CASE STUDY: Mesa County, Colorado Increasing Mass Incarceration by Doubling Pretrial Incarceration Since 2012 Through Use of Pretrial Services Risk Assessment and “Investment”
Mesa County, Colorado has long been touted as a successful model of spending on pretrial services, reducing mass incarceration, and making the system “more fair.” Instead, the actual numbers show that the risk assessment and supervision reforms actually doubled pretrial incarceration since 2012.
County data shows that pretrial incarceration of the presumed innocent has more than doubled since the reforms began. Right before the alleged successful Mesa County pretrial reforms that began in 2012, the average daily jail population in June of 2011 was 267 inmates. In February, 2020, the average daily jail population is 537, a staggering 101.1% increase in the average daily jail population over the eight years of the so-called pretrial reforms.
The report – found here – also notes that 80.1% of defendants in the Mesa County jail are in pretrial status, meaning presumed innocent, and that the increases are driven nearly almost entirely by that population, the one the “reform” was targeting.
In fact, recent data – found here – showed the male adult jail population in Mesa County grew by 32% over the most recent four years from 2015 – 2019. As a result, the County is now looking at spending $21 million on a jail expansion. Success? No. That is simply an increase in mass incarceration.
Could population growth be the cause? No. The population is growing at roughly a 1% annual rate between 2015 and 2018. Between 2015 and 2018, the total county population only grew 3.4%: Population Growth
Colorado Public Safety Director Stan Hilkey was the key architect of the Mesa County model, which he is now attempting to implement statewide. He noted in public testimony in 2020 that he was not the “King” of Mesa County: “I came from Mesa County. I do not claim to be the King of Mesa County. Or that work. There were a lot of people that were a part of that work.”
One of them who has been “part of that work” with Director Hilkey in Mesa County since the beginning and another co-architect of the “solution” is Mesa County Chief Deputy District Attorney Bo Zeerip. District Attorney Zeerip admitted in an email that he uses the pretrial system as a smokescreen to unconstitutionally seek high cash-only bails to keep who he thinks are the bad people in jail and deny them bail. Looks like even the judges might be in on it. That might help explain why mass incarceration is so dramatically increasing in Mesa County, Colorado.
At the end of the day, Colorado’s poster-boy case for pretrial risk assessment and supervision as “reform” did exactly what academics are finding it would do: not work and potentially back-fire. All of this “investment” has paid off not in terms of “justice reinvestment funds” to use to fund programs that get to the root causes of crimes, but instead a massive $21 million bill and millions more dollars in perpetuity to increase mass incarceration in the name of decreasing it, at the same time Colorado cut $26 million in funds to treat opioid addiction, which is fueling a crime wave on Colorado’s west slope. Jurisdictions need to think twice about these policies.