Pubdate: Thu, 01 Sep 2005
Source: Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
Copyright: 2005, Denver Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.rockymountainnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/371
Author: Bill Scanlon

OFFICIALS OPPOSE RELEASE OF DRUG OFFENDERS

The Independence Institute is naive if it thinks Colorado can release 2,000 
drug offenders from jail and still keep the streets safe, a group of 
law-enforcement officials said Thursday.

The Independence Institute, a conservative think tank in Golden, opposes 
Referendums C and D on the Nov. 1 ballot, and has suggested Colorado's 
budget shortfall could be reduced by finding alternatives to jail for drug 
offenders.

But a half dozen law officers, including the heads of both the Colorado 
sheriffs' and police associations, called a press conference Thursday to 
say that most people in Colorado prisons for drug crimes are multiple 
offenders who were deeply involved in drug trafficking or violence.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, said his group never 
advocated releasing violent criminals from prison.

"We want all criminals punished appropriately," Caldara said. "But that 
doesn't mean we have to put non-violent criminals into $30,000-a-year 
hotels with cable TVs," he said, referring to state prisons.

"We could use house arrest or ankle bracelets or community service. They 
could be out working for the public."

At the Capitol press conference, Adams County Sheriff Doug Darr said people 
should not be fooled by drug offenders.

"These people aren't going to prison for smoking a joint or possessing an 
ounce," he said. Instead, they're in prison because they've created 
methamphetamine labs that endanger children, or been involved in gunfights 
with rival gangs or police, or have blown several chances to stay out of 
prison, he said.

Darr, who is on metro Denver's task force on violent gangs, said its best 
tool to get them off the streets is to charge them with drug crimes.

Darr and the others at the Capitol press conference shared the rap sheets 
of four drug offenders in prison. One, Anthony Lewis Andrusyk, had been 
arrested 10 times and charged with 25 crimes including trespassing, 
larceny, assault, felony possession of a weapon, obstructing a police 
officer and manufacturing dangerous drugs.

"They may be serving time only on the drug charges, but they've been 
arrested for very serious offenses," said George Epp, the former Boulder 
County Sheriff who now is executive director of County Sheriffs of Colorado.

"These people on average have three felony convictions," he said. Each of 
the 3,932 people in Colorado prisons for drug convictions had had at least 
one other arrest or contact with law officers, he said.

Epp said state budget cuts have exacerbated the problems in prisons, and 
finds it ironic that the solution posed by some is to keep cutting the budget.

Epp noted that Al Capone went to prison for tax evasion, but that doesn't 
mean he wasn't one of the Prohibition era's most violent gangsters.

Caldara retorted that if convicts are violent drug offenders, "they damn 
well should be labeled violent drug offenders."

The proponents of C and D are trying to "scare taxpayers into a tax 
increase," he said.

Epp noted that 14 years ago, just 2 percent of Colorado's inmates were 
diagnosed with mental illness.

Fourteen years later, 16 percent of the prison population has a mental 
illness - using the same scale as in 1991, he said.

The reason is because state cuts in mental health services and in 
substance-abuse treatment programs have left mentally ill people with no 
place to go, he said.

So, "When cops are called because a guy is acting crazy, the only option is 
to bring him to jail, where he's caught up in the whirlpool of the justice 
system."

Adams County District Attorney Don Quick said of drug offenders: "You can't 
just release them. It's a simple sound bite, rather than a sound solution."

Because of cuts brought on by the spending limits of the Taxpayers Bill of 
Rights, the state's parole system has been decimated, and drug treatment 
programs have been slashed, Quick said.

While 20 percent of the DOC's inmates are there because of drug 
convictions, 80 percent actually have some kind of substance abuse problem, 
he said. Because of the cuts, the only option for most as they leave prison 
is to pay for their own treatment. "You can imagine how well that works," 
Quick said.

Meanwhile, said Epp, the state has cut the budget for housing criminals in 
county jails. It now pays just $41 a day, down from $49 a day, for sheriffs 
to keep offenders in county jails.

"In metro Denver, $41 a day covers just two-thirds of the actual cost," Epp 
said.

Epp said he's voting for Referendum C. "I don't want to be saying 'I told 
you so' a few years from now when people will be saying we should have 
spent the money back then, before the drug gangs took over our communities."

Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said he agrees with the DAs and sheriffs on 
needing to keep drug offenders in prisons, but that he is opposed to C and D.

"They're just a massive tax increase," he said. "I see nothing in them that 
is going to help law enforcement, other than the police and fire pension 
funds. I'd rather have the money in my own pocket - it would be better for 
the economy."
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MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman