Colorado’s prisons are so full that the Department of Corrections for the first time has triggered a legislatively mandated process designed to speed up the release of eligible prisoners and reduce the incarcerated population.
State corrections leaders on Saturday notified outside officials that the prison system’s vacancy rate had remained below 3% for 30 consecutive days. That 30-day mark triggers a 2018 law that requires prison officials to make notifications across the criminal justice system and take population-management steps.
The sustained vacancy rate of less than 3% shows that Colorado’s prison population is “precarious,” state Sen. Julie Gonzales, D-Denver, said.
“When I say precarious, I mean the fact that more than 97% of the available prison beds are already full,” she said. “We either need to have a very clear conversation about finding ways to lessen that pressure, whether that is by following the measures outlined in the statute, or we need to have a very serious conversation about opening up a new prison.”
Colorado’s prisons can collectively house about 16,500 people, which means the system would need to keep about 500 beds empty in order to maintain a 3% vacancy rate. At the end of July, the agency had 477 empty beds, according to a monthly prison population report.
The prison system had a vacancy rate of 1.92% — about 300 empty beds — on Saturday, according to a copy of a notice obtained by The Denver Post.
The Department of Corrections was required to notify Gov. Jared Polis, certain legislators, parole board members, district attorneys, chief judges and others when it hit the 30-day mark.
The agency must also seek out information on unused community corrections beds and coordinate with the Colorado State Parole Board to review for the potential release of inmates who are close to their mandatory release dates with an approved parole plan and those who are eligible for parole and meet certain other conditions, according to the notice.
The Parole Board is not required to release any prisoners, and only people already eligible for release are considered under the population-management process, said Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, who helped draft the 2018 law.
The idea behind the legislation was both to raise an early warning about the prison system’s population across the rest of the justice system and cut through red tape so that people who are already eligible to be released are more quickly discharged, she said.
“We are not creating early release, we are just trying to get the machine to work more quickly because of the bed crunch,” Donner said.
Saturday’s notification is the first time the 2018 law has been triggered, she said.
The prison system has recently over-relied on housing state prisoners in local jails, Donner said. Jails, which are controlled by local officials, typically hold inmates who have not been convicted and are awaiting trial, or those who are serving sentences shorter than one year. Prisons, run by the state, hold inmates serving longer sentences.
Prison population reports show the number of state prisoners housed in local jails for more than 72 hours while waiting to be transferred to state prisons climbed steadily between January and June.
In mid-July, 17 Colorado sheriffs raised concerns that too many state prisoners were being held in county jails. State prison officials, the sheriffs said, were slow to pick up inmates who were sentenced to prison, creating a backlog of state prisoners held in local jails.
In the Douglas County jail, state prisoners waiting for transport spent an average of 23 days in the jail in 2022, but an average of 31 days during the first six months of 2025, according to records provided by the sheriff’s office.
In the Weld County jail, an average of 26 prisoners were waiting transport to state prisons during the first six months of 2025, compared to an average of 12 prisoners on any given day in 2024 and 16 in 2023, according to data provided by the office.
“County jails were never intended — nor funded — to house state inmates for prolonged periods,” the sheriffs wrote in a July 10 letter to Polis. “Yet, across Colorado, counties are being forced to expand housing capacity and increase staffing simply to keep up with the rising number of inmates who should already be in state custody.”
The local jail backlog declined after the sheriffs’ letter went out, according to the Department of Corrections’ monthly population reports. There were 559 state prisoners held in county jails for more than 72 hours at the end of June. That dropped to 400 by the end of July.
Donner said prison officials were using county jails to keep the prison vacancy rate above 3%.
“They were increasing the number of people held in DOC in (the) jail backlog as a way of artificially keeping that vacancy rate above 3% to avoid triggering the prison population-management measures,” she said.
Department of Corrections spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez did not return a request for comment.
Gonzales said she does not believe Colorado has the money or political will to build a new prison, but that the state’s burgeoning prison population demands immediate attention.
“It’s going to become incredibly clear that we have to address DOC staffing, funding, rehabilitation and sentencing moving forward,” she said. “This is a crisis that will impact our budget and human beings all across this state.”
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