SB 12 intended to help people reenter society and avoid the stumbles that lead many to be reincarcerated by providing them with seed money to cover basic expenses as they looked to find stable housing and employment on the outside. Colorado’s reincarceration rate is higher than that of almost any other state; half of the people released from its state prisons are sent back behind bars within three years. 

The bill’s failure promptly signaled that Colorado’s 2024 session may replay last year’s dynamics on criminal justice issues; the state Senate became a graveyard for reform legislation despite Democrats’ 23-12 advantage in the chamber. 

Some progressive lawmakers hoped to change that dynamic but at least one core obstacle carried over: the design of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the body that reviews virtually all criminal justice legislation. As Bolts reported in early 2023, Democratic leaders’ decision to appoint Senator Dylan Roberts, a career prosecutor and frequent opponent of criminal justice reforms, to the committee was bound to chokehold their ambitions, and did last year. 

Roberts, whose vote can swing the five-person committee since he’s one of three Democrats, is the reason SB 12 failed last week, one of the bill’s chief sponsors told Bolts.

“We didn’t have the votes,” said Senator James Coleman, a Democrat from Denver, pointing to Roberts as the Democratic holdout. Roberts did not respond to an interview request following the bill’s tabling last week, but he told The Denver Post in January that he was concerned with how much SB 12 proposed to spend—up to $22.5 million by 2026—and that he felt the bill wasn’t written with sufficient oversight to ensure accountability to taxpayers. The state Department of Corrections had lobbied against the bill, too, on similar grounds. 

Lacking the support to advance the bill out of committee, Coleman and his cosponsor Julie Gonzales, a Denver Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, made a motion on Wednesday to indefinitely delay consideration of the bill, the state’s equivalent to killing legislation for a session. Both vowed to retry it next year.

Gonzales told Bolts that the bill would have faced “stronger headwinds” than Roberts even if it had made it past the Judiciary Committee, which motivated her decision to agree to table it. The Appropriations Committee, where two centrist Democrats hold a lot of clout, loomed as the next obstacle. Pointing to the state’s “really tight budget situation,” Gonzales says that she wants to find ways to better justify the bill’s price tag.

Proponents of SB 12 say it could cut costs if it led to any meaningful decrease in recidivism and reincarceration, given the enormous cost of imprisoning someone—about $50,000 a year in Colorado. The state’s prison system spends roughly $1 billion a year, and fails to release many of its detainees in a condition to thrive; incarcerated people often face chronic homelessness and unemployment after their release.

The state gives most people who are released a one-time debit of $100, a sum that formerly incarcerated Coloradoans say is vastly insufficient. The state also radically underpays people for labor they perform while they’re in prison, adding to their challenge to have resources for basic expenses when they’re released. 

As she testified against SB 12 before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, Adrienne Sanchez, the chief lobbyist for the state Department of Corrections, was asked by Gonzales how much the state pays its prison laborers. “Less than a dollar a day,” Sanchez responded. 

Critics of the bill, including Sanchez, also took issue with the fact that SB 12 was clearly written with a single vendor in mind: the Center for Employment Opportunities, a New York-based nonprofit behind a 2020 national project to distribute checks of up to $2,750 to people leaving prison. They said this risked an anti-competitive process, to the possible detriment of other groups working in prison re-entry in Colorado. 

Nowhere in the U.S. has a bill like SB 12 ever passed, and the Center for Employment Opportunities, which advocates for states and localities to adopt such stimulus payments, had hoped to plant a flag in Colorado this year. 

Still, SB 12 was limited in scope: It called for a pilot program that would expire after a year. But Coleman says he finds it difficult in general to rally enthusiasm at the Capitol for policy that challenges the status quo, even for a one-year experiment. 

“It’s a larger issue, where we aren’t all in alignment in the party,” Coleman said. “I wish this world was different. We’ll get there eventually.”

Those fault lines within the Democratic Party were on full display last year, when a slew of progressive legislation ended up derailing or getting significantly weakened. Among that group was a bill to raise the minimum age at which a child can be prosecuted, to shield preteens from prosecution. “It’s perplexing, particularly when you have a Democratic Party that runs on a platform of social justice,” Dafna Gozani, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who helped advocate for the bill, told Bolts at the time.

But Democrats last year also passed some reform bills, including a law to help protect children from being tricked by law enforcement in police interrogations, and another to curb local immigration detention. Those successes helped fuel cautious progressive ambition for 2024, though it’s not taken long for familiar political dynamics to reemerge this year.

Even before the session began, Democratic Governor Jared Polis vowed to veto any attempt to permit safe drug-use sites. This is a proposal many years in the making in Colorado, and one city leaders in Denver have previously embraced, but the plan now seems indefinitely sidelined. 

Polis’sveto pen is an occasional character in Colorado’s criminal justice politics. He blocked a bill last year, for example, that was meant to make it a little easier for incarcerated people to request clemency from him. Most often, he signals opposition through backchannels or vague public statements of concern, and Democratic lawmakers kill legislation before it ever reaches his desk.

This year, Colorado lawmakers will also consider a slate of bills that would ramp up criminal penalties for certain lower-level offenses. Some legislation pending now would increase punishment for operating a commercial vehicle without proper licensure, for stealing guns, for harming police dogs, and for not complying with a police officer’s order to present an ID. The state adopted landmark legislation in 2021 to make the state’s misdemeanor laws less punishing, but critics have since argued that the changes made the state’s penal code too permissive. 

Coleman regrets that his opponents on these issues are leaning toward just keeping people in prison, rather than proposing approaches to slow down the revolving door of incarceration. “What is the alternative, if it’s not reentry cash?” he asks. 

Tristan Gorman, a lobbyist for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, thought SB 12 was an opportunity to show a different way. It “would have invested a modest amount of money in actual prevention,” she said. “Why wouldn’t we at least try that after the failure and suffering caused by decades of mass incarceration?”

Gorman added, “Generally, the state seems to have plenty of money to react to crime with punishment, no matter how much it costs taxpayers or how ineffective it is at preventing crime.”

The post Colorado Session Starts with Familiar Setback for Criminal Justice Reformers appeared first on Bolts.

James Orr was in his apartment in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side one Wednesday morning in 2013 when he heard his phone buzz. “James, you have 30 days to move,” an Illinois state police officer on the other end told him. The 62-year-old, who had moved into the apartment with his wife in 2006 after finishing a three-year prison sentence, was incredulous. “What do you mean I have to move?” he asked. He had lived there for seven years.

As part of a previous conviction, Illinois required Orr to appear on the sex offense registry, one of five public conviction registries in the state. The sentence came with a litany of other restrictions that will follow him for the rest of his life. Orr can’t visit parks, forest reserves, schools or playgrounds and must pay a yearly $100 registration fee. He’s also prohibited from living within 500 feet of any school, playground, day care or childcare facility. 

That’s why state police came calling in 2013. “You have to move, sir,” the officer repeated. “A day care moved [within] 500 feet.” Orr says he panicked and started calling around, trying to find a place to go. But each time he found an available apartment, police shot down the address saying it wasn’t compliant with Illinois’s dense web of housing restrictions. 

Orr estimates he checked on more than 20 places but still couldn’t find a legal place to live by the time his month-long window to move drew to a close. He could continue to stay at an illegal address. But if he were caught, he’d be sent back to prison. He and his wife packed their belongings into a storage unit and moved in with his sister, but when he called police to update his address, they told him it was too close to a school. His only other option was to register as homeless—but in all his interactions with police, he says no one told him he could.

It often plays out like this: A person can’t report their address because it’s not legal. Without a legal address, they can’t register. When they don’t register, police pick them up and charge them with a new crime.

It took police another year to come knocking after Orr failed to find a legal address or register as homeless. A judge ultimately convicted him of failure to report a change of address, a class 3 felony, and sentenced him to seven years in state prison. It was the second time he’d been imprisoned solely because he couldn’t find legal housing; police once arrested him in his home during an address check after determining his apartment was in a banishment zone, despite them previously allowing him to register the address.

“How do you get out of it? How do you get out of the cycle unless you build you a house on a dirt road somewhere?” Orr told Bolts.

The expansive nature of so-called housing banishment laws in Illinois, in addition to a laundry list of other restrictions, make it nearly impossible for people with past sex offense convictions to find a place to live. Few available housing units exist that aren’t within 500 feet of playgrounds, schools, and day cares. As a result, Orr and more than 1,400 other people like him, predominantly Black men, are forced into indefinite homelessness across the state, cycled in and out of prison and relegated to an underclass with lifelong stigma.

Orr and hundreds of other unhoused Chicagoans with sex offense convictions have spent years organizing against housing banishment laws and registry requirements with the Chicago 400 Alliance, a coalition of housing, reentry and victim advocates as well as social service agencies. The group’s most ambitious challenge to date is a bill pending in the Illinois legislature that would ease residency restrictions and expand housing options. The legislative session, which begins this week, ends in late May.

The bill would shrink banishment zones around schools and playgrounds from 500 to 250 feet and remove home day cares from the list of residency restrictions. Once a person finds stable housing, under the proposal, they also couldn’t be forced to move if their home later becomes part of an exclusion zone.

“The reality is that our current policies are not working,” Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, who is the bill’s chief sponsor, told Bolts. “They’re not serving who they should serve. It’s creating a crisis of homelessness and it does not make our communities safer.” 

As an employee at the state department of corrections in the 1990s, Lightford helped create Illinois’s sex offense registry. But now, after years of enhanced penalties and restrictions, she said, “What we’ve done is disenfranchised a whole population of people.”

Orr still didn’t have housing the last time he got out of prison in 2017. His wife’s apartment wasn’t compliant with state residency restrictions, so at first he tried a shelter a few blocks from a police station. But when he stopped by the station to update his address on the registry, he heard a familiar refrain—no good, it turned out the shelter was too close to a playground.

With no other options, Orr opted to sleep in his wife’s car while he saved for one of his own. Within a few months, he’d scraped together enough to bounce from one hotel room to another. Seven years later, he says it’s an endless cycle. “I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when I first got out in 2017—sleeping in my car, staying in a hotel.” 

Orr stays with his wife just two nights a year. He can’t stay anywhere for longer than two days a year, or else it’s legally considered a secondary residence. Orr and others who register as homeless must check in with local law enforcement on a weekly basis. Even if a person on a registry manages to find legal housing, exclusion zones are constantly in flux. People can be forced out at any time, regardless of whether they own or rent their home. Ubiquitous and often impossible to identify from outside, home day cares pose a particular challenge. 

If a person’s housing becomes illegal, police generally offer a 30-day window to find a new place within the scope of the law—though that’s a courtesy, not a legal right. Two options exist for people still without housing at the end of that period: live homeless or return to prison.

Steven, who asked that his full name not be used for fear of retaliation, finished his prison sentence in 2007 and moved to Riverdale, a Chicago suburb south of the city. Housing was easier to come by there, since it’s less densely populated than the city. For years, he managed to find a legal place to stay with relative ease. 

That all changed in 2019. He and his wife had been living in their apartment for five years. The pair dated in sixth grade, reconnected years later, and have been married for more than a decade. One mid-July day, police arrived to measure the distance between their apartment and a new day care that was opening up down the block. Steven says they told him his apartment was 28 inches too close. “It just got harder, and harder, and harder to find a place where I could stay. So I became homeless,” he told Bolts.

Every afternoon, after he finishes work as a peer counselor at an addiction treatment center on the city’s west side, Steven visits his family’s home. Each evening, after he says goodnight, he leaves again. Sometimes he stays with his mother, sometimes his sister, sometimes a friend—always couch surfing and never staying anywhere longer than two days. When his grandchildren ask why he leaves at night, he tells them he works the night shift.

“It hurts. I want to lay next to my wife,” Steven said. “I want to play with my grandchildren. I want to have fun with my children not just part of the day but, sometimes, all day. I want to wake up to them. I want to hear the noises, and the arguments, and the fussing. That’s what I miss most.”

The impact of Illinois’s housing banishment law extends far beyond people with convictions and shapes generations of families in lasting ways. 

As the primary caregiver to an adult son with an intellectual disability who must comply with the abundance of housing restrictions and residency requirements, Cheri worries what will happen when she can no longer look after him. Those rules, coupled with a dearth of skilled nursing facilities with beds available for people with sex offense convictions, leaves her with virtually no viable options.

“It definitely puts pressure on the family,” said Cheri, who asked that her real name not be used to protect her family. “What are we going to do with these people? Just throw them away when their families are no longer able to take care of them? I mean, it kind of feels like they’re throwing all of us away.”

Cheri says the judge in her son’s case gave him three days to move after he was convicted and sentenced to probation, community service, and ten years on the sex offense registry. Her house was 11 feet too close to a home day care, so the family put it up for sale and spent the next ten months searching for a place to live. She says she lives every day “in constant fear that someone’s going to open up a day care, someone’s going to put in a park, wherever you live.”

The conviction, and the stigma that comes with it, creates instability in nearly every aspect of their lives, Cheri says. The punishment is lifelong. “We can’t go to museums. We can’t go to forest reserves, we can’t go to parks. There are family reunions that we can’t attend because he can’t be present.” It creates, she said, “a class of people who, no matter how hard they try to do the right thing, are just pushed down constantly.”

Over the past four decades, Congress ushered in a series of federal mandates that pressured states to vastly expand policies targeting people with sex offense convictions. This includes the Wetterling Act, named for an 11-year-old boy from Minnesota who was abducted in 1989. The measure, part of the infamous 1994 crime bill, required states to establish a registry for people convicted of sex offenses and other crimes against children. Megan’s Law, which followed the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey, mandated that states make their sex offense registries public. 

Illinois lawmakers, for their part, passed into law a cavalcade of measures targeting people convicted of sex offenses. In 1986, the state began requiring people convicted of two or more sex offenses against children to record their information in a private law enforcement database. Lawmakers expanded the registry to include people convicted of any sex offense against a child in 1993, then again to include anyone convicted of any sex offense in 1996. Later that year, lawmakers made the registry public. 

Each year, as legislators returned to Springfield, they tacked on new conditions. By 2013, people on the registries were prohibited from living within 500 feet of any facility “providing programs or services exclusively directed toward persons under 18 years of age,” working at businesses that photograph children, or participating in holiday activities with children outside their families, like handing out Halloween candy.

Every state maintains some form of public conviction registry and 27 have residency restrictions of some kind. But another 23 states have resisted such housing restrictions, which are not recommended by federal agencies and are opposed by numerous advocacy organizations, like the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of Sexual Abuse, the professional organization for researchers and treatment providers in the field.  

A large body of evidence shows these measures do little to prevent—or even respond to—sexual violence.

According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, eight out of every ten perpetrators of sexual violence know the person they harm. In cases with children, that proportion climbs to 93 percent—and the perpetrators themselves are often children. A 2009 U.S. Department of Justice bulletin states that youth under 18 comprise more than a quarter of all people who carry out sexual violence, and more than one-third of perpetrators when the person harmed is also a child. Four of ten survivors under age six are targeted by another child, according to a 2000 Bureau of Justice Statistics study. The report also finds that the most common age of sexual assault perpetrators is 14. 

Yet survivors report sexual assaults to police in fewer than one-third of all cases. Police make an arrest in just 5 percent of assaults, and fewer than 3 percent result in a felony conviction. Cases that do make it to trial—and result in a lifetime of punishment—represent only a small fraction of the perpetrators of sexual violence and, reflective of the legal system at large, disproportionately target Black men. In Illinois, roughly one out of every 139 men is on a public conviction registry—which include sex offenses, murder, gun convictions and crimes involving violence against youth. When accounting for race, the divide is even starker: one out of every 39 Black men in the state is on a registry. 

Madeleine Behr, policy director at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, says politicians have long weaponized survivors in order to appear “tough on crime,” all while pushing registries and increasingly restrictive policies that create more harm than they address. “Survivors and victims know who harmed them. It’s something that I think gets so lost in this conversation,” Behr told Bolts. 

Studies have consistently shown housing restrictions and exclusion zones don’t make communities safer—and, in fact, can even weaken public safety. When the Minnesota Department of Corrections studied cases in which someone was reincarcerated for a new sex offense after being released from prison during a 16-year period, researchers couldn’t identify a single case in which residency restrictions would have prevented a new crime. A 2012 study from Connecticut’s Office of Policy and Management found that only 20 of the nearly 750 people released from prison in 2005 with sex offense convictions were convicted of a new sex offense. That’s in line with research from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found people with prior sex offense convictions were far less likely than people convicted of other offenses to be rearrested or to go back to prison.

Even an Illinois task force created to study registration and residency requirements and composed of state lawmakers, law enforcement, policy advocates and state prison officials found that housing banishment laws were ineffective. In a 2017 report, the group said the homelessness and loss of family support caused by housing banishment policies put people at a higher risk of recidivism. “In sum, residency restrictions do not decrease sexual reoffending or the sex crime rates in the areas where they are used,” the task force concluded.

Patty Casey, a retired Chicago police commander who oversaw her department’s registration unit, calls the status quo a “lose-lose situation” for both police and people who have to register. Officers, she says, are tied up verifying the legality of place after place, while people with sex offenses are trapped in an endless loop of homelessness.

Casey singles out the restriction against living within 500 feet of home day cares as “absolutely ludicrous.” Home day cares can pop up practically anywhere—licenses are free and require little more than a background check, an inspection, 15 hours of training and a medical exam. “It creates a large number of homeless registrants,” Casey said. “They’re restricted [from living] almost everywhere.” 

Casey told Bolts she plans to testify in support of the bill to ease residency restrictions and expand housing options during the upcoming legislative session. If signed into law, she said, “we would have so many less homeless persons, and it would be easier on law enforcement and easier on the registrants.”

It remains to be seen whether the support from folks like Casey and Lightford, the Senate majority leader, will be enough to muster the legislature to shirk decades of sensationalized, “tough-on-crime” policies. Four other legislators, including two more in Senate leadership, have signed on as bill sponsors and numerous others have committed to voting for it. While supporters expect some GOP opposition, a previous version of the bill even had a Republican sponsor in the House.

Notably absent from the conversation so far is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who is rumored to have presidential ambitions and has touted the state’s efforts to make Illinois a national leader in criminal legal reforms. Advocates with the Chicago 400 Alliance have questioned the governor’s silence on the issue. (Pritzker’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.) 

“Why aren’t they telling the lawmakers they should pass this bill?” said Adele Nicholas, a civil rights attorney and director of Illinois Voices for Reform, one of the groups advocating for the bill. “I guarantee you that if they did, it would become law.” Nicholas has challenged numerous state sex offense policies in federal courts and before the Illinois Supreme Court, leading to three separate injunctions against the state.

The state’s “own commission looked at the evidence several years ago and concluded that these laws are counterproductive,” she said, referring to the 2017 task force. “The evidence is out there, but they’re not taking any action to stand up for evidence-based policy.”

Chicago 400 members have for months visited Springfield to educate legislators and build support for the bill. Steven says he’s confident they’ll ultimately prevail, but he’s often shocked by how little policymakers know about current law and its impacts on people with sex offense convictions. “You’ve made laws because people are uneducated; they’re afraid,” he said. 

For the time being, hundreds of people with sex offense convictions continue to live in precarity, forced into homelessness by a system of the state’s design. “There really is no way of knowing the degree of punishment until you’ve lived it,” said Cheri, the mother of someone on the registry. “There’s no end. You just can’t ever get past it.”

Orr says he’s still trying to rebuild from the last time he went to prison because he couldn’t find a home. His sister died about a week before he was released in 2017. Orr remembers going to her home and finding the freezer brimming with containers of catfish, his favorite meal. “She was gonna throw me a surprise homecoming,” Orr said. “That was like another broken heart.”

The instability, fear and stigma lived day in and day out take a toll. “It can be so scary and shameful at the same time,” Orr said. “There’s so much politics in this particular crime. They break up a lot of families. A lot of people couldn’t survive this.”

“It’s very disappointing and hurtful,” he added. “I try to tell myself it’s gonna get better.”

The post How Illinois Housing Banishment Laws Push People into Homelessness and Prison  appeared first on Bolts.

This has been true for years, even as Colorado devotes huge portions of its budget—about $1 billion last year—to its Department of Corrections. The state’s prison population boomed from the 1980s to the 2000s, dipped to modern-record lows as COVID-19 set in, and, today, Colorado has returned to incarcerating people at or above pre-pandemic rates. 

James Coleman, a Democratic state senator whose Denver district includes the state’s largest women’s prison, says the legislature ought to try something new: giving more money to people exiting incarceration. He and three other Democrats are proposing Senate Bill 12 to allocate up to $3,000 per person upon release, for a one-year period. That would be a dramatic change to how Colorado currently treats people who exit its state prisons; most only receive a one-time debit card with $100, according to formerly incarcerated people and those who work with them.

This idea has been only lightly tested in the U.S., and only in the last few years. The New York-based nonprofit Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), which is behind the Colorado effort, in 2020 began distributing checks of up to $2,750 to more than 10,000 people returning from incarceration in six states, including Colorado, plus a couple dozen cities. CEO says beneficiaries of that project, which it called the Returning Citizens Stimulus, were more likely to obtain and keep employment and housing, and to stay free from incarceration. 

If passed, Coleman’s bill would make Colorado the first to codify a program of this sort in state law, according to CEO.

“The reality—$100 and a bus ticket—is not enough. People want the resources to not go back,” Coleman told Bolts on Wednesday. “We want to see people able to get out and utilize the dollars on housing, on workforce development, on opportunities to get jobs.”

This legislature hasn’t always been receptive to such bold changes within Colorado’s criminal legal system, especially lately, as the Democrats who control state government have largely moderated their stance after a brief embrace of reform around the 2020 protests for social and racial justice. But the bill piloting $3,000 cash assistance in the state starts from a promising position this year: Coleman’s co-sponsor in the Senate, Julie Gonzales of Denver, chairs the chamber’s powerful Judiciary Committee.

Passing SB 12 is just the first step. Coleman, Gonzales and others backing it will also have to convince state budget-writers to fund it. The bill proposes to open the stimulus program to anyone exiting a state prison, plus anyone exiting a county jail after being convicted of a felony offense. More than 7,000 people per year are released from Colorado prisons, but giving each of them $3,000 would cost more than $20 million, and history indicates this legislature is highly unlikely to fund an experiment of this sort to that extent. The scope of the proposal should become clearer in coming weeks.

“We’re still debating what a good sample group would be. How many people do we want to benefit?” Coleman said. “We want it to work first, and then we’ll see if we can get more funding in the future. What we know is it’s an innovative idea and no one’s done it.”

Several formerly incarcerated Coloradans told Bolts that the way the state currently releases people from prison sets them up for failure. 

“The Department of Corrections says they don’t like to release people homeless, but they do that every day,” said Khalil Halim, who was once imprisoned in Colorado and is now executive director of Second Chance Center, a resource hub for people leaving incarceration. “There’s not a lot you can do with $100. People are liable to do whatever they need to to survive, so, with funds, even if it’s just staying in a hotel for a week or being able to buy food, it helps stabilize you to get wherever you need to get to.” 

“You can stretch $3,000 for a few weeks,” he added. “You can’t stretch $100.”

In Jamiylah Nelson’s case, the $100 went quickly. “Personal hygiene products and underwear,” she told Bolts. “It’s not sustainable and it’s not helpful.” In 2021, Nelson was released after 14 years in prison, during which she struggled to build savings because, she says, the job she worked while incarcerated—training therapy dogs—paid her only about $4 per day.

This is a typical story in Colorado and in prisons across the country, where incarcerated people are routinely forced into unpaid or radically underpaid work—even when performing highly skilled labor, like fighting wildfires. (Coloradans voted in 2018 to ban forced prisoner labor, but, as Bolts has previously reported, people in state prisons are still being punished for refusing work assignments.) 

Nelson, who went to prison at 23, was in her late 30s by the time she was released, and felt out of touch with modern society. She had forgotten how to navigate the local public transportation system, which she says impeded her employment options after leaving prison. With an extra $3,000, she says, “I’d have been able to get me a car right away, and I’d have put some into savings. I didn’t have that opportunity, because everything was rolling so fast downhill as soon as I got out.” (Nelson has since stabilized and now works for the University of Denver.)

CEO’s survey of people involved in its Returning Citizens Stimulus experiment shows that beneficiaries mostly used the money on basic life expenses, like food, rent, transportation, and utilities. 

SB 12 would follow a model similar to that program’s, by doling out checks in stages as opposed to all at once, and only if participants hit certain “milestone” achievements. In CEO’s 2020 pilot, the “milestone” markers included opening a bank account, building a budget, applying for Medicaid, participating in a job coaching session, and keeping appointments with probation or parole officers. 

Colorado’s bill would order the Department of Corrections to issue a request for proposals by September from nonprofit groups interested in running the pilot. Whichever group is selected—probably CEO, a lobbyist for the bill told Bolts—would be responsible for setting the “milestone” markers. 

Coleman said he’d like to see those tied to indicators of positive, prosocial progress. Valerie Greenhagen, who directs CEO’s work in the Rocky Mountain region, told Bolts the benchmarks should not place obstacles in front of the money. “We’re looking at what the individual we’re working with is struggling with,” she said. “The milestones themselves can be a fairly low lift and they really are designed to meet the person where they’re at.” 

In its pilot, CEO distributed checks in three phases, and it reports that more than 80 percent of surveyed participants received all three payments.

Formerly incarcerated Coloradans interviewed for this story all say they’re comfortable with the “milestone” system written into Coleman’s proposal.

“Giving somebody a blank check is not exactly doing them a service,” said Paul Keener of Aurora, who was released in 2019 after eight years in prison. “I’m all for financial assistance, but for having it administered through a system that does community placement or community service for those people being released.”

Added Halim, “We know that if we can provide additional support, such as help with the rent, getting into classes, then our recidivism rate goes down. If you just give a person the money, there’s no stability added to that.”

But Simone Price, director of organizing for CEO, says she hopes Colorado and others will eventually start giving more money to people after incarceration without attaching so many requirements. The only recent state legislative effort to propose that so far was SB 1304 in California, which earmarked $1,300 payments to those exiting prison and which passed the legislature in 2022—but Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom declined to sign the bill into law.

With the concept of substantial cash assistance upon re-entry being so untested, Colorado’s bill proposes a pilot program running just one year. Coleman says he hopes to use that period to collect data and to build a case for long-term funding. 

He thinks the results could be compelling. It currently costs nearly $47,000 on average per year to incarcerate someone in a Colorado prison, according to state reports, and so the program could theoretically pay for itself if it leads to any meaningful dip in recidivism.

“It’s hard, when you’re running a bill you’ve never had before, to justify a high dollar amount,” Coleman said. “So we either pay at the beginning, and potentially save $47,000 from a single person not being incarcerated, or we pay at the end.”

The post A New Plan to Lower Recidivism: Stimulus Payments to Formerly Incarcerated People appeared first on Bolts.

Nobody told Percy Glover he could vote when he was released from prison nineteen years ago. Michigan allows anyone who is not presently incarcerated to vote, meaning Glover could have immediately registered, but he spent years unaware of his rights.

“I was struggling financially. I couldn’t find a job. I was lost in everything,” he told Bolts. “It was years later before I actually considered even thinking about voting.”

Glover eventually learned his rights and started working to engage others in democracy. Last year, he founded F.A.I.R Voting Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for more inclusive election procedures in Michigan, and this month he is celebrating a major legislative victory: The state is about to make it a lot easier for people who exit prison to end up on voter rolls. 

State lawmakers last week adopted House Bill 4983, which would put Michigan in a unique class. If signed by the governor, this would be the first law in the nation to require a state to register people to vote when they’re released from prison.

The state would later send people mail notifying them that they have been registered to vote, as well as giving them the option to decline and opt out of voter rolls. 

Michigan first adopted automatic voter registration in 2018 as part of Proposal 3, a ballot measure that voters overwhelmingly approved. The idea is for public agencies to leverage their existing interactions with citizens to register them to vote, relieving individuals of that burden and shifting it to the state. But, like in most of the other states that have set up this program, Michigan has only implemented it to add people to voter rolls when they get, renew, or update their driver’s licenses or state IDs.

HB 4983 would significantly expand automatic voter registration by ordering the Department of Corrections to implement it as well; at least 8,000 people are released from state prison each year in Michigan, according to the secretary of state’s office. The bill would also bring other agencies into the program, building on steps that a few states have already taken to register people when they obtain a Native American tribal ID, or when they sign up for Medicaid. 

“We wanted to include more than just driver’s licenses so that we could really get people registered any time they’re interacting with our government, which includes Medicaid offices and the Department of Corrections,” state Representative Penelope Tsernoglou, the Democrat who sponsored the legislation, told Bolts. 

Tsernoglou was first elected in 2022 as part of a blue surge that delivered full control of Michigan’s state government to the Democratic Party for the first time since the 1980s. Democrats have passed a number of major voting bills this year, and HB 4983 itself is part of a broad voting-rights package that now awaits the signature of Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who has supported other efforts to expand ballot access. 

Voting rights advocates in Michigan say they’re confident she will sign these new reforms; her office would not specify her plans when asked by Bolts. 

These advocates wanted to build on the 2018 ballot initiative to expand its reach. “Prop 3 was a huge step in the right direction, but there were a lot of people not interacting [with a driver’s license office] so conversations since then really centered around how to reach people where they’re at,” said Ben Gardner, Michigan campaign manager for All Voting Is Local, a national organization. This bill also authorizes Michigan to still identify other public agencies in the future that could also automatically register people to vote.

Michigan is already better than most states at registering people to vote, but there are still hundreds of thousands of eligible Michiganders who aren’t registered—and that population includes disproportionate numbers of low-income people and people of color, voting rights advocates say. They’re confident that, if Whitmer signs the bill to strengthen automatic voter registration, it can expect to reach and sign up most of them. 

Besides applying automatic voter registration to more agencies, HB 4983 would also greatly change how the program works—even at driver’s license offices. 

Right now, Michiganders are asked whether they want to opt out of having the state register them to vote in the course of the transaction in which they’re getting or updating an ID. Under HB 4983, they would no longer be asked this question while conducting this other business; instead, they would later be sent a mailer at home, and they would have to return it if they wish to not be registered.

This is known as “back-end” automatic voter registration. Data from Colorado, which has also opted for such a model, show that this system dramatically reduces the share of people who choose to opt out. This year alone, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., have adopted similar legislation to switch from “front-end” to “back-end” models. Oregon’s bill, like Michigan’s, also extends its program to apply to Medicaid.

The Medicaid change comes with an asterisk, though: States cannot enact it without the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up such reforms. 

Asked about Michigan’s bill, the Biden administration told Bolts this week that it is reviewing the issue, echoing an earlier statement it shared with Bolts in July about Oregon’s bill.

“We recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) said in its new statement. “CMS is considering additional opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration while also ensuring compliance with Medicaid confidentiality requirements.” 

But Michigan would not need to wait for any approval to enlist its prison system into expanding voter rolls.

In fact, the state has already begun experimenting with this reform through administrative changes. According to the secretary of state’s office, Michigan has given people exiting any state prison the opportunity to register to vote since 2020, through a program that helps them obtain a state ID as they re-enter society. 

HB 4983 would substantially build on that administrative effort, codifying it into law to make it a requirement for the DOC to register people. It’d also expand it to anyone released from prison independent of an ID program, and switch the procedure to a back-end model.

Michigan is particularly well positioned to leverage the point at which people leave prison to register to vote, since it’s among 24 states where people regain the right to vote as soon as they exit the prison, without any of the long waiting periods or onerous additional conditions that many other states impose. (In Maine and Vermont, plus D.C., anyone can also vote from prison) 

Erica Peresman, a voting rights attorney in Michigan, told Bolts that many formerly incarcerated people are currently disinclined to register because they’re worried about whether they’re allowed. 

“They’d be afraid of doing something wrong,” said Peresman, who is senior advisor at the Michigan nonprofit Promote the Vote. “We’d be out there at voter registration drives and people would say, ‘no, I have a felony on my record.’ They didn’t want to get in trouble, and they weren’t necessarily going to listen to some lady standing on the street with a clipboard.”

HB 4983 would solve some of that problem; formerly incarcerated people would no longer have to wonder whether it’s safe to register because the state would automatically do that for them and send them a mailer. 

Still, advocates say Michigan should go further. The state will need a “massive voter education effort” to complement the new policy, said Peresman, who warns that many who stand to be affected by the state’s recent expansions to voter rights may still not realize that they’ve been registered, or that that they could take advantage of new voting procedures like vote-by-mail

Tsernoglou, the bill’s sponsor, agrees. She wanted the legislature to also pass another bill that would have required the Department of Corrections to provide people with specific information about their voting rights. That bill, HB 4534, would have required prison officials to tell people who exit incarceration that they are eligible to vote, how to obtain a mail ballot, and when elections are held in Michigan. (The secretary of state’s office says it already provides some of this info to people leaving prison; HB 4534 would expand and codify enshrine that in law.)

The bill did not pass either chamber before the legislature adjourned last week. “I think that bill would be a prime example of something we could do additionally, next year,” Tsernoglou told Bolts. 

Another issue that the reform will likely run into is that some people who leave prison don’t have a stable address to provide. Khyla Craine, deputy legal director in the secretary of state’s office, told Bolts that her office allows people with unstable housing situations to update their addresses online; the state would work with parole and probation officers, plus community organizations like Percy Glover’s, to make sure people know how to do this, she said.

Glover said that a bill like HB 4983 can only go so far if the state does not also step up its investment in the success of people re-entering society, ensuring they have access to jobs and housing. 

“Voter economics is real,” he said. “If you are impoverished, you are not thinking about an election, and most people leaving a prison are not walking into a strong financial position. Finding somewhere to live, having transportation, having basic needs met—that’s the priority.”

The plan to automatically register people leaving prison is “very important,” he added, “but we won’t see significant turnout, as we should, without all these other layers.”

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