an economic question as much as it is a humanitarian one. The economic costs of crime dwarf the cost of jails and prisons.

It’s true that corrections comes at a high cost. Colorado saved roughly $140 million per year by lowering its corrections population since the mid-2010s.

Those state-associated cost savings, though, don’t match the economic losses from property and violent crime. The total economic impact of crime in 2022 alone reached more than $27 billion. The increased costs of murder alone from 2015 to 2024 topped $800 million.

Leaders should not present Colorado’s criminal justice situation as a false choice with punitive harshness on the one hand and compassion on the other. The real question is how to do both right at once, prioritizing rehabilitation without prioritizing public safety.

A rebalanced system would include better access to effective rehabilitation and reentry programs, firm consequences for repeat and violent criminals, restored support for policing and swift enforcement, and a statewide recidivism definition that measures outcomes honestly.

The real path to real progress is one that lowers recidivism because people change, not because the system looks away. The state has embraced much clemency. It is time to restore responsibility in kind.

Paul Pazen is the Common Sense Institute Public Safety Fellow and the former police chief of Denver.