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.

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.

Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics.

Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars.

“I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

As part of an event celebrating Juneteenth, Arrington sat on a panel to discuss prison labor, which panelists referred to as the last frontier of slavery in the United States. While the 13th Amendment of 1865 formally abolished chattel slavery, it legally remained as a punishment for crime.

Michael Gibson-Light, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Denver and author of the book “OrangeCollar Labor: Work and Inequality in Prison,” said during the panel that “slavery was not abolished” with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, “it just changed. It evolved, it transformed.” 

“Laws popped up that made it easier and easier for criminal legal institutions to continue to literally capture and extract the labor of the very same people whose labor was extracted under chattel slavery,” he added. “But now, the justifications were different. They had to do with law-breaking. They had to do with vagrancy. They had to do, eventually, with drug use.”

In 2018, after years of community organizing, Colorado sparked a national movement when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment A, a ballot measure that deleted half a sentence from the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Colorado was the first state to do so since the signing of the 13th Amendment. Since Colorado removed its language, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Alabama, and Tennessee have followed suit with similar constitutional amendments. Organizers in around a dozen more states are now pushing to get similar ballot measures in front of voters during the 2024 elections. 

“This is a fast-moving train,” said Kamau Allen, the lead Colorado organizer and the co-founder of the Abolish Slavery National Network.

But in some ways, Colorado’s Amendment A only abolished prison slavery on paper. That’s because the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has continued to punish those who refuse to work. Since 2018, there have been at least 727 documented instances where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work, according to a 9News investigation this past summer, with punishment ranging from changes in housing to loss of privileges and delayed parole.

Now, some of the same organizers who crafted Amendment A are hoping to strengthen the state’s anti-slavery law through litigation. A lawsuit filed against Polis and his Department of Corrections in state court last year contends that compulsory labor in prison under threat of punishment and coercion violates the amendment approved in 2018. The plaintiffs, two incarcerated men who say they were punished for refusing work assignments that increased the risk to their health during the pandemic, are seeking a permanent injunction requiring Colorado prisons to “cease requiring compulsory labor” and a court order “declaring unconstitutional the statutes and regulations that mandate incarcerated people must work against their will.” 

Advocates said the lawsuit—and their organizing efforts outside the court—are focused on banning forced labor, not whether incarcerated people have opportunities and incentives to work behind bars. They say they are not trying to get rid of prison work programs. 

“That’s never been the intent,” said Kym Ray, a community organizer with Together Colorado who helped draft Amendment A. “People do want to work, they want the opportunity to earn money.”

“The intent is to give people the choice,” she added.

Today, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion each year in goods and commodities, and over $9 billion in services for the maintenance of the very prisons that confine them—all while being paid pennies an hour or nothing at all, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. Their labor enables mass incarceration by offsetting the cost of the country’s ballooning prison system, which has grown by 500 percent over the last 50 years.

State and local governments rely heavily on incarcerated workers for various needs: highway and road work; cleaning governors and mayoral estates; maintenance of hiking trails; making furniture for state and government buildings, including for public universities; and even doing hospital laundry. Incarcerated workers also conduct vital public services during times of crisis, from fighting wildfires to making personal protective equipment throughout the pandemic.

“It’s a massive labor force that is completely hidden from view,” Gibson-Light told Bolts. “And that’s by design.”

In addition to off-setting costs for federal, state and local governments, approximately 4,100 companies in the U.S. have directly profited off of prison labor, a number that is likely an undercount—including large companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, IBM, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, according to a database created by the advocacy organization Worth Rises.

“A lot of people are making a lot of money off the system,” said Arrington, who has worked for the reentry nonprofit, Second Chance Center, since his release. “It is no different than it was 200 years ago.” 

Nationally, the minimum wage for incarcerated workers is anywhere from $0 to 35 cents an hour, according to an ACLU report. Some jobs can pay more than a dollar an hour, but those jobs are rare. The pay for people incarcerated in Colorado prisons ranges from 33 cents to more than $2 an hour for some jobs. At least nine states—Maine, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida—pay incarcerated people nothing for almost all prison jobs. 

Gibson-Light says better wages alone don’t address the main problem with prison slavery: forced labor under threat of punishment.

“Had, in the 1800s, Abe Lincoln said, ‘Everyone who was enslaved in the Confederate States shall now be given three cents a day,’ the abolitionists of the time would not have been satisfied,” he said. “There’s a reason it’s the Emancipation Proclamation, not the compensation proclamation. It’s not a question about wages. The question is about freedom.”

Valerie Collins, an attorney with Towards Justice, the nonprofit worker’s rights law firm that is representing the incarcerated workers who sued in Colorado, told the crowd at the Juneteenth event that’s precisely why their case doesn’t make arguments about wages.

“In a lot of ways, that kind of muddies the water,” Collins said. “We did not bring wage claims …to keep the focus on the forced nature of the work itself, in the coercion that is used to extract that labor.”

That strategy differs from the one advocates took in 2020, when four incarcerated people filed a lawsuit against the state contending that the 10 cents an hour they were making amounted to “slave wages.” The men asked for minimum wage and to be considered state employees and receive worker benefits such as sick leave and medical benefits, but a state judge dismissed their claims.

The current lawsuit was filed on behalf of Harold Mortis and Richard Lilgerose, who are both incarcerated at the Fremont Correctional Facility in Canon City. It alleges that the men were disciplined for refusing to work in the prison’s kitchen during the COVID-19 pandemic due to existing physical and mental health conditions. ​​A correctional officer threatened that Mortis would be removed from his incentive living program if he didn’t work in the kitchen, according to the lawsuit. When he refused, they removed two days of his earned time—extending his time in prison. Similarly, Lilgerose lost four days of earned time and was threatened with losing more privileges such as recreation time and visitation for refusing to work.

Colorado Department of Corrections policies state, “All eligible offenders are required to work unless assigned to an approved education or training program.” Consequences for refusing to work can include “restricted privileges, loss of other privileges, delayed parole hearing date, and not being eligible for earned time”—all the things incarcerated people use to “better or maintain your body and your mind,” Gibson-Light said. Attorneys for the state of Colorado have argued that they are “incentivizing work” and not forcing it. 

“Many programs provide certified classroom education, apprenticeships, and certificates as well as on-the-job training and experience in a variety of in-demand industries,” a CDOC spokesperson said in a written statement to Bolts. “In addition to technical skills, our programs also teach critical soft skills that help prepare inmates to interact professionally with others in a work setting. These skills help contribute to the successful rehabilitation of inmates.”

State prison systems typically justify forcing people to labor for little to no money under the threat of punishment by claiming the work is rehabilitative. But often, the jobs on the inside don’t translate to opportunities on the outside. 

“​​We’re talking about full internal labor markets with lots of different jobs: stamping license plates, making street signs, cleaning trails, raking rocks, building prison walls, operating call centers, repairing and maintaining vehicles, janitorial work, and anything and everything in between,” Gibson-Light said. “On the surface, it sounds like ‘Oh, there’s so many opportunities.’ (But) they do not align with the realities of the labor market,” he added. “You can be a barber and make good money, but you get out and you can’t get a barber license if you have a record.”

Groups in Colorado first organized and got a constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2016, but it failed by a slim margin, with 50.4 percent of voters choosing to leave the language alone. 

“When we woke up to Donald Trump being president, we also woke up and found out that Colorado voted to keep slavery,” Allen recalled.

In 2018, a coalition of organizations tried again, this time putting a bill in front of lawmakers to get it on the ballot. The bill passed unanimously. Then, in preparation for the question going in front of voters, organizers went door to door and held film screenings in churches across the state showing the 2016 documentary “13th” by Ava DuVernay, which explores the historical connection between slavery and mass incarceration.

The 2018 amendment passed overwhelmingly, with 65 percent of voters approving it. Ray, who worked on both amendment campaigns, says the vote, while decisive, still points to a large number of Coloradans willing to tolerate a form of slavery. “Obviously, that goes to show (that) we’ve got some more work to do,” Ray said. “We haven’t all arrived.”

After they won, the calls started to flood in from organizers across the country looking to make the same change in their own states. 

Like in Colorado, the push has been an uphill battle for other states. After failing to get lawmakers to put the issue on the ballot in 2021, organizers in Louisiana tried again in 2022 and got a bill through both legislative chambers, setting up a fall referendum. But it ultimately failed.

“People were like, ‘No, slavery was abolished in 1865!’ Meanwhile, I’m over here pickin’ cotton,” said Curtis Davis, the executive director for Decarcerate Louisiana who advocated for the measure by talking about his own experiences while he was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Davis says he thought he had rights and tried to refuse when he was sent to pick cotton within his first week of being locked up in 1990. “The guy just pointed his shotgun at me,” he recalled. “The guy told me, ‘You gave up your rights when you got convicted.”

Later, Davis says he purposely dropped a weight on his foot so he didn’t have to work 12 hours in the scorching Louisiana sun. As punishment, he recalls being sent to solitary confinement and was written up for “damaging state property.” He says removing the slavery exception is about, “Treating people as people, not property.”

Some of the measure’s champions, including the ACLU of Louisiana and Representative Edmond Jordan, a Baton Rouge Democrat who sponsored the amendment, eventually pulled their support during the 2022 campaign. They said the version that had made it before Louisiana voters was too ambiguous after legislative dealmaking diluted the language. Voters at the ballot box were asked, “Do you support an amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude except as it applies to the otherwise lawful administration of criminal justice?” 

In the face of that confusion, the amendment failed by a large margin, 61 to 39 percent.

During the 2023 legislative session, a bill to put the amendment on the ballot again this year passed the House but died in the Senate. “We are just keeping on going,” Davis said to Bolts. “We are like that little energizer bunny.”

Even if voters in more states pass constitutional amendments that end the exception for prison slavery, Gibson-Light says that elected leaders and officials across all levels of government have an incentive to oppose meaningful changes to prison labor. 

“If (incarcerated workers) were regarded and protected and compensated like real workers, which they are, the state would go bankrupt,” he added. “And I think that’s an important part of the underlying story.”

In October 2022, a state district judge hearing the lawsuit over forced labor in Colorado prisons ruled that the threat of isolation or physical punishment could be deemed unconstitutional, but also concluded that CDOC’s practice of taking away privileges such as good time may be allowable, according to 9News. The lawsuit is still pending.

Advocates who pushed to end the slavery exception say they are looking for other ways to improve prison work conditions that go beyond giving incarcerated people the choice of whether to work at all. Ray with Together Colorado says she wants better access to work programs that have connections to employers on the outside; better wages to help incarcerated people support themselves and their families; banning the use of solitary confinement, which has been used to punish people for refusing to work; and giving incarcerated people more worker protections.

“Many of them are up on roofs doing roofing with zero experience,” she added. “We are meeting folks who have lost fingers because they’re working on faulty equipment or equipment that they haven’t even been properly trained on.”

Arrington recently earned his aircraft mechanic license from the Federal Aviation Administration—the same one he was studying for when he was wrongly incarcerated. He’s moving out of state with his wife to pursue his career but plans to continue fighting to abolish prison slavery.

For now, Arrington and other organizers in Colorado have turned their attention to Polis, urging him to use his authority to force CDOC to change their policies. Organizers under the unifying title, End Slavery Colorado, asked to meet with the governor to discuss prison slavery last month, but as of this writing, they haven’t heard back. The governor’s office declined a request for comment for this story, citing the pending legislation. 

“(Polis) could end it tomorrow,” Arrington told the crowd on Juneteenth. “He could stop fighting slavery in court and actually be accountable for the thing that 65 percent of us told him we wanted to do.”

The post Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery  appeared first on Bolts.

Lawmakers in Oregon, a state that already leads the nation in electoral engagement, adopted legislation this summer that would make voting even more inclusive. If it is signed into law by the state’s Democratic governor, House Bill 2107 would instruct state Medicaid offices to automatically register people to vote when they open or renew a health plan. 

The bill could add tens of thousands of people to voter rolls by allowing the Oregon Health Authority to forward basic information it collects from people applying for Medicaid coverage—age, residence, and citizenship status—to election officials. These officials would then use it to register anyone who is eligible to vote and but not already signed up to do so.

This process, which would still give people the chance to decline being registered, is nearly identical to Oregon’s existing system of automatically registering people. But that system only applies at the Driver and Motor Vehicle Services department, leaving out Oregonians who don’t visit the DMV. 

“Voter registration shouldn’t be dependent on going to the DMV, because not everybody does,” said Isabela Villarreal, policy director for Next Up Action Fund, a group that helped bring automatic voter registration to Oregon in 2015, explaining that lower-income and younger Oregonians are less likely to use DMV services. “We just want to make sure we’re capturing every single person and allowing them to participate.”

According to the secretary of state’s office, 85 percent of all Oregonians who are not registered are enrolled in Medicaid, a program that serves people living near or below the federal poverty line. That’s roughly 170,000 people in this state of 4.2 million who could be added to the voter rolls if the state began automatically registering Medicaid recipients. 

“This is a critical opportunity to register people that have been historically and currently excluded from our electoral systems,” Villarreal said.

The reform, however, comes with a catch: It would not actually change anything unless Oregon wins the blessing of the federal government, which for years has held up similar proposals in other states and told Bolts it’s still reviewing the issue. Medicaid is a program administered by states but regulated by the federal government, which largely bars a state’s Medicaid office from disclosing information to other agencies without the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ authorization.

Colorado, for one, adopted a reform similar to Oregon’s in 2019, only to see the federal agency that administers Medicaid stall its application over privacy concerns. Colorado’s secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, shared her frustration with Bolts last week, saying she struggles to even get answers from federal officials. “It would be great for Colorado to implement it,” she said. “We should be working to streamline people’s interactions with the government.”

Advocates for expanding voter registration hope that the growing number of states seeking to automatically register Medicaid recipients will motivate the Biden administration to revisit its stance and greenlight new  reforms in Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere.

Oregon eight years ago became the first state to adopt automatic voter registration, or AVR, and today similar systems exist in almost half of U.S. states. The design differs greatly by state, but the core idea is simple: Instead of expecting people to take proactive steps to register, a government agency uses the information they already collect to register people, while still giving them an opportunity to opt out. 

AVR has been proven to boost registration and turnout, and make the electorate more diverse. In Oregon, roughly 94 percent of eligible residents are now registered to vote. 

But in Oregon, as in many states, AVR is limited to people who visit the DMV, an agency with which many people, especially low-income residents, just don’t interact. Oregon voting rights advocates say this helps explain why nearly 200,000 eligible voters in the state—roughly 6 percent of the voting-eligible population—remain unregistered. They’re hoping that reaching Medicaid recipients gets the state closer to universal registration.

Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections at Common Cause, a national voter advocacy organization, says including Medicaid recipients would make AVR systems far more inclusive. 

“These are the people who generally fall through the cracks in our voter registration system: people who might be more transient, people who are less affluent, people who are unable to take time off work to go vote, older individuals who don’t have their documentation in order,” she told Bolts. “These are the type of people that, in general, face more barriers to the ballot. If we can reach those people with something like this, I don’t see a reason why we wouldn’t.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, who has until late July to take action on HB 2107, did not respond to questions for this story. Local observers told Bolts they expect she will sign the legislation.

Several other states, including Colorado, Massachusetts, Nevada and New Mexico, have already had the same idea and passed legislation to extend AVR systems to government health programs. “The DMV seemed like the big first place to get the most people registered,” Griswold, the secretary of state of Colorado, told Bolts. “We believe Medicaid is that second place.”

But the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency housed within HHS that oversees the Medicaid program, has left most of those states in limbo for years. Oregon may be next, as state officials there say HB 2107 cannot be implemented without CMS authorization. 

CMS rules bar state Medicaid agencies from using or disclosing client data for purposes that are not directly connected to the Medicaid program, but a state can request a waiver to implement a specific proposal, or ask CMS to determine that the way in which it plans to use the data is indeed legitimately connected to health care administration. Medicaid law experts say the prohibition exists to protect people from having their information used against them—police can’t turn to Medicaid for a person’s last known address, for instance, nor can prosecutors in states that punish abortion patients.

Colorado’s attempt to implement AVR through Medicaid has gone nowhere since 2019, first under the Trump administration through early 2021, and then under the Biden administration. When Colorado U.S. Senator Michael Bennet wrote a letter to CMS last year imploring the agency to green-light Colorado’s reform, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote back that the agency “had previously concluded that [the state’s proposal] appears to be inconsistent with the Medicaid privacy protections in current laws and regulations.” 

But Brooks-LaSure, who was nominated to the position by President Biden, also referred to an executive order Biden issued soon after his inauguration directing all agency heads to “evaluate ways in which the agency can, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, promote voter registration and voter participation.” Brooks-LaSure added that CMS is “exploring opportunities to enhance Medicaid’s role in promoting voter registration.”

CMS told Bolts in a statement on Monday that “this issue is under review.”

CMS did not say whether it had reached any new conclusion since Brooks-LaSure’s letter to Bennet more than a year ago. When Bolts first reached out to CMS seeking clarity, the agency said in a statement that AVR systems “may” breach Medicaid’s confidentiality rules but a CMS spokesperson reached out days later to say the agency’s initial response had been rushed and “provided in error,” and reflected the view of the Trump administration. The agency then issued another statement that kept the door open to new state initiatives.

“In keeping with the President Biden’s Executive Order directing federal agencies to promote access to voting, we recognize the importance of state Medicaid agencies assisting in expanding voter access and registration activities for the populations they serve,” CMS said. 

CMS did not reply to follow-ups requesting more information about its review process.

The picture gets fuzzier considering Medicaid services are already automatically registering people in Massachusetts. States Newsroom reported last week that the state had seen a large jump in registration as a result. 

Michelle Tassinari, an attorney in the Massachusetts Secretary of State’s office, told Bolts she is confident that the state is compliant with federal rules because Massachusetts asks people, during their initial interactions with the health agency, if they’d prefer that their information not be used for the purpose of voter registration. Washington state also registers people through its health agency using a similar approach, a process known as “front-end” AVR. 

Automatic voter registration looks different in Oregon, as well as in Colorado. Instead of being asked if they want to opt out of registering during their transaction with an agency, prospective voters receive a mailer later on; they must respond to it if they do not wish to be registered. Data show that this approach, known as a “back-end” system, registers many more people to vote than when people are asked up-front, and more states have been switching to this model.

CMS did not answer Bolts’ questions when asked if these design distinctions were relevant to how the federal government is assessing state-level AVR programs. 

This confusion reflects what officials in the states that are in limbo have experienced. 

Griswold told Bolts that she’d be happy to hear the federal agency’s specific concerns and reach a workable solution, including by adjusting the exact design of Colorado’s system, but that CMS hasn’t even created the opportunity or shared precise feedback.

“We do not see a big difference between AVR at the DMV versus at Medicaid offices,” Griswold said. “If CMS thinks there’s a big difference, we can always address that in the law, we can go back and tighten the law if they want. But they need to give us guidance.”

Griswold doesn’t dispute the importance of protecting privacy but she believes this isn’t that complicated or fraught. “I think you can design the system where states never interact with the underlying data,” she said. “We do not need to know anything about people’s medical information, nor do we want to know that information.”

Other election experts also point out that the design of existing AVR systems already integrates privacy protections. The goal, they say, is to make use of data the government already collects without weaponizing it.

“If it’s administered correctly, I don’t see it being any different than [automatic voter registration] through the DMV,” Lacey Donaldson, the elected clerk in Pershing County, Nevada, and the head of that state’s county clerk association, told Bolts. Nevada’s plans for automatic registration of Medicaid recipients is also in limbo due to CMS.

One difference between the DMV and health services is that Medicaid recipients interact with the state more frequently. In Oregon, Medicaid recipients must renew their plans and update their information—including their mailing address—annually, whereas many people go years without visiting the DMV. This means that administering an AVR system through Medicaid would be likelier to keep voter rolls up-to-date.

“This is a win-win-win-win for lots of different people,” says Amber McReynolds, a national expert in election procedures who was appointed to the U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors by Biden. “The people who want to make sure more people are registered to vote, for people who care about making sure voters addresses are accurate, for people who want more efficient government. It’s one of these concepts I always think that everybody should like.”

In Oregon, the concept was championed by Shemia Fagan while she was secretary of state. Fagan, a Democrat, resigned in May after Willamette Week revealed she’d been accepting lucrative consultant payments from cannabis entrepreneurs who have been top donors to her political career. Still, the legislation passed based on strong support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers; Republicans opposed the legislation. 

Other states may soon join the CMS waiting chamber. A new bill introduced last month in New Jersey proposes expanding that state’s AVR system to include Medicaid services.

“We’re hopeful that CMS will reconsider its reading of the law, which we think is currently incorrect,” Griswold said. “State pressure is mounting.”

The post Oregon Wants to Register Medicaid Recipients to Vote. Will Biden Officials Allow It? appeared first on Bolts.

House Bill 1100, which Democratic Governor Jared Polis signed Tuesday, directs local governments to “eliminate involvement in immigration detention.” It will ensure the end of detention agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Teller and Moffat counties, the last two places in the state with contracts where ICE pays to warehouse arrestees in local jails. The law calls for these agreements to terminate by next year, and also bans state and local governments from participating in any scheme to detain immigrants with a private prison company.

Experts expect the move to force federal immigration officials to rethink overall enforcement strategy in the state, and ultimately to reduce civil immigration detention there. 

“It’s definitely a huge win,” said the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition’s Nayda Benitez, who is undocumented but shielded from deportation by the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. “This fight, ensuring that there is limited collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement agencies, is one we’ve fought for years, and this is another step forward.”

It’s estimated more than 150,000 people, or about 3 percent of Colorado residents, are living in the state without authorization. Advocates and lawyers trying to shield that population from incarceration and deportation have recently charted a series of victories: since 2019, when Democrats took control of state government, Colorado has, among other changes, banned local law enforcement from arresting or jailing someone on the basis of a civil immigration detainer; banned ICE from arresting people on courthouse grounds; allowed non-citizens to obtain driver’s licenses; and opened state housing benefits to all residents, regardless of immigration status.

Backers of this latest law, HB 1100, say it is particularly important for people in and around Teller County who live in fear of contacting law enforcement when they are victims of or witnesses to a crime because of immigration status. Teller County reports close to 600 immigrants have been detained there since 2019; the vast majority of those detentions came during the Trump administration, when ICE more aggressively pursued civil immigration violations.

Benitez told Bolts that Teller County, which sits just west of Colorado Springs, has long been viewed as a hostile place for immigrants, and that she hopes HB 1100 offers that community a greater sense of security.

“People that are traveling there, that are in the area, know that you just have to be careful because that county does work with ICE,” Benitez said. “It’s an extra level of precaution; there’s ICE presence throughout the state, but not all counties have contracts with ICE or a motivation to possibly detain people. … If I’m with my family in Teller County, we drive as carefully as we can. I don’t really stay that long when I’m there.”

Though Moffat County, in far northwest Colorado, also maintains a detention contract with ICE, immigrant rights advocates say enforcement is not nearly as aggressive in that area and that HB 1100 more specifically targeted Teller County. 

Representative Lorena Garcia, a Democrat and lead sponsor of the law, told Bolts, “My understanding, from when we spoke with the Moffat County sheriff, is that their contract is worth maybe $10,000 to $12,000 a year. If they are using it, it’s a very limited amount.” (The sheriff’s office did not return Bolts’ request for comment, and ICE’s own year-end detention statistics don’t mention Moffat County.)

Garcia and others who worked to pass the law hope that, beyond limiting local involvement in immigration detention, it will also make people feel safer reporting crimes.

“I was a victim of domestic violence. I was silent for years because I did not have the courage to ask the police for help, for fear they will work with ICE and detain me,” Milagro Chavez, an unauthorized immigrant in Colorado, told state lawmakers during a legislative hearing earlier this year, through a translator. 

While people in immigration detention are accused of civil violations, they are often treated as criminals in local lockups, several families told Bolts. 

Christina Zaldivar, whose husband, Jorge, has spent many years entangled with immigration enforcement, said he was arrested by ICE after a car crash. Though no one was hurt and Jorge was accused of no crime, he was eventually placed in Teller County’s jail, an hour from home, and made to wear a jumpsuit and live in a cell for three months. “Teller County has no business collaborating with ICE, and shouldn’t be receiving dollars for this,” Zaldivar said. “Shame on Teller County. Shame on Moffat County. How dare they?”

Ending agreements with ICE in Moffat and Teller Counties presents a strategic concern for federal immigration authorities. The contracts there gave ICE more options for detaining people across wider swaths of this largely rural and mountainous state, but the end of ICE agreements in those counties will leave just one immigration detention center in the state: a 1,500-capacity facility in Aurora just outside Denver, operated by the private-prison giant GEO Group. 

ICE’s former longtime director of enforcement and removal operations in Colorado and Wyoming, John Fabbricatore, predicted the law would lead to less immigration enforcement in the state. He recently told a state House committee that ICE would have to be more selective with fewer places to detain immigrants.

“We have pretty bad winters out here,” Fabbricatore, a 24-year ICE veteran who retired last year, told lawmakers during his testimony. “If you arrest somebody down in Durango with ICE, you would have to drive them from Durango all the way up to the GEO facility in Aurora during that ice storm, or go over mountain passes, or wherever, when now you could deliver them first to Teller County, hold them in Teller County.”

Colorado’s reform follows similar legislation in California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. New Mexico also considered banning local arrangements with ICE this year, but the proposal died in the state Senate in March. Mark Fleming, an associate director at the National Immigrant Justice Center and an advocate for HB 1100, said other states that have banned local ICE detention agreements have seen drops in overall enforcement.

“In states like Illinois, where I am, what we have noticed is that the number of people swept up into the pipeline for deportation goes drastically down,” Fleming told Bolts. “By passing this sort of legislation, we have forced ICE to prioritize its enforcement and it’s led to a drastic reduction of enforcement in the state. I’d suspect very similar patterns in Colorado.”

Up until the moment Polis signed the bill into law Tuesday night, advocates had feared that he would veto it. He was under pressure from Teller County officials to do so, and there is some precedent for Polis opposing legislative attempts to curtail ICE power. 

Polis, who founded schools for undocumented and immigrant children and strongly supported the DACA program while a member of Congress, as governor surprised and frustrated immigrant rights advocates in 2019 when, early in his first term, he forced lawmakers to cut legislation seeking to create “safe spaces” in places like churches and hospitals, where ICE could not make arrests.

Even as he signed HB 1100, Polis also issued an accompanying letter endorsing ICE as an agency with a “legitimate and important role in our state and in our nation,” and reiterating that “Colorado is not, nor should it be, a sanctuary state.”

Representative Garcia, the bill sponsor, said that the governor’s concerns with the bill sometimes veered from policy and into rhetoric. “One of the things he asked us is, ‘How is this going to not make me go against my promise to not make Colorado a sanctuary state?’” Garcia told Bolts.

Aurora City Councilmember Crystal Murillo, who represented the Colorado People’s Alliance in advocating for HB 1100, said “sanctuary,” in this context, is so undefined that it’s hard for advocates to know which policy proposals will or won’t cross the governor’s line. “I’m not sure what this means for his leadership in the immigration justice space,” Murillo said. “I know some of our coalition partners were happy to see that the bill was passed, but I guess concerned by what that signaling means for future immigration justice work in the state.”

In his letter accompanying the bill signing, Polis seemed to signal that he would oppose any future legislation to ban local governments from entering into 287(g) agreements, which are similar to the local detention agreements banned by the law he just signed. Unlike those agreements, the 287(g) program deputizes local law enforcement to act with ICE and on its behalf, including by making arrests. In Colorado, only Teller County has such a contract, and it’s been a matter of legal dispute for years between the ACLU and the county.

“All local governments should be free to determine how and when they work with federal immigration officials when it comes to immigration enforcement, and the state should never get in the way of efforts to enforce state or federal law,” Polis wrote.

The post Colorado Bans Local Governments From Jailing Immigrants for ICE appeared first on Bolts.

Their goal was to end the criminal prosecution of children under age 13 in Colorado, where, The Denver Post has reported, close to 1,000 kids that young are arrested annually. Colorado children as young as 10 are liable to face criminal charges—and then, often, plunge into prolonged cycles of contact with the court system—sometimes for minor actions like snapping a classmate’s bra strap or getting into a schoolyard tussle.

Three lawmakers—all women of color representing Denver—tried last year to shield preteens from prosecution and divert them to community programs outside the carceral system. Their proposal derailed amid law enforcement opposition and what its proponents saw as an unwillingness to hear out communities of color where children are most vulnerable to arrest. Heading into 2023, the coalition amended its approach: Two of the women who sponsored last year’s version stepped back, and in their place the group recruited three new male sponsors, two of them white Republicans. 

“We kind of had this idea that we can’t have only women of color dying on these hills again,” says Representative Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, the only lawmaker who stayed on as a prime sponsor both years. “We think that led to not being able to get it across the finish line, us having to validate our experience.”

Senator Cleave Simpson, one of the new Republican sponsors, says he was initially hesitant but was convinced to push for alternatives to criminal punishment for children that young. “To think about 10-, 11-, 12-year-old kids ending up in handcuffs,” he told Bolts, “I haven’t been touched like that by a policy conversation before.”

As the backers’ strategy changed, so did Colorado’s political landscape. Defying expectations of a red wave, voters in November instead strengthened Democrats’ control of Colorado’s state government, re-electing Governor Jared Polis in a blowout, expanding his party’s margins in both houses of the legislature, and further undercutting a diminished GOP’s ability to block progressive change. Heading into the 2023 session, the state’s Black and Latino legislative caucuses each identified the youth prosecution bill as formal priorities, more than 60 organizations signed on in support, and the coalition backing the bill held more than 100 meetings with people and groups invested in the topic, Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. 

Despite these favorable conditions, HB 1249 sputtered once more. It was gutted in the last days of the session and rewritten without most of its teeth. Lawmakers again declined to raise the minimum prosecution age, this time replacing the heart of the proposal with provisions for more funding to local social service providers and more data collection on post-arrest outcomes for children. 

The neutered bill was sent to the governor’s desk, where it still sits. Even its sponsors don’t see that as much of a win. 

“We’d checked all the boxes,” Gonzales-Gutierrez told Bolts. “We made it bipartisan. We had hundreds of stakeholding meetings. We met with DAs, who weren’t willing to give us substantial feedback. They said, ‘We don’t want to do this.’ From pretty early on, the governor’s office was in opposition; they wouldn’t even provide technical feedback. Everything was just a no.”

Dafna Gozani, an attorney with the National Center for Youth Law who helped advocate for the Colorado bill, echoed the disappointment. “Everybody forgets we’re talking about fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders,” she said. “It’s perplexing, particularly when you have a Democratic Party that runs on a platform of social justice.” 

The record of the 2023 legislative session in Colorado, which ended May 8, has led to profound frustration—boiling into public view—from more progressive-leaning lawmakers and state advocates who regret missed opportunities to pass headlining liberal policies.

Democratic legislation to allow cities to establish safe drug-use sites or rent control programs failed, as did proposals to ban assault weapons and install new protections for gig economy workers. Earlier this month, in the session’s final days, a pro-tenant bill meant to thwart evictions in which landlords haven’t proved cause to evict withered alongside a bill to study the idea of moving Colorado to single-payer health care system. 

Even when a bill makes it past the legislature, Polis’ pen can loom as an uncertain hurdle. The governor vetoed a bill last week that would have offered more transparency to people applying for executive clemency, helping them navigate the process even without attorneys.

Liberals did have reasons to celebrate as the legislature adopted some noteworthy policies they’d championed, including bills to strengthen protections for abortion and gender-affirming care, plus four gun-control policies. Criminal justice reformers also won passage of a law intended to help protect children from being tricked by law enforcement in police interrogations. 

Still, Representative Javier Mabrey, a newly-elected progressive, faults his party for doing less with more. “I think people know what they’re getting when they’re voting for Democrats: They’re going to do things for renters, do things to help working people, to fight for communities of color,” he told Bolts. He regrets that his party chose instead to frequently preserve the status quo. 

Gonzales-Gutierrez concurs: “It’s just a lot of the same.”

For reform bills this year, the Senate was the primary graveyard. Democrats there have many votes to spare, having expanded their majority since the last session by three seats to 23-12, but some of their senators resisted progressive priorities.

The youth prosecution bill passed the House but, in the frenzy of session’s end, its sponsors learned that they had lost too many Democrats to push it through the Senate; only one Senate Republican, Simpson, was willing to cross over in support. Several Capitol sources told Bolts that the governor was quietly threatening a veto while the bill was still intact. Simpson said he believes this made several lawmakers nervous they would “stick out their necks for nothing.” 

A Polis spokesperson told Bolts that the governor is still reviewing the bill before signing it, but that his concerns “were shared during the legislative process and were largely addressed by the sponsors and proponents.” The spokesperson declined to answer questions about Polis’ specific concerns. Opponents of the bill argued that diverting to social service providers would not be appropriate for serious offenses—ahead of the session, sponsors amended it to carve out homicide cases—and that the juvenile system is already equipped to provide services to preteens.

In another instance, HB 1202, which would have allowed the opening of Colorado’s first safe drug-use site, passed the House before dying in a Senate committee. Following that vote, progressive Senator Julie Gonzales said it was “incredibly disappointing” to see a public health response to overdoses falter despite “the broadest majorities that this state has seen in a generation.” 

Most Republicans opposed those reforms, but the GOP was largely relegated to spectatorship this session, watching intra-Democratic strife settle the fate of key legislation. Republicans are just one Senate seat away from superminority status in both chambers. “It’s always darkest before the dawn, but the problem is you don’t know when the dawn is going to come,” Republican Senate Minority Leader Paul Lundeen told Bolts. 

And many progressives believe that Democratic leaders followed their November romp by building infrastructure within the legislature to thwart progressive change. They cried foul on committee design weeks before lawmaking ever began.

In one instance, Dylan Roberts, a former prosecutor with a lengthy record of siding with law enforcement and Republicans to oppose bold criminal justice reforms, was named as one of the three Democrats on the state Senate’s Judiciary committee. With no vote to spare on any legislation opposed by the panel’s two Republicans, this arrangement seemed to virtually doom key legislation that Roberts did not support and alarmed reformers from the session’s outset, as Bolts reported in January.

On that committee, Roberts helped weaken, through amendments, bills to limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement and to examine the cost of policing and incarcerating drug activity in Colorado, among other legislation. Roberts played a decisive role in sinking the rent control bill when he sided with Republicans in committee.

And Judiciary was not the only chokehold, Mabrey says. He complains that the design of numerous Senate committees, including Appropriations and Finance, forced Democratic lawmakers to repeatedly cut into their own bills based on the opposition of centrists.

Steve Fenberg, the Senate’s Democratic president and a close ally to Polis, told Bolts there was no concerted effort by party leaders to thwart progressive policy. 

“Nothing was done to set up roadblocks,” he said. “Why would I do that? I’m a Democrat. I consider myself a progressive. I’m the leader of my caucus. Why would I do something that inherently tries to block my members’ priorities?”

Committee design came organically, he said, adding that members requested assignments based on their own backgrounds and interests, and that leadership did its best to accommodate them.

Fenberg said it’s irresponsible to read very far into the size of Democrats’ majorities. “I think people assume there’s 23 [Democrats in the Senate] and therefore they can pass anything they want,” he said. “We forget this sometimes, but people make decisions based on policy, and some of these bills didn’t have the support from what I would call progressive members of our caucus.  

“It shouldn’t just be, ‘Oh, we have this many Democrats, therefore any Democrat bill gets passed.’ I actually think that would be bad.”

Speaker Julie McCluskie, a moderate Democrat who leads the state House, echoes Fenberg’s assessment and says Democrats must continue at least trying to work with Republicans.

“We were each elected from our districts, and while the Democrats have a supermajority [in the House], I believe to my core that if we are going to craft lasting policy for this state we have an obligation and responsibility to hear from our own caucus, our Republican colleagues and from our districts,” McCluskie told Bolts. “I know that there were many Republicans that worked in a bipartisan way.” 

Steph Vigil, a Democrat who flipped a Colorado Springs House seat in November to become the first queer lawmaker from the red bastion of El Paso County, disagrees with legislative leaders and hopes they change their approach. “I respect the love for the institution to want it to be that way, but I think we’re dealing with some truly genocidal people,” said Vigil, pointing to racist and transphobic rhetoric and legislation from the GOP. 

“People asked us for something, they asked for us to be bold,” Vigil added. “You’re not here to make friends with people who wish you harm.”

But Fenberg cautions against his party going too far, too quickly. “Don’t underestimate what infighting and controversies within our own party can do,” he said. “If the Republicans want to get control, they have to get their shit together. … If we don’t get our shit together and we go down a path of polarization in our own party, that speeds up the process for Republicans.”

As lawmakers tried to keep the youth prosecution bill intact in the session’s final weeks, they were also pushing for HB 1042, a related bill meant to prevent police from lying to children during interrogations in order to secure information or guilty pleas. Deceitful interrogations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country, including in Colorado, the National Registry of Exonerations has found. 

When a previous version of HB 1042 derailed last year, Roberts was a rare Democrat to oppose it. So when he was promoted ahead of the session to being the swing vote on the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, reformers immediately sweated their proposal, and Roberts confirmed their fears in January when he told Bolts that he would oppose it again barring substantial amendments. From January to April, its sponsors agreed to a slew of changes that loosened the bill; they reluctantly signed off an amendment allowing for information or confessions obtained through deceitful interrogations to still be used against children in certain court settings, like hearings to determine bond or whether a child should be removed from their home. 

The bill’s backers also tried to make their effort seem less adversarial toward law enforcement, no longer using words like “lying” or “deception” in their marketing of the bill.

The changes were ultimately sufficient for the District Attorneys’ Council, a historically influential body that lobbies on behalf of state prosecutors, to drop its opposition, and for Roberts to support the bill. HB 1042 passed the legislature in April, and Polis—who, lawmakers say, was earlier quietly threatening a veto—signed it into law last week.

Progressive lawmakers have cheered passage of this bill, as the amended version remains closer to their original intent, in contrast to the youth prosecution bill. Still, they say even this victory came with more concessions than it should have, given the nature of the issue and Democrats’ enormous structural advantage, weakening the bill’s potential to shield kids from duplicitous tactics. 

Gozani, the youth justice attorney, was incarcerated in Colorado as a child. She says the experience was “traumatizing and incredibly damaging” and regrets that in the two decades since then, Colorado’s approach to youth has remained largely similar, and punitive. 

She hoped that HB 1249, the preteen prosecution bill, would chip into that system. After its clipping, Gozani isn’t sure if the coalition behind it will run their proposal again next year. With no legislative election this fall and the same Capitol leadership structure expected in 2024, it’s hard for reformers in this and other policy spaces to envision how exactly they achieve victory. 

Gozani has found that, regardless of partisanship, it’s difficult to convince people who never have experienced the juvenile system, or whose children never have, of the need to make that system less punishing. 

“A lot of folks have the luxury of never having to interact with the justice system,” she said. “For them, it’s very comfortable to continue a status quo that is extremely damaging.”

The post ‘Everything Was Just a No’: Progressives Frustrated After Colorado Legislative Session appeared first on Bolts.

The Democratic leadership appointed Dylan Roberts, an incoming state senator who built a voting record that was often hostile to reform legislation while a state representative, to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a powerful body that reviews and can kill bills that touch on the criminal legal system.

The committee will have three Democrats and two Republicans this session, putting Roberts in the likely position of a deciding swing vote on legislation that would reshape law enforcement, prosecution and incarceration. The panel, little-watched by the public and typically known for its long, esoteric legal debates, could become the graveyard of Democrats’ reform agenda.

Roberts told Bolts that he will approach criminal justice issues much like he did in the House. Last year, he was the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to vote against Senate Bill 23 to stop police from lying to children during interrogations in order to obtain information or secure guilty pleas, and House Bill 1131, which would have raised the minimum age for children to face criminal prosecution from 10 to 13. The former bill passed the Senate but fizzled dramatically on the House floor at the end of the session; the latter was gutted, replaced with a task force meant to explore the change.

The proposals were part of a years-long effort by advocates and some Democratic lawmakers to make Colorado law less punishing of young people, and the legislators who championed those bills say they’ll try again in 2023. But Roberts told Bolts that he stands by his votes. Barring substantial amendments, he said, he would not vote for either if and when they are reintroduced, which would be enough to doom them in committee in their intended forms. 

Colorado’s session opens Jan. 9 and runs until May. After gaining seven seats in November, Democrats now enjoy majorities of 23 to 12 in the Senate and 46 to 19 in the House, and so they will have many votes to spare when bills make it to the chamber floors. But they would have much less room for error in the Senate Judiciary Committee, as currently designed. Roberts’s opposition, for instance, would block the version of SB 23 that passed the Senate last year. (The other two Democrats on the committee are generally reliable progressives, while the two Republicans have seldom been open to progressive legislation.)

House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, who sponsored SB 23 and HB 1131 last session, told Bolts that she is frustrated by the Judiciary Committee’s upcoming make-up. She said she and like-minded lawmakers supported Roberts in his election to ensure Democrats held the Senate, but that feel should not have an effective veto over criminal justice legislation.

“I do think the Democrats need to have a conversation about what it means to be a Democrat, what it means that all these progressive people were just elected, and we still put all this power in the hands of a single white man,” said Bacon, a Black lawmaker from Denver.

Roberts was also the only Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to oppose a bill meant to raise arrest standards and lower jail populations, and the only one to not support indefinitely postponing a Republican bill to limit clemency applications, HB 1164, though he voted against passage. Last year, he was among a crowd of Democrats behind a successful push for the legislature to make simple possession of small amounts of fentanyl a felony.

Some at the Colorado Capitol say they do not believe that Roberts is inclined to behave as a one-man kill committee of progressive aspirations, but that they are unsure what to expect from him. He is clearly more conservative than most Democrats on criminal-legal issues but he has also voted for plenty of reform legislation in the past, they note. Roberts stood with his party in supporting a 2019 bill lowering criminal penalties for simple drug possession and a 2020 bill repealing the death penalty. 

Roberts told Bolts that his foremost mission is to represent the interests of Senate District 8, which covers mountain and rural communities in northwest Colorado. The district leans blue, though slightly less so than the state at large; it has a higher percentage of white residents than the state as a whole and a much lower incarceration rate than more urban, diverse parts of Colorado.

“I knocked on thousands of doors,” Roberts told Bolts, “and criminal justice reform did not come up, but public safety did. That’s something I’ll bring to mind when I approach these bills down in Denver.” He added, “We all represent our districts first, not our caucus first.”

Roberts told Bolts that, as of Jan. 2, zero Democratic lawmakers had approached him to discuss coming legislation on criminal-legal issues. “I think it’s pretty clear, when you have a three-to-two committee, that one vote either way is going to be the deciding vote,” he said. “I understand and recognize that’ll be a consequential place to be in, but I hope my colleagues use it as an opportunity to engage me and the communities I represent on those policies.”

Senate Majority Leader Dominick Moreno, a Democrat who represents Denver’s north and west suburbs, told Bolts that Roberts, the only attorney in the Senate Democratic caucus, was a natural choice for the Judiciary Committee—but that he did not mean to build the committee such that the fate of legislation hinges on the vote of a single Democrat.

He said that Judiciary could have been expanded to a nine-member committee with six Democrats, which would have created breathing room around Roberts, but that “we couldn’t find another member of the caucus that was willing to serve in that capacity.” 

The legislature’s Judiciary Committees are known for taking on intense topics and deliberating at great length, which, Moreno said, makes them unappealing to many members who may already be quite busy. He added that he approached Senator James Coleman and Senator-elect Tony Exum about joining Judiciary, “but it didn’t really go anywhere.”

Moreno insisted that Senate leadership does not want the chamber’s Judiciary Committee to be a roadblock to progressive policy. “No one member by themselves will stand in the way of making meaningful criminal justice reform,” he said. 

Still, Moreno did not specify what the leadership may do for the committee to not sink progressive legislation. Committee assignments can change mid-session, either permanently or on short-term bases, but Moreno gave no indication of a Senate Judiciary personnel shakeup; he also stressed that expanding the size of a committee would be difficult at this stage. He did not say whether leadership may route certain bills that fit in the scope of Judiciary to other committees more likely to pass them.

Republican State Senator Bob Gardner, the ranking member of Senate Judiciary, told Bolts that committee placements aren’t made by mistake.

“I think the subtext of this one is that we will see criminal justice legislation come out of the committee that is moved more to the center, if it does come out of committee,” he said. “Or, we will see things that do not come out of the committee because they’re a bridge too far. That’s my hope.”

Progressive lawmakers say they won’t amend their 2023 agendas, even as they are keenly aware of the committee’s new power dynamics. 

Julie Gonzales, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and frequently sponsors anti-carceral legislation, said the Roberts assignment “changes nothing of the bills I’m planning to be a lead sponsor on.” Those include reruns of last year’s proposals to prevent cops from lying to kids in interrogations and to raise the minimum age of prosecution; currently, eight states have set that age above Colorado’s line of age 10.

Gonzales, a Democrat who represents parts of Denver and is the Senate majority whip, told Bolts, “Senator-elect Roberts’s record speaks for itself. I look forward to working with him.”

Roberts said he stands by his votes against those two bills. “I was hearing serious objection from my community,” including law enforcement and some advocates for crime victims, he said. Police groups and state prosecutors fought the changes last year because they said it would be harder for them to gather information to solve crimes or to use prosecution to steer children to treatments. 

Tristan Gorman, a lobbyist for the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, said stopping police from lying to children remains a high priority for reform advocates. 

“It’s still just as important as it was last year to protect kids, who are way more vulnerable to deception than adults, from making false confessions, and, in turn, reduce wrongful convictions,” she told Bolts. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is but one example of Democrats shying from leftward policy, despite deepened majorities that leave the party in control of 69 of 100 seats in the legislature. Colorado’s Joint Budget Committee and its House speakership, among other spots of major influence, are both controlled by Democrats notably more moderate than the Democratic caucuses overall. Democrat Jared Polis, a regular impediment to progressive legislation in Colorado on issues ranging from tax policy to immigrant protections, remains governor.

Progressives like Bacon find this all clarifying. 

“Last session, we over-relied on this excuse of the election, to temper ourselves,” Bacon said, referring to some Democrats’ worry that championing ambitious criminal justice reforms in an election year could backfire at the polls. “This year, that won’t be an excuse anymore, but already we have set ourselves up to extend the beliefs of last session, and that tells me where people are really at. We’ve set up actual infrastructure to keep us from these issues.”

The article has been corrected to note that Roberts voted against passage of HB 1164, the GOP-proposed clemency bill, while joining the GOP to oppose indefinitely postponing it.

The post Committee Appointment Threatens to Derail Criminal Justice Reforms in Colorado appeared first on Bolts.

Compared to the larger electorate that votes in a presidential or midterm year, off-cycle elections tend to see depressed turnout and draw a wealthier and whiter electorate, which can skew whose interests are spoken for in local politics, research shows.

“This reform makes it such that the power of the people is shared among the whole community,” Chelsea Castellano, an organizer who helped champion Ballot Question 2E to move city council elections in Boulder, Colorado, from odd- to even-numbered cycles, told Bolts. She said the status quo was “keeping voter turnout small and low and among certain groups that are typically pretty well represented on our council.” Question 2E passed easily, with almost two-thirds of the vote.

Election data show that turnout in Boulder hasn’t topped 51 percent in any of the odd-numbered years, when its municipal elections were held, between 2013 and 2021. In the even-numbered years of that same span, city turnout averaged 83 percent.

The drop-off is similarly dramatic in jurisdictions around the country that elect local leaders in odd-numbered years. In San Francisco, which also just passed a ballot measure to move its local elections to even-numbered years, turnout averaged 43 percent in off-cycle years but 80 percent in presidential election years.

Voters in nine other localities also approved measures this year to move their elections to even-year cycles, according to an analysis by Ballotpedia. They Include St. Petersburg, Florida; in King County (Seattle), Washington; and in San Jose, Long Beach, and five other California cities. 

This wave of changes came among a series of reforms to election procedures that voters approved last week with an aim of increasing voter participation and turnout. In Connecticut and Michigan, voters codified more days of early voting into state constitutions. Voters in Oakland, California passed two measures enabling noncitizen voting in certain elections and creating a public funding program that allows more voters to financially back candidates of their choice.  

In Boulder, Castellano and her allies hope that moving municipal elections away from off-cycles will engage more people of color, low-income earners, and students (Boulder is home to the University of Colorado), making for an electorate more reflective of the actual populace. Another local progressive organizer, former city council candidate Eric Budd, said he hopes this encourages candidates to run on issues that matter to a larger and more diverse set, as opposed to catering to the narrower group of off-cycle voters.

“Back when I was running,” in 2017, Budd said, “a lot of people were giving me the advice that you need to run a really moderate message, to appeal to homeowners.” Looking back at his own platform from that campaign makes him cringe, he added: “The way I was talking about occupancy limits was very guarded, the way I was talking about duplexes. … I think (2E passing) really shifts not only the people that are running, but the platforms that we’re running on.”

Budd and Castellano advocate for housing density and more flexible zoning as tools to build a larger, more transit-oriented housing stock in the name of climate action and improved socioeconomic and racial diversity, and to address the unaffordability of Boulder, where the median home listing tops $1 million. The other, unofficial political party in Boulder has worked to beat back density and development, prizing so-called “neighborhood character” above affordability strategies and has dominated most of the modern era until recently. The pro-density urbanists previously battled the city council to place a measure on the ballot to relax occupancy limits in Boulder, then lost in the off-cycle 2021 election. Budd said they started organizing for 2E three days after that defeat.

John Tayer, head of the local chamber of commerce, which took a neutral position on Question 2E, believes that progressives are more likely to hold onto power moving forward, with the help of voters more likely to turn out in the city’s new even-year election cycle. “There’s no question that this will—and I think it’s the intended purpose of the initiative—draw out a voter pool that would skew toward the youth, lower-income and renter populations, which would then probably align with candidates of a similar character,” Tayer told Bolts.

Opponents of 2E argued that off-cycle elections mean an electorate that is more involved. “Maintain an informed vote!” argued one longtime council member in the opinion pages of Boulder’s Daily Camera newspaper. Similar cries echoed from opponents of various related measures around the country.

For evidence that a larger and more diverse electorate can indeed change political makeup, the pro-2E organizers have looked to cities like Berkeley, California, and Ann Arbor, Michigan—like Boulder, two wealthy, small cities with major universities, where municipal elections have flipped from odd- to even-numbered years.

In Ann Arbor, this change has had the effect of wiping out all council members who strongly resist housing density and development. That city also requires partisan markers for local candidates which means that, in even-numbered years with higher turnout, conservatives have an even harder time winning in the liberal stronghold. One former Ann Arbor council member, a longtime Republican, said in 2020 that she registered as a Democrat just to have a chance. She lost by 20 percentage points that year. (Boulder’s elections remain non-partisan, though there are so few Republicans in town that one needn’t squint to discern most candidates’ affiliations based on their policy proposals.)

Surveying the nation, researchers at the University of California, San Diego found shifts in power are not surprising, given the “unequivocal” finding that, “Across the nation, turnout in cities with on-cycle elections is dramatically higher than those with off-cycle elections.” Moving municipal elections to presidential years produces an average turnout boost of 29 percent, the researchers wrote, as higher-profile races draw more people to ballot boxes in those years.

Inspired by this data and the passage of 2E, Colorado state Representative Judy Amabile, a Democrat of Boulder, told Bolts she is now working on a bill to lift the state prohibition on school board elections in even-numbered years. 

And just to the east, in the city of Aurora, progressive council member Juan Marcano is pushing for changes that he believes will better align the local government with its broader citizenry. Aurora, with a population of nearly 400,000 people and greater racial and ethnic diversity than any other city in the state, is clearly liberal: Its congressman, U.S. Representative Jason Crow, is a Democrat who just coasted to reelection. Its state legislative delegation is almost entirely Democratic. And yet the city council, elected in non-partisan races in odd-numbered years, is controlled by conservatives. In the most recent municipal election there, turnout was only at 30 percent, city data show. Nearly three times as many registered Aurora voters turned out for the 2020 presidential election, the Sentinel newspaper reported.

Aurora has had some exceptionally close local elections in recent years—most notably, the former Republican U.S. Representative Mike Coffman won the 2019 mayoral race by about 200 votes over Democratic local NAACP chapter president Omar Montgomery—and Marcano believes his side stands a good chance at flipping power in November of 2023. If it does, he said, he’d like to refer to voters amendments to the city charter that would make local elections partisan and place them on even-numbered years. 

“They know that if we had the opportunity to actually have more attention shown to municipal elections, coinciding with when more people are turning out, that they would likely not prevail, to put it politely,” Marcano told Bolts. “They’re relying on low turnout and the disproportionate white, wealthy and conservative voters that turn out for municipal elections.”

The idea, he said, is to meet voters where they’re at. He likened it to designed sidewalks and bike trails.

“You’re going to find the social trails out in the world, and that tells you where the sidewalks should be,” Marcano said. “What we’re seeing from our residents is they want to vote in even years. That’s when they turn out, so it’s our responsibility to allow people to follow the path of least resistance and to be heard when they want to be heard.”

Marcano won his race, in 2019, by 232 votes, or less than 2 percent. The state representative whose district roughly overlaps with his Aurora ward, a Democrat named Iman Jodeh, just won re-election by 28 percentage points.

Those striking numbers aren’t lost on Republican Dustin Zvonek, an Aurora council member who opposes even-numbered and partisan local elections. He said such changes would make municipal politics less personal and more nationalized, and rob city campaigns of the spotlight they presently enjoy during off-cycle elections.

“If you’re just about getting partisan majorities, I understand why you’d want to do this,” he told Bolts. “You can say there are more people that vote overall, so that’s better. But I guess it depends on what you’re looking for.”

Were Aurora to make the moves Marcano seeks, Zvonek added, there is little question that this liberal city with conservative local leaders would elect a more progressive council. “I absolutely believe that,” he said.

The post To Boost Turnout, Some Cities Just Synced Up Their Local Elections With National Cycles appeared first on Bolts.

Voters in Maryland and Missouri supported proposals to allow for the regulated sale of marijuana for non-medical purposes, joining 19 other U.S. states that have already done so. However, similar proposals in Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota all were shot down by comfortable margins.

Also, ten years to the week since Colorado and Oregon became the first two states to legalize recreational pot, Colorado voters are poised to approve a measure that removes criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. Oregon went first on this front, passing a ballot measure decriminalizing those substances in 2020. 

“The more public dialogue there is on drug policy issues, the more sensible the policy outcomes are,” said Mason Tvert, a policy expert and industry advocate who co-directed Colorado’s landmark 2012 campaign to legalize non-medical cannabis use. 

“As we saw in North Dakota, South Dakota and Arkansas, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Most people alive right now have lived the vast majority of their lives in a world where cannabis was entirely illegal, and where they were hearing anti-cannabis propaganda. It’s not surprising that there are still voters with concerns. … But the writing’s on the wall.”

Underscoring Tvert’s point is the fact that even President Joe Biden, who has been a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs, is coming around. Last month he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned thousands of people convicted federally and in the District of Columbia for marijuana possession.

The marijuana map is diversifying rapidly in the U.S., as the issue is no longer a project only of progressive advocates for drug policy reform. Missouri, which approved its cannabis measure by six percentage points as of Wednesday morning, went for Donald Trump by at least 15 points in the 2020 presidential election. Maryland, which went for Biden by 33 points and approved its cannabis measure by about 30 points on Tuesday, was the bluest state in the country that had yet to legalize recreational marijuana.

The Missouri and Maryland measures were the only two of Tuesday’s five state-level marijuana initiatives to allow for record expungement by people previously convicted of marijuana-related activities that have now been legalized by voters. These states will now automatically expunge records for certain people, and make others fill out petitions. Missouri’s approach to prior convictions has been especially controversial, as some reformers fear it won’t be as effective in practice as on paper. The chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, plus some prominent cannabis advocates, came out against the ballot measure.

It’s relatively new that marijuana ballot measures would take this issue on at all. A decade ago, the reformist initiatives were focused squarely on the question of whether or not to legalize, and left questions of social equity, record expungement, banking and more for later on. 

“What’s happening now is there’s a far more detailed discussion taking place,” Tvert said. “There’s this growing sense that it’s inevitable that it will be legal, and so what should the details be?”

The two Dakotas took opposite paths to the same result this year. North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected legal marijuana just four years ago, voting down a measure that, unlike this year’s, would have allowed for some record expungement. The previous North Dakota measure lost by 19 percentage points, while this year’s was losing by just 10 as of Wednesday morning. 

Fifty-four percent of South Dakota voters supported legal marijuana just two years ago, but after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, who won reelection Tuesday, the state supreme court invalidated that measure. Given a chance to vote again on the issue, South Dakotans rejected it by a six-point margin.

The Arkansas measure looked little like the other four on the ballot this year, prohibiting home-grow of marijuana plants and placing a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits. More exclusive markets can perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Market exclusivity was of chief concern to many who opposed Colorado’s ballot measure on psychedelics. Among these opponents were some of the organizers who pushed successfully for a 2019 Denver reform to decriminalize psilocybin mushrooms. They argued this year’s statewide measure, which allows for sale of approved psychedelics only by licensed providers, will benefit a small group of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,” one advocate who worked on the 2019 effort told The Denver Post. 

The post Wins and Losses for State Referendums to Legalize Weed and Psychedelics appeared first on Bolts.

Five states are voting on legalizing recreational marijuana, and most are staunchly Republican. The issue has long drawn support across the political spectrum, and these elections will again test the sense of a growing national consensus against marijuana prohibition. 

Even President Biden, who was a dedicated soldier in America’s war on drugs while a senator, is coming around. Last week he ordered a federal review of marijuana’s classification as a “Schedule 1” substance, defined as having h “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse,” and he pardoned an estimated 6,500 people with federal convictions for marijuana possession, plus thousands more convicted in the District of Columbia.

The national debate over the war on drugs is also shifting past marijuana. Colorado, which helped launch the wave of weed legalization a decade ago, is now considering a measure that would legalize psychedelics, emulating a reform adopted by Oregon in 2020. 

Bolts looks at the six state referendums, plus some intriguing local measures, that may affect drug policy this fall. 

Most measures would establish new state-regulated systems for the sale of marijuana or, in the case of Colorado, psychedelics, likely bringing in considerable new revenue into public coffers. 

But there is wide variance as to how they would handle people who have already been convicted over behaviors that could soon become legal. A review by Bolts shows that only two of the five marijuana referendums would set up expungement of past criminal records, which considerably saddle a person’s access to jobs and housing.

Arkansas | Issue 4: On legalizing marijuana

Arkansas could become just the second state in the South, after Virginia, to legalize marijuana for recreational use and sales. Issue 4 qualified for the ballot after a petition drive organized by the group Responsible Growth Arkansas, just six years after another citizen-initiated measure legalized medical marijuana. A September poll found wide support for the measure.

But Issue 4 is also raising concerns about inequitable design. The Arkansas Advocate found that Arkansas would have the strictest rules among the 19 states that have legalized recreational marijuana: It would be the only one to both prohibit home-grow operations and keep a hard cap on cultivation and dispensary permits, which experts predict would limit supply and competition, leading to higher prices at retail stores. A more exclusive market could also perpetuate race and class disparity in who has access to the substance, and who is policed over it.

Moreover, unlike in some of the other states with marijuana measures this year, Issue 4 does not provide for wiping clean the criminal records of people already convicted over marijuana.

Republican lawmakers are angry that organizations are using the initiative route to champion issues that they oppose, including the 2016 medical marijuana vote. They have placed another measure on the ballot that would make it harder for ballot measures to pass in the future.

Missouri | Amendment 3: On legalizing marijuana

Just north of Arkansas, Missouri has also legalized marijuana for medical use, and may now do the same for recreational use. 

Amendment 3, which also qualified for the ballot through a petition drive organized by the group Legal Missouri, would end existing state prohibitions on the possession of marijuana, set up a regulated sales system by distributing licenses via a lottery system, and allow home growth. Polling shows a closely divided electorate. 

Missouri borders eight states, only one of which (Illinois) has legalized recreational marijuana. Based on the experience of other states, that would presage an influx of out-of-state customers looking to buy legal marijuana in Missouri. But this could also cause new legal problems as these customers would be breaking the law the second they crossed back into their home states, where marijuana possession may be punishable by jail time. This has been a long-documented problem for people traveling into Kansas with weed from Colorado.

The Missouri amendment creates a path for people with marijuana convictions to expunge their records. But many marijuana advocates believe the ballot measure does not go far enough and are raising alarms. They stress that some people would be excluded from automatic expungement due to carve-outs or because they’re still serving time; they also note that the initiative would keep in place some criminal penalties, including for smoking marijuana in public. The chair of Missouri’s Legislative Black Caucus opposes Amendment 3 on these grounds. Organizations that support criminal justice reforms such as ACLU of Missouri and the Missouri Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, are supporting it.

Maryland | Question 4: On legalizing marijuana

Going off of the results of the last presidential election, Maryland is the bluest state in the country that has yet to legalize marijuana. Question 4 would end that distinction and legalize the possession and retail sale of marijuana.

Maryland lawmakers placed it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment that does not need the governor’s signature. (Republican Governor Larry Hogan has vetoed bills related to marijuana in the past.) Lawmakers also passed implementing legislation earlier this year (House Bill 837) that would be triggered by the passage of Question 4; Hogan allowed the bill to become law without his signature. 

The legislation would automatically expunge the records of people who have been convicted of offenses that would be newly legal under the law. It would allow people who are presently incarcerated for marijuana possession to petition for immediate release. 

If Question 4 passes, lawmakers would still have a lot of blanks to fill in the next session, as HB 837 did not flesh out the regulatory details of marijuana sales. Progressive advocates and lawmakers have already signaled that building an equitable retail system is a prime concern and that they want dispensary licenses and tax revenue to be distributed in a way that helps the Black communities that have been disproportionately affected by the prohibition of marijuana. A report released by the Baltimore prosecutor’s office in 2019 found that Black residents of Baltimore were six times likelier than white residents to be cited for marijuana possession. 

North Dakota | Measure 2: On legalizing marijuana

North Dakotans overwhelmingly rejected a measure to legalize marijuana just four years ago. But proponents of legalization are hoping for a different outcome by highlighting a broad alliance: Measure 2 qualified after a petition drive organized by a coalition called New Approach ND, whose chair is a member of the Libertarian Party and whose treasurer is a police officer-turned-defense attorney. The measure’s sponsoring committee features lawmakers from both parties. 

The Republican-run state House already passed a legalization bill in 2021, though the bill later died in the Senate. Measure 2 picks up where that bill left off: It would legalize the possession and sale of marijuana, and also allow home growth of up to three plants.

The measure would leave a lot of regulatory rulemaking for the legislature to take care of, but it does stipulate that only 18 retail licenses would be granted to start. That may limit the circulation of marijuana in a very vast, if sparsely populated, state. 

Measure 2 would not allow for expungement of criminal records, unlike the 2018 measure that provided for automatic expungement. 

South Dakota | Measure 27: On legalizing marijuana

South Dakotans already said what they think about marijuana in 2020: 54 percent of voters approved a ballot measure to legalize its recreational use. But after a lawsuit championed by Republican Governor Kristi Noem, that measure was invalidated by the South Dakota Supreme Court the following year for breaching the state’s requirement that initiatives only pertain to one subject.

Advocates returned this year with a drive to qualify a new proposal for the ballot. Measure 27 takes a simpler approach than the 2020 initiative. It would not change the state constitution, for one. It would allow for the purchase and possession of marijuana, plus home-grows of up to three plants for personal use, but it would leave questions of taxation and regulatory structure to the state legislature.

And it would not set up a process for people to expunge their past convictions.

The marijuana debate has seeped into the governor’s race, as Democratic nominee Jamie Smith has denounced Noem’s efforts to overturn the 2020 initiative. Another South Dakota election that touches on drug policy is the ballot measure to expand Medicaid access to tens of thousands of people; enhanced health insurance can improve paths to treatment over substance use issues that are otherwise funneled into jail, which played a role in other recent referendums over Medicaid. 

Colorado | Proposition 122: On legalizing psychedelics

With Proposition 122, a voter-initiated measure once known as Initiative 58, Colorado may add to a new trend: Building off of a 2019 ballot measure in Denver, and a 2020 ballot measure in Oregon, the measure would remove criminal penalties for use, possession and home-grow of psilocybin (commonly known as “magic mushrooms”) and some other psychoactive substances. 

It would also set up a legally regulated system for state-regulated providers to sell psychedelics for a range of treatment and therapeutic purposes. 

Denver, the state’s capital city, did a version of this, and a government review panel that included law enforcement found no resulting threats to public safety. Some of the organizers of the Denver reform are now opposing  Initiative 58 because they fear the measure would specifically benefit a small handful of profit-seeking interests. “It’s opening the floodgates for corporations to come to Colorado to open their bougie life and healing centers,”  one advocate who worked on Denver’s decriminalization effort told The Denver Post. 

Local elections matter to drug policy, too

Under the hood of state statutes and prohibitions, localities retain vast powers to decide how aggressively to pursue the war on drugs. That, too, is at stake this year all around the country.

Colorado, for instance, is a home-rule state, meaning that towns and counties still have the authority to ban the sale of marijuana. Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city and the anchor of a historically arch-conservative region, has long resisted legal weed; residents cannot purchase it within the city, which misses out on all the local sales tax that other municipalities get to collect. Colorado Springs voters this year will decide Questions 300 and 301, which would enable recreational marijuana sales and tax them.

In Texas, where marijuana is illegal but where some liberal-leaning cities have asked the police to not enforce the statute, some towns like Killeen will weigh in on decriminalizing marijuana. 

And the war on drugs is also on the ballot in many elections for the law enforcement offices that have the power to make arrests or press charges over drugs—or refuse to do so. In many places, the debate still revolves around marijuana. The Democratic incumbent in Indiana’s Marion County (Indianapolis), for instance, has stopped prosecuting low-level possession but his Republican challenger is taking issue with that. “I do not want Indianapolis to become a San Francisco, to become a New York City, to become a Los Angeles,” she said at a recent forum.

Other candidates are promising to at the very least avoid jail time over drug offenses. And some reformers want to go further and keep the criminal legal system out altogether. Rahsaan Hall, running for prosecutor in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, says he won’t prosecute drug possession. “Those are not law enforcement issues,” Caitlin Sepeda, a nurse who narrowly lost the primary for sheriff in another Massachusett county in September, told Bolts last month. “Those are nursing issues. Those are social service issues.”

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