Parole violations in Colorado have dropped by more than 50% over the last six years, driven by sweeping declines in technical violations around drug and alcohol use.
From left, Amy Yestrebski, who is on probation; Annie McCoppin, who is on probation through Boulder County’s drug court; Angelia Bowen, who is on parole; Brittany Potter, who is also on probation through Boulder County’s drug court; Allison Holling, a therapist; and Emily Kleeman, executive director of The ReEntry Initiative, gather for a wellness and therapy class at The Reentry Initiative, a nonprofit that supports parolees as they come out of prison, in Longmont on Feb. 7, 2024.
As she’s learned more about the man accused of killing her mother, Whitney has grown angry. Months before the attack, the man’s parole officer hadafter he was convicted of drunk driving and missed drug tests and check-ins that were part of his parole on an aggravated robbery conviction. The decline is part of a years-long effort by lawmakers and reformers to keep parolees out of prison and redirect those who struggle with substance abuse into treatment when they relapse, instead of into custody. Advocates hail the shift as progress that helps parolees better reenter society by reducing punitive prison stays and increasing support for those coming out of prison.
“It’s not because they stopped using drugs, I promise you,” the parole officer said. “…I’ve got people violating 10, 12, times a month. They’ll sit there and tell you, ‘Yeah, I used fentanyl today,’ and there’s not a thing you can do…That’s why parole officers just quit writing altogether.” “It is important to recognize that a reduction in total parole technical violations is a nuanced, complex issue,” she said in the statement. “As such it can be attributed to many variables.”
Her parole officers at the time — the years leading up to 2013 — would give her one or two chances after she tested positive for drugs, then write up a violation. Those violations led to her parole being revoked, and she was sent back to prison. Vodicka and other advocates applaud what they see as a culture change within the Department of Corrections that has some parole officers looking at drug and alcohol use with a less punitive lens.
The number of people returned to prison or jail for new crimes also decreased, though not as dramatically. About 19% of people released from prison returned within three years because of a new crime in 2009, compared to 15% in 2019. Prosecutors are seeing parolees committing new crimes, said John Kellner, district attorney in the 18th Judicial District, which covers Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties. Anecdotally, the number of such defendants seems to be on the rise, he said.
Parole officers do have punitive options for technical parole violations. Parolees can be still sent back to jail for up to 14 days under a policy once heralded asJail stays are constrained by the number of beds available in local jails for such parole violators. In December, there were about 9,500 people on parole across the state, according to the Department of Corrections.
One Colorado man who was released on parole in November 2022 has been arrested four times in the last eight months for possessing fentanyl and driving under the influence, court records show. The number of people who died while on parole in Colorado inched up over the last decade and then spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, Department of Correction data shows. Less than 1% of parolees died in the 2014 fiscal year, a figure that grew to 1.4% in the 2018 fiscal year and then to 2.3% in the 2022 fiscal year, the data shows. That’s an increase from 78 annual deaths to 203.
Kem Kershaw, right, meets with re-entry case manager Courtney Lau, left, and re-entry program manager Lara Arndt, front, of Homeward Alliance at the Murphy Center for Hope in Fort Collins on Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. “As a result of being violated on the dirty UA, I lost all of that,” he said, referring to the urine test that showed drug use. “I basically had to start over.”“I got tired of going to prison for it,” he said. “I just spent entirely too much of my life in jails and prisons and when my father passed way, I felt he would be so ashamed of me, so I started to change my life.”
Parolees can be returned to prison either for technical violations of the rules of their parole, or if they are arrested and charged with a new crime. An arrest for unauthorized absence falls into the latter category. Statewide, prosecutors filed 973 unauthorized absence cases in 2022 and 1,134 in 2023, the records show. Some of those cases include multiple counts of unauthorized absence.Prior to the law change, parolees charged with felony escape in the 18th Judicial District were routinely returned to prison for the remainder of their original sentence, along with an additional year or two on the escape charge, said Kellner, the district attorney.
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