Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning and welcome to the Health and Safety Committee.

Today is 7 July 30th.

The month has passed so quickly.

We have one briefing and two consent items today.

But before we go into our agenda, why don't we start with introductions?

I do believe we have Council President Pro Tem online.

So we'll start with you, Council President Pro Tem, and then we'll go to the one.

Good morning, Diana.

Good morning.

Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

And then Councilmember Flynn.

Oh, going to the right.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

I like this more dramatic pause.

Good morning, everyone.

Sedana Gonzalez Bachetas.

I'm one of the council members at large.

I'm Sarah Parity.

I am your other council member at large.

And it reminds me of the owl, the two owl.

No.

Two.

Three.

Three.

It's gonna be one of those meetings, folks.

What happens when you keep using it?

Let's roll with it.

Um, it's always great to have Greg Morrow and the uh community corrections uh team here to kind of walk us through a little bit of the work that they do.

So, Greg, I want to turn it over to you if you'll like to introduce any of the members of your team.

Uh the floor is yours.

All right.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and good morning, members of council.

Um, as the chair said, I'm Greg Morrow, the Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Safety, and I'll ask members of my team to introduce themselves.

So I'm Stephanie Robertson.

I'm a residential services manager for Denver Community Corrections.

And I am Aubrey Cote, and I am a manager with pretrial services under community corrections.

Um, thank you for the opportunity to come and present to the committee today.

Um, you know, we hope to get into a good discussion and educational briefing about the programs that community corrections offers within the Department of Safety.

Um I think it's pretty widely understood that safety represents uniform agencies like police, fire sheriff, and certainly 911.

Sometimes I think it's good to raise awareness that there's also important programs as part of that comprehensive public safety strategy that provide alternatives to incarceration.

So, with that, community corrections programs provide safe alternatives to incarceration, kind of through three distinct models, and we're gonna kind of highlight those three models and then go into the detail of each one throughout this presentation.

Um we start with pretrial services.

Uh, pretrial is the initial stage of a criminal case, uh, which begins with arrest and ends with the disposition of charges.

Um, our team interacts with the criminal justice system at this stage shortly after an individual is arrested and booked into the jail, where our team kind of around the clock will conduct an interview, pull some uh background information, and conduct a risk assessment, and all that gets packaged into a report that goes that goes with the individual to court the next day.

Um if anybody is ordered to ongoing support or supervision as part of their pretrial release conditions.

Our team manages that aspect as well.

Uh pretrial is 24-7.

Um, and for context, we're talking about the adult pretrial system.

I know the council member has experience with the juvenile system, but we're talking about the adult pretrial system.

The second method or model is our residential services program.

And when I say residential services, we're talking about our halfway houses.

Um these are again our 24-hour structured supervision components that offer both programming and supervision.

Um, individuals in placement are allowed and encouraged to seek and maintain employment, and we also offer a wide uh array of interventions that are targeting the needs that sort of led to the commission of the crime or instability to begin with.

Um, participants in these programs also pay towards their victim restitution, child support, and they contribute to the state and federal tax base.

The most important aspect of residential re-entry is really the step down back into community.

We know that more than 90% or greater than 90% of our incarcerated population in our state prison system return home.

And so this affords individuals that need higher structure and support the opportunity to come back safely to their communities.