While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

Cloud is now vice chair of the Southern Ute tribal council, and from the tribe’s headquarters early this summer, she reflected on how much has changed. Since 2019, when Democrats gained a legislative trifecta in the state, Colorado has established a polling place on the reservation and placed a drop box there for mail ballots. The state has also hired special liaisons to promote and facilitate turnout among Native voters. “I don’t want future generations to have to deal with any of what we’ve had to, to get to vote,” Cloud told me. “We should have access to the vote, to shape our own region, our own country.”

Colorado officials are now proposing to go further. In 2023, the state adopted legislation to try something that’s never been done in this country: automatically register tribal members to vote in U.S. elections. 

The program, if implemented, would enable tribes to share their membership lists with Colorado elections officials, who’d then use that information to register every eligible person to vote, while giving them a chance to opt out. Since Colorado already mails ballots to every registered voter, this would necessarily mean getting ballots into the hands of more Native people. “We’ve made real steps forward, and we’re going to continue,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told me recently. “We always try to push the envelope.”

Cloud, like Griswold, sees immense promise in this plan. When she testified in favor of the law last year, she said Colorado “serves as a model for other states to increase voting among tribal members.” And advocates living in those other states are watching. Several told me Colorado’s reform could be transformative if it spreads nationwide: Roughly one third of the more than six million Native Americans who are eligible to vote across the country are not registered, a share far greater than that of white Americans who are unregistered.

And yet, Cloud is also keenly concerned that the program could make her community more vulnerable. For U.S. election officials to automatically register tribal members to vote, the tribes would need to share certain vital information about their members, such as full name, address, and date of birth. Cloud is hesitant to hand this data over to a state that has, over a long history that she knows too well, been an agent of violence.

“When tribes have given out too much information, that information has been exploited,” Cloud said, nodding to U.S. government and industry having used tribal data and maps to locate natural resources and justify land theft, among other harms. “We have to maintain trust and we have to protect tribal members and their information.”

It’s a worry that other tribal leaders and advocates for Native voting rights echoed in conversations this spring and summer. “We’ve had our lists, our populations, kept by the government before—and that hasn’t ended well for us,” Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, a member of the ​​Tohono O’odham Nation and the top elections official in Pima County, Arizona, told me.

Anticipating that data-sharing would generate concerns, Colorado legislators wrote the law to make the program optional: Tribes can opt in, only if and when they feel comfortable with it. Griswold says she is in no rush to implement this program until tribes want it.

Cloud and other representatives of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, along with leaders of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, their western neighbors, have held ongoing discussions with Griswold’s staff to share their concerns, and work out whether acceptable compromises can be found. They’ve met about 10 times over the last year, exploring what safeguards could be put in place. 

Those talks haven’t yet yielded any agreement, though the parties seem cautiously optimistic. The chair of the Ute Mountain Utes even says a breakthrough could come as soon as this year.

Cloud, too, hopes to reach an agreement, but she remains wary. The day we met at the Southern Ute headquarters happened to fall exactly 100 years to the week since Native Americans gained U.S. citizenship. That landmark, Cloud said, at once seems distant and shamefully fresh. “We are the first and original residents of this entire continent,” she told me, standing in a temporary exhibit the tribe set up to commemorate the 100-year anniversary. “The first ones here, and the last to have citizenship.”

We were speaking amid what was, as recently as 1868, a Ute territory of more than 56 million acres. It covered most of what is now the state of Colorado, plus large portions of what are now Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. 

Her tribe today controls less than one percent of that area, a sliver of reservation land near Durango, in southwest Colorado along the New Mexico border. Colorado was once home to more than 40 tribal nations, but just two recognized tribes—the Southern Utes, and the Ute Mountain Utes—are still based here. Cloud thinks constantly about how to protect the 1,500 people enrolled in her tribe, and what remains of their land. 

“When the Europeans came in, and our homelands were greatly reduced, you get a disconnection between humans and nature,” she said. “You get traumatic experiences, and trust issues that Native people have with the United States government.”

This tribe’s journey is a familiar one in the broader story of Native American betrayal: members killed or otherwise oppressed at the hands of white settlers; a United States government that encroached gradually, agreeing to and then violating treaties in order to steal land and resources; and eventually tribes shunted by the government onto the reservations they inhabit today.

In various ways, and with varying levels of success, Colorado’s state government has lately been trying, or at least saying it’s trying, to repair this harm. The legislature here has, in the last few years, passed a series of laws and resolutions intended to improve education, water rights, public safety, and more, for Native people living in this state.

Colorado’s new voter registration reform also came out of that repair work. Proponents see it as a valuable step toward making American democracy more inclusive of the land’s original inhabitants. “Historical voter suppression in Colorado has been against Native people and Native people living on tribal lands,” Griswold said. “Understanding that there is this historical backdrop, I’ve really tried to pursue any means to reverse that historical voter suppression and get eligible people registered.”

The state of Colorado already registers citizens to vote automatically, but only at the DMV, when they’re getting a driver’s license or state ID. The program has been wildly successful at signing up new voters, but voting rights advocates worry that it’s leaving behind people who do not go to the DMV and apply for an ID—including many who live on reservations. 

The new law expands this automatic approach to tribal enrollment lists. This reform would reach tribal members wherever they may reside, and most Native Americans do not live on reservations. Those who do stand to be most affected, experts said, because they are more likely to be unregistered. 

Cloud said she’s all-in on continuing to make voting easier for the tribe, and stressed that she appreciates Griswold’s efforts to build relationships with tribal leaders. But in conversation, she also laid out the difficulties in reconciling her different goals.

“How do we protect our sovereignty? How do we protect our tribal members?” Cloud asked. 

And how, she added, can tribal leaders embed those aims within the mechanics of voter registration?

As she pondered these questions, Cloud received an alert on her phone and paused our interview. A Southern Ute member had been reported missing—a 15-year-old girl, the alert stated, last seen a couple of days prior outside the reservation. 

Cloud wondered if the girl might already be in New Mexico, or even farther from home. She listed her worries aloud: “Has anybody reached out to her family?”

“What has been done to try to contact her?” 

“Have they contacted the neighboring counties, the neighboring states?” 

“Do they have the right description of her?” 

Whenever this happens, and it happens shockingly often—the girl is the third person to go missing from the reservation in a month, amid a national crisis of missing and murdered girls and women that disproportionately plagues indigenous communities—Cloud thinks of her friend Nicole, who vanished from the area two years ago. For days, Cloud told me, authorities assured Nicole’s loved ones that she’d turn up quickly. “Come to find out,” Cloud said, “she’d been murdered in the first day.”

Cloud resumed our interview. With her mind still on the missing girl, she brought the conversation back to registration policies.

“This actually ties in with the voting: It’s the safety of our members,” she said. 

“Knowing our tribal information is out there, we become very vulnerable,” she continued. “People don’t place value on tribal lives. This is very real.”

Three other states besides Colorado—Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico—have also adopted laws lately to automatically register Native American tribal members to vote; their reforms, too, have yet to be implemented. Like Colorado, these other states give tribes the option to enter into the program but don’t force it upon them. To date, no tribe in any of these states has agreed to do so.

But at least one tribe may be close to such an agreement: the Ute Mountain Utes, whose reservation is bigger than that of the Southern Utes in both land area and enrolled population, could move on this matter soon by entering into an agreement with Colorado’s government, says their chairman, Manuel Heart. 

Sitting in his office on the reservation, Heart echoed some of Cloud’s concerns about how sharing tribal enrollment lists could infringe on tribal privacy and sovereignty. But, after much discussion with the state, he said, he feels ready to get started. He hopes to bring the issue to a vote of the tribe’s elected council soon.  

Our interview took place in early June, still weeks away from the state’s June 25 primary. His mail ballot was sitting on his desk as we talked; he’d already filled it out and was keen to cast it as soon as possible. 

Heart said his tribe, like the Southern Utes, has benefitted from other, recent reforms meant to facilitate Native voter participation: the Ute Mountain Utes now have a drop box on their reservation, plus an in-person polling center for anyone who’d rather vote that way.

The officials who run elections in this area are proud of these voter services, but acknowledge that turnout remains very low on Ute Mountain Ute land.

Danielle Wells, the elections supervisor in Montezuma County, showed me a map of the area and pointed to where her staff places drop boxes, in all the county’s major towns. In the runup to elections, five of the six boxes yield hundreds of ballots each time elections workers swing by to collect from them, she said. In the drop box on the reservation, though, “we see maybe 20, maybe a dozen,” Wells told me.

The June 25 primary would go on to draw especially low participation: Only 3 percent of registered voters living on Ute Mountain Ute land cast a ballot, according to the clerk’s office, a rate nine times lower than that of Montezuma County voters overall.

The gap isn’t usually that wide, but it’s always there. During the 2020 presidential election, for example, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 50 percent, trailing Montezuma County’s overall turnout of 85 percent. In 2022, when Colorado was electing a governor and other major officeholders, turnout on Ute Mountain Ute land was 22 percent—three times lower than the county’s overall rate. A large turnout gap also persists on Southern Ute land, and studies show that this holds true for Native Americans across the country. 

Heart badly wants to increase turnout, but doesn’t fault his tribe’s membership for so often declining to vote. Would you be excited, he asked, to participate in elections that shape a political system so historically hostile to your community, to elect representatives of a government that has stolen from and broken promises to tribes? 

“How is a tribal member going to feel when they’ve always been pushed away?” Heart said. “It wasn’t our choice to be put on these reservations. The United States government put us here.”

To this day, in many other states, tribes are still constantly trying to beat back new restrictions—strict voter ID requirements that don’t accommodate tribal ID cards, gerrymandered maps that dilute their representation, inconvenient polling places, and other policies that make it particularly hard for Native Americans, and especially those living on reservations, to have a say in U.S. democracy. 

Expansive reforms like automatic voter registration for tribal members remain a political non-starter in many states with large Native populations. “Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska would not do that,” Ahtza Dawn Chavez, who runs a non-profit in New Mexico that promotes Native voter participation, told me, naming four states currently under full Republican control. “You have to lay down a solid foundation, and [automatic voter registration] is something that is maybe stage two or three or four of that work. In a lot of states, you’re still at stage one.” 

In Arizona, for example, voting rights advocates have spent years fighting restrictions, proposed by Republicans, that could make voting harder for Native people. Arizonans in 2022 narrowly rejected a ballot measure that would have made voter ID laws more stringent; Native voters would have suffered the brunt of those proposed rules.

Cázares-Kelly, the elections official in Pima County, bemoans the many hurdles that already suppress the Native vote in her state of Arizona. Notably, she told me, it can be challenging for Native folks who live on reservations to register to vote because homes there often don’t have addresses in the format typical of non-reservation lands—that is, number, street name, city, state, zip code.

“The home where I grew up, I cannot give you the address for it,” Cázares-Kelly said. “I can tell you where it is: south off of Highway 86 onto Indian Route 15, you turn right at the red fence, drive down the dirt road. There’s a fork in the road and you take a left. Our house is the first one by the big tree. That’s literally my address.”

Since getting elected in 2021, she has found that even well-meaning officials commonly have little understanding of why voter engagement campaigns and election policies that work for most of the population may not work for people who live on reservations.

In Colorado, both the Ute Mountain Utes and the Southern Utes report that voter turnout is often substantially higher for their internal elections, which are administered entirely by the tribes. Neither syncs their tribal elections with Colorado’s; the Ute Mountain Utes vote on a Friday in October and the Southern Utes vote on a Friday in November. 

On the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, Chairman Heart said, few talk much, if at all, about U.S. and Colorado elections. The land is so far removed from Colorado’s population center—it’s a roughly seven-hour drive to Denver, and is in fact much closer to Albuquerque—that for decades both the Southern Utes and Ute Mountain Utes were placed in New Mexico media markets, meaning they’d receive broadcast political advertising meant for that state and not theirs.

Only in the last decade or so have political candidates started regularly visiting the area. “They hardly ever came,” Heart said. “And once they got elected, they never came.” 

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, the first and still only person of Native American descent to represent Colorado in Congress, and one of only four Native people ever elected to the U.S. Senate, feels this acutely, because for four decades he has lived on a ranch on the Southern Ute Reservation.

He is 91 now, and from an armchair in his home, he, too, said U.S. government officials have broadly and consistently failed Native people on policy concerning elections and voting.

“It’s pretty difficult to ask a people who you’ve dominated, whose wealth you’ve taken over the years, to suddenly help support you getting elected. That’s a long jump,” he told me. “Unless you can show somebody how voting is going to help them, they’ll have a lower interest in it.” 

Nighthorse Campbell is bullish on automatic voter registration but understands why tribes may not trust elections officials with their membership data. “It’s not going to take a week or two. It takes years, and years, and years. And maybe it’ll never be universal,” he said.

The ongoing negotiations between the Ute tribes and the state of Colorado over automatic voter registration affect only a tiny fraction of the country’s nearly 600 federally recognized tribes. These two tribes combined have enrollments of under 4,000 people; a successful implementation of the pending reform in Colorado may only lead to a few hundred new registrations at first, and many fewer each subsequent year.

But Allison Neswood, a lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund and an expert on issues of Native voting rights, says there are many eyes on these negotiations around the country. The outcome of the state’s talks with the two tribes could set a landmark precedent stretching much beyond Colorado, she told me, if the parties can identify solutions that satisfy all their goals.

“Once one tribe, two tribes, three tribes start to get the ball moving on this, and show that there’s a way to do this in a way that’s respectful of and promoting of tribal sovereignty, and that’s protective of data sovereignty, I think more tribes will feel more comfortable diving in and looking for their own approach,” Neswood said.

Voter registration laws created a hurdle to voting when they emerged in the U.S. starting in the 1870s, forcing people to declare an intent to vote before they could cast a ballot. These laws, then and often still today, have depressed turnout among people with fewer resources and less familiarity with the political process. To alleviate this burden, Oregon in 2015 became the first U.S. state to adopt automatic voter registration; the policy has since spread to about half of all states. It’s typically implemented at DMVs, for a couple of simple reasons: One, the vast majority of the population visits these offices on a somewhat regular basis, and, two, the offices already collect all the information necessary to determine voter eligibility. But some states are trying to expand it to other government settings to reach even more people—especially lower-income residents less likely to visit the DMV.

Several states, including Colorado, want to try this out at Medicaid offices, and, last year, Michigan became the first state to approve automatically registering people as they leave prison. 

Extending this program to tribal enrollment lists comes from the same desire to make sure fewer people fall through the DMV’s cracks.

Colorado’s reform passed as part of a broader bill to facilitate voting in the state, for instance by expanding ballot access on college campuses. That bill was sponsored by Democrats, and passed with their unanimous support, while most Republicans were in opposition. New Mexico’s reform also passed last year with largely Democratic support, and was also part of a large bill meant to ease voter access. Nevada (in 2021) and Michigan (in 2023) both included tribal enrollment lists in laws meant to expand automatic registration generally.

But unlike efforts to implement automatic voter registration in other settings, the process that’s ongoing in Colorado, Cloud says, requires deep reflection. It invites the state to confront its history of violence and prove to the tribes that the government can be trusted. 

Barbara McLachlan, the state representative for southwest Colorado, whose district includes reservation land of both of Colorado’s Ute tribes, says she understands this caution. “We’re trying to turn a cruise ship,” she told me over coffee in downtown Durango. “It takes time, little by little. There is a generational lack of trust; they’ve been treated horribly, and still are, in some ways.”

When she entered office, eight years ago, she did not know how to even broach the subject of collaboration with Native residents she represented. She said it took years, and regular outreach, to build credibility with the tribes. Both Heart and Cloud say they appreciate her work, and name her as one of few people in state government with any consistent presence on their lands.

Prompted by a bill McLachlan sponsored, state government since 2023 has invited Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute leaders to deliver annual addresses to a joint session of the legislature—a platform these leaders have so far used to highlight lingering injustice and inequity in matters of water access, health care, and more. But McLachlan, who is term-limited and exiting office in January, laments that her colleagues in state government mostly still fail to do the sort of relationship-building that might have made it easier to jumpstart automatic voter registration by now. After eight years in the legislature, she told me, she only knows of one state House lawmaker, besides those already based in the region, who has visited either reservation.

“It’s hard, then, to say, ‘trust me on this one,’” she said, of the voter registration proposal.

To reach that trust now, Cloud and Heart both want concrete assurances that state elections officials can provide enough data protections for their membership lists.

Tribal and state leaders each said they’re still unsure of which policy mechanics might emerge from their negotiation. Tiffany Lee, the La Plata County clerk, who oversees U.S. elections on most Southern Ute land, has not been involved with that negotiation, but, in an interview at her Durango office, she floated a possible solution: The state could seal the personal information of anyone who is registered to vote off a tribal enrollment list. (This is also a solution proposed by Neswood in a policy paper she authored recently.) Colorado, like other states, already offers this option for anyone who wants their information to be confidential. That route is popular with public figures, judges, cops, and others who want an extra layer of protection.

The catch, Lee warned, is that sealing people’s records may make it harder for them to then update their voter registration down the line. If they move, or want to switch party affiliation, they’d have to pursue those steps in person at the clerk’s office, she said. “If we make them all confidential, that stops them from being able to do anything electronically with us, or by phone call,” Lee told me. “So, there are drawbacks.”

Jena Griswold, the Colorado secretary of state, is midway through her second and final term in this role. She said she hopes that these policy discussions are resolved in her time, but accepts that they may not be. “The people we’re talking to—them, or their parents, may have been excluded from the franchise in their lifetime. Sometimes things just take time,” she added.

At the Southern Ute headquarters, Cloud and I ambled through the exhibit that commemorated the tribe’s history and the 100-year citizenship anniversary. It contained photos of tribal members long deceased, and posters about the tribe’s relationships with water, land, and one another.

We were nearing the end of our time together, and the missing girl had thankfully just been safely located. 

Cloud pointed to photos of her great-grandfather, her grandmother, her grandfather, her aunt, and other relatives. “Can you imagine what they had to give up?” she said. “You live in two different worlds as Ute people: You’re still very much wanting to be connected to your past and your nature, your language, your culture, your tradition—but you also have to be very aware of what’s going on in your community on the other side, the assimilation side.”

She reached the final piece of the gallery, a poster in the shape of a frame with nothing in the middle. Cloud said it represents the unknown things, exciting and daunting alike, yet to come for the tribe. She said she hopes automatic voter registration will be among them. “This is the future, and anything is possible from now,” she said, looking at the frame. 

“We’ll get there with Jena, with the voting,” she added. “We’ll get there.”

The post On Native Land, a New Push to Expand Voting Meets the Long Tail of State Violence appeared first on Bolts.

George Brauchler, a former prosecutor who was a face of tough-on-crime politics in Colorado for much of the last decade and a leading voice among death penalty proponents in the state, is close to completing his political comeback. 

In late June, he won the Republican primary in the race to become the next district attorney in Denver’s conservative south suburbs, where he already served as DA from 2013 to 2021 and is favored to win in the November general election. 

In his latest bid for office, Brauchler has added to his usual zero-tolerance arsenal: He is now promising to seek jail time for any adult who steals anything in his jurisdiction, from a candy bar to a car. “I’m going to put out a PSA, I’m going to do a press conference, and I’m going to let everybody that will listen know,” Brauchler told Bolts this week. “If you come to this jurisdiction and steal from us, you should expect to go to jail.”

This policy, which he described as an experiment, would be unusually punitive; Colorado courts often address small-value theft through fines, probation, or diversion programs. Tom Raynes, a former DA in western Colorado who now directs the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council, told Bolts he doesn’t know of any prosecutor in the state who has pursued jail time in every theft case. 

But if Brauchler is elected in November, he’ll no longer have any authority over a big chunk of the region he used to lead. That’s because the state has split his old 18th Judicial District in two. 

The populous and suburban Douglas County, plus the more exurban and rural Elbert and Lincoln counties, are forming a brand new and GOP-leaning 23rd Judicial District. That’s where Brauchler is running this year.

Arapahoe County, a blue swath of more than 600,000 residents that contains most of the city of Aurora, will now have a DA of its own, rather than share one with its redder neighbors to the south. (It’ll still be called the 18th district.) 

The frontrunner to win Arapahoe County’s first standalone DA race this year, Democrat Amy Padden, is a reform-minded attorney whose tone is very different from Brauchler’s.

Her belief, in stark contrast to his, is that “we need to find alternatives to incarceration.” While Brauchler vows to seek jail time in many low-level cases, Padden said she’s loath to take that approach because it risks destabilizing individuals, families, and, eventually, whole communities. 

“Someone is locked up over the weekend, for three days, for however long it is, and they may very well lose their job, their house, have all kinds of consequences,” she told Bolts. “That’s going to increase the chances they may reoffend.” 

“We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” Padden added. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.” 

With Brauchler’s and Padden’s opposing agendas, counties that used to form one behemoth district are now poised to take starkly divergent paths.

Assuming that the new districts vote according to their usual partisan leans in November, similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different prosecutorial responses—depending on which side of this new administrative boundary they occur.

This would mark a greater change in Arapahoe County, an increasingly liberal area whose residents’ voting preferences have been drowned out by the redder parts of the old 18th district. Residents there decisively voted against Brauchler in 2012, and against Brauchler’s Republican successor, John Kellner, in 2020. 

Arapahoe County, which is much more racially and economically diverse, has also long been a place with a particularly brutal and racist law enforcement presence, by the state’s own admission. By the end of Brauchler’s last term in office, in 2020, its imprisonment rate was four times higher than that of Douglas County.

Four years ago, Colorado lawmakers chose to divide the district due to its explosive population growth. A bipartisan law adopted in March 2020 split it in two, but provided that the split would only be effective after the 2024 elections. Coloradoans in 2022 overwhelmingly approved a measure to give each new district its own separate judges.

The state split no other judicial districts. Colorado will now have 23 district attorneys, up from 22. 

“The reason we do districting is to take account of the evolving nature of communities, and Douglas and Arapahoe counties have changed a great deal,” said state Representative Mike Weissman, a Democrat who was one of the law’s sponsors. 

“The two large counties were pretty politically distinct and had two different philosophies about criminal justice and public safety,” he added. Arapahoe County voted for Joe Biden by 25 percentage points in the 2020 presidential race. Douglas County voted for Donald Trump by 7 percentage points; overall, the new 23rd district backed him by 10 percentage points. 

When Padden ran for DA a first time in 2020, in the old district, she overwhelmingly carried Arapahoe County but lost Douglas, Elbert, and Lincoln counties by large margins. Kellner, who is not seeking reelection this year, beat her by 0.2 percentage points districtwide—a margin of under 1,500 votes, out of nearly 600,000 tallied. 

This year, Padden just has to win Arapahoe County. And she’ll face a familiar name in GOP nominee Carol Chambers.

Chambers, like Brauchler, is attempting her own comeback: She was DA in the 18th District from 2005 to 2013, during which time she generated plenty of controversy—she was accused of hiding evidence at in a high-profile trial, and offered “conviction bonuses” to deputies who hit quotas—and zealously sought the death penalty. (On the day Colorado repealed the death penalty, in 2020, two of the three people on the state’s death row had been prosecuted by Chambers. All three were Black men who attended the same high school in Aurora.) 

Chambers, who failed to carry Arapahoe County the last time she was on the ballot, in 2008, even as she won districtwide, isn’t running much of a campaign so far. She has no website and has spent no money this cycle, according to state campaign finance records. 

In the new 23rd district, Brauchler will face a Democrat who, by her own admission, also has no organized campaign for now. Karen Breslin told Bolts she was recruited to run for the position by Democratic Party leaders after her recent failed bid for the 4th Congressional District, but that she has not yet been able to turn her focus to the DA race. 

Asked how she’d be different from Brauchler as a prosecutor, Breslin told Bolts, “I’m going to have to punt on that. I don’t know his record with enough detail.” 

Padden’s approach to prosecution is much more in line with the statewide political trends that Brauchler has railed against during his campaign.

Since Democrats gained full control of the state government in 2018, the legislature has, among other reforms, lessened penalties for drug possession; limited the use of cash bail and pretrial incarceration in general; placed a slew of new restrictions on police power; mandated polling places in local jails; and abolished the death penalty.

“Every year I’ve said it’s the most offender-friendly legislature we’ve ever seen, and every year I’ve said it, I was right,” Brauchler said. “They’ve continued to whittle away at the amount of accountability that can be heaped on someone for their criminal conduct.”

During his earlier stint as DA, Brauchler frequently pushed back against statewide sentencing reforms. For instance, he resisted a law that allowed judges to resentence people serving life without parole for crimes they committed while they were children. He fought against resentencing requests and unsuccessfully tried to get the law struck down as unconstitutional. He also talked and wrote prolifically against the legislature’s move to repeal the death penalty.

Now, with his proposal for jail time in all cases of theft, Brauchler is practically inviting a showdown with the legislature, telling Bolts he expects Democratic lawmakers will draft a bill to reform theft sentencing laws once they see his policy in action.

Brauchler noted that he doesn’t necessarily want petty theft to result in defendants losing employment; he said he’s open, for example, to recommending sentences that can be served over weekends only. But it is essential, he feels, to create a standard of guaranteed incarceration for minor offenses, in order to stem more serious crimes. “I’m a firm believer that if we take this thing seriously and we do it right, it has an impact on a whole host of other crimes in the jurisdiction,” he said. 

Should Brauchler pursue this policy, he’ll face major opposition from civil rights groups and defense attorneys.

“It is deeply concerning if jail time is sought across the board, for low level offenses, because we know that’s not in the interest of justice,” said James Karbach, director of legislative policy for the state’s public defender office, and formerly the lead public defender in Arapahoe County during most of Brauchler’s time as DA. “We know that’s not effective at promoting public safety; it can be destabilizing and actually provide worse outcomes. It’s expensive. And the research shows that doing that doesn’t work.”

Indeed, research has shown that long prison sentences and short jail stints alike often harm, not aid, efforts to prevent recidivism. This is particularly pronounced among people with substance use issues and other behavioral health disorders that jails and prisons are commonly unequipped, or simply unmotivated, to treat.

Severe crackdowns against low-level offenses have also been found to disproportionately increase punishment of people of color—a population already disproportionately policed and incarcerated in Colorado and the country overall.

Rebecca Wallace, policy director at the Colorado Freedom Fund, works closely with people who face detention for minor offenses. The Freedom Fund pays cash bail to get poor people out of jail ahead of trial, and advocates at the statehouse, and Wallace has no doubt about how a blanket policy of jail time for every theft charge would play out.

“Most of the people who are picked up for petty theft are people experiencing extreme poverty, and many of them homelessness, and their theft is related directly to that scarcity,” Wallace told Bolts. “When people who are in those circumstances go to jail, quite frequently they lose all their possessions because they’re homeless. They lose their animals. They lose connection with service providers, with health providers, treatment providers, whatever community they have established. That loss can sometimes take months or years to reestablish after spending only a short time in jail.” 

While there is plenty of research supporting Wallace’s case, Braucher says he’s observed that theft, including petty theft, is motivated by “greed” and not by desperation.

“This mythical story of the mom that’s out there stealing a loaf of bread to feed her kids—I’ve been doing this since ‘94, man. I’ve never once seen anything that approaches that at all,” he said.

Wallace is skeptical that Brauchler would be able to carry out his plan, as it would require system-wide buy-in throughout the 23rd district. He’d need police to increase low-level arrests, judges to approve more jail time for petty charges, and cooperation from local sheriffs who run the jails Brauchler wants to fill. 

In her work at the Freedom Fund and in her previous role with the ACLU of Colorado, Wallace says she’s lately found general bipartisan disinterest in Brauchler’s kinds of ideas among law enforcement officials and lawmakers.

“What we have found in working to reduce incarceration for low-level offenses is that Colorado DAs want to spend their time working on people who commit serious offenses with victims,” Wallace said. “I understand he wants to come in and shake that up and take us backwards, and I have faith that he’s not going to have the ability as a one-man show to do that.”

Should he and Padden both become DAs, Bauchler said he’ll make a point to build a working relationship with the Democrat who’d lead prosecution next door. But, he added, “Obviously, I’d prefer to have someone who is more like-minded in that position.” 

He cited, among other differences between them, Padden’s views on prosecuting kids as adults. (Padden criticizes the DA’s office for transferring minors to adult system too frequently, and she has said she would only do so “in the most extreme cases.“) “That kind of an approach, if she sticks to that—yeah, that’s going to make things more challenging,” Brauchler said.

Padden, too, expects ongoing disagreements with Brauchler. 

“I’m not surprised by his frame of mind. That’s always been his frame of mind,” she said. “But what we’ve been doing in the past hasn’t worked. People’s entire lives can’t be defined if they make one mistake.”

The article has been updated to reflect Brauchler and Padden’s statements on juvenile prosecutions.

The post A New Boundary Sends Suburban Colorado Down Opposite Paths on Prosecution appeared first on Bolts.

Scott Deno, who oversees Colorado’s largest jail, says he takes seriously his role in helping people vote if an election rolls around while they’re under his custody. His jail, in Colorado Springs, holds more than 1,600 people on any given day, and most are being held pretrial or serving out a misdemeanor sentence, meaning that they retain the right to vote.

Testifying in February before a legislative committee, the chief of detention for El Paso County’s sheriff’s office told lawmakers he was “very proud” of his record on this front. “I can say with 100 percent confidence: if an incarcerated citizen is residing in the El Paso County Jail during the election season, they will have the opportunity to cast their vote in a secure and timely manner,” Deno said.

State Senator Tom Sullivan followed up a bit later in the committee hearing: “How many of the incarcerated people that you had actually voted in the last election?”

Steve Schleiker, El Paso County’s clerk and top elections official, a Republican who was testifying alongside Deno, took that question. 

“Zero,” he said. 

Amanda Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, was present at the hearing for that admission. “It was a wild moment,” she told Bolts. “You could feel it in the room.” 

El Paso County is no outlier. A statewide review by the nonprofit Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition found that in the 2022 general election, only 231 people voted from the state’s jails. Some 6,000 people are held in jails across Colorado every day, a population that’s disproportionately Black and Latinx.

Gonzalez, a Democrat, said she has talked to sheriffs who run these lock-ups but dismiss these numbers. “To me, this is just a civil rights issue,” she added. Like their counterparts around the country, Colorado sheriffs have substantial power over whether the people in their custody get to exercise their right to vote. Sheriffs decide whether to allow outside groups, like the League of Women Voters, inside jails to assist people in registering to vote or obtaining a ballot. They control the flow of mail in and out of jails. They also control the flow of information relevant to voting; formerly incarcerated people in Colorado and other states have told Bolts that they never were notified of their voting options while they were jailed.

The Colorado legislature on Friday adopted a first-in-the-nation reform last week to fix this. Senate Bill 72, which now awaits the signature of Governor Jared Polis to become law, would give people held in local jails a lot more opportunities to obtain and cast a ballot.

It would require that sheriffs establish polling stations within local jails across Colorado each general election to operate for at least one six-hour period. It would also require every jail to designate a ballot drop-off location, for those who want to vote by mail.

Colorado would be the first state to enact a mandate of this sort. Nevada, Massachusetts, and Washington state have recently passed initiatives meant to make jail voting easier, but none feature the central requirement of Colorado’s: turning local jails into in-person polling places.

“It’s really a gold standard for what all states can aspire to,” Carmen López, an expert on jail voting for The Sentencing Project, a national research and advocacy organization, told Bolts. “Folks in Colorado who are in jails will have the voting experience that the rest of society in Colorado has. I think that’s really important.”

SB 72 builds on recent efforts in Denver, where local officials set up in-person voting from jail starting in 2020, to great effect so far: The jail’s turnout rate has occasionally surpassed the city’s overall rate. Elections workers and outside voter-engagement groups have also been able to enter the Denver jail to register people to vote and help them access ballots.

Just a few cities outside of Colorado, including Chicago and Dallas, have set up similar programs for jail voting.

The reform does not affect who is already eligible to vote. Colorado, like nearly every other state, bars people from voting while they are incarcerated if they’ve been convicted of a felony, and SB 72 keeps it that way. Rather, the bill seeks to improve ballot access for a group of people who already have the right to vote but face major barriers to actually using it.

Should Polis sign SB 72 into law, it’ll go into effect in time for this November’s election. (A spokesperson for the governor’s office declined to tell Bolts whether Polis, a Democrat, would sign the bill. Several people who’ve worked closely on it said they expect he will.) This bill would not apply to primary elections; its proponents say they hope to expand it in the future.

This bill sailed through both the House and Senate. It received broad support from Democratic lawmakers who run both chambers, and it also garnered some Republican votes.

But Colorado’s county sheriffs largely opposed the legislation, and their statewide association lobbied against it. Some county clerks, the local officials who oversee local election administration, also resisted the reform. During Colorado’s 120-day legislative session, which ends on Wednesday, a parade of local officials from all parts of the state asked lawmakers to reject, or at least neuter, SB 72. 

“We already serve this voting group,” testified Sheri Davis, the Republican clerk in suburban Douglas County.

“What we are currently doing across the state works,” said Democratic Sheriff David Lucero of Pueblo County, not far from Colorado Springs. “I would ask you to vote ‘no’ on this.”

Shannon Bird, one of the few Democratic lawmakers who voted against the measure, pointed to local sheriffs’ opposition to explain her stance. “They were concerned that their jails did not have the appropriate infrastructure to support the requirements of the bill; they were worried about jail staff’s ability to ensure the safety and security of inmates and election staff during the voting process,” she told Bolts. She also echoed many sheriffs’ point that there’s just no problem to begin with. “All sheriffs I heard from made clear that individuals in their custody have a right, and are already able, to vote safely through Colorado’s mail ballot process,” she said.

Some local opponents of the bill also said it would demand too much of their offices, which in many cases are short-staffed. Schleiker told lawmakers the bill would be enormously expensive to implement; El Paso County spends $26 per voter during a typical election, he said, but would have to spend more than $2,000 per jailed voter, under SB 72’s requirements.

Proponents of SB 72 countered during the hearings that this would be neither expensive nor burdensome, and that, in any event, sheriffs must learn to see voter access as mandatory.

“This is not a favor we’d be doing for these citizens,” Colorado voting rights advocate Stephanie Puello told lawmakers in the February hearing. “This is a right that they are entitled to.”

Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, estimates it would cost her county about $1,400 in total to implement SB 72, a far cry from the $2,000 per-voter price tag Schleiker predicted.

SB 72’s backers say they’ll closely monitor its rollout, given the lack of buy-in from many of the people who run Colorado’s local lock-ups and elections offices. Kyle Giddings, a civic engagement advocate for the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition who is himself formerly incarcerated, told Bolts that he is helping to gather a group of volunteers who can provide staffing and resources to any jail administration that is struggling to adjust to the reform, or is simply unmotivated to meet its demands.

“That starts on Day One,” Giddings said. “We’ve already had conversations with sheriffs that are very vocally against this bill, to say that after this bill passes we’re not going to disappear into the wind and hope they do their job. We’re going to be there the whole ride.”

Giddings and others said they intend to watchdog every jail in the state to make sure that eligible voters are granted meaningful ballot access. They intend to maintain regular communication with sheriffs and clerks to make sure those officials understand and respect the demands of SB 72; they also point toward the bill’s requirement that the secretary of state’s office provide training materials to local officials. 

Tova Wang, a senior researcher of democratic practice at Harvard University, told Bolts that she’s hopeful SB 72 has sufficient teeth to force even the most reluctant county officials to make voting from jail much easier.

“You can’t legislate motives, but you can legislate participation,” she said. “This is not that hard to do. It is sometimes the first time you do it, but after you’ve done it once, it’s not a huge lift. These concerns about resources and security—there have been a number of places able to address those challenges successfully. Denver has been doing it for a while now.”

Gonzalez, the Jefferson County clerk, says she has found that it doesn’t take much effort to bring turnout up in jails, especially when the baseline leaves so much room for improvement. When she ran for office, she said, she was “horrified” to learn about the virtually non-existent voter engagement program in her county jail: in a facility that holds about 1,000 people, she said, only three cast ballots in November of 2022. 

It’s not hard to see why that number was so low, she said, explaining that jail staff was not making much effort to publicize voting rights information.

“In Jefferson County,” she told Bolts, “the process was that there was just one sign posted with information. So a person would have to see the sign, want to vote enough to go to a deputy and ask for a voter registration form, then fill out that form. The deputy turns the form into the clerk’s office, the clerk’s office would generate a ballot, and get it to the voter. There are several barriers there where that would be a system that would not work for incarcerated voters.”

Led by Gonzalez, Jefferson County’s elections office partnered with the jail to make relatively inexpensive tweaks—creating a hotline that incarcerated people could call for free to ask about voting; advertising elections information inside the jail; and going cell-by-cell to offer voter registration forms, among other actions. About 100 jailed voters participated in Colorado’s presidential primary earlier this year, a large increase from the three who voted in 2022. 

One hundred people voting from Jefferson County’s jail still amounts to low turnout, and Gonzalez, who testified in favor of SB 72 at a House hearing, said she’s hopeful her county can keep improving. Under the bill, clerks like her would be able to supplement existing mail-voting efforts with the option for convenient, in-person voting. 

Colorado allows same-day voter registration, so Gonzalez says the physical voting centers could even grow voter rolls. 

But she said the best version of this reform will need real buy-in from sheriffs—something she has struggled to find in her own county. She questioned why so many sheriffs and clerks around the state are so unbothered by the fact that hardly anyone in Colorado is voting from jail.

“If you told me we had some precincts [outside of jail] with turnout rates of less than 1 percent, I’d be screaming at the top of my lungs about what is going on there,” Gonzalez said. “But our system has, unfortunately, a really long history of not including people of color, low-income people, and people involved in our criminal justice system. That’s exactly what we’re trying to fix. I don’t want those people ignored.”

The post Colorado Adopts First-in-Nation Mandate for Voting Centers in Jails appeared first on Bolts.

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.