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.

And this is a sentencing alternative primarily used in our county court system, where a judge may impose a sentence to this program in lieu of a jail sentence.

The program utilizes electronic monitoring technologies to assist staff, and folks again are working, attending court ordered activities, and in many cases in a reunification effort with their families.

So as we take a deeper dive, we're going to start with residential services or our halfway house system.

This slide depicts sort of the statewide system.

For those of you that have been kind of with this conversation for a long time, you know that it's a state and local partnership.

So the middle branch of the state activities involve the funding.

So a significant portion of community corrections costs are provided by the state.

They also sort of set minimum standards for operation.

So whether you're a public run program like we have now in Denver and in Fort Collins or Mesa County or private facilities, you have to adhere to a set of minimum standards.

And there are well over a hundred of them.

The two trees on the right really represent how individuals are referred to placement in our system.

We have the court system on the left and the Department of Corrections referral system on the right.

And you'll see the theme as we talk about each model.

We tried to set up this presentation to share a little bit about how folks access these services or are referred or sentenced into them, what the participant populations represent, who they are, and then some outcomes tied to each one.

So when we talk about community corrections eligibility or residential services, it's under state statute, right?

The citation is 18 1.3301 for those keeping track.

And really, there are three sets of referrals that we process.

Individuals from our district court who are sentenced on a felony level case can, as an alternative to prison, be sentenced directly to community corrections.

Those individuals are sentenced for a determinate period of time, and they will spend the time in the sentence either in the residential halfway house or we have a non-residential component to the program.

The next referral system is the Department of Corrections, and the executive director of DOC has the ability to transfer any individual who is still serving their prison sentence, but we're preparing them for release onto parole, and they have declared Denver in this instant as their release destination.

The referral eligibility is based upon a parole eligibility date.

So you have to be eligible for parole, and 95% or more are, meaning that they're not serving a life sentence in DOC.

So they're coming home sometime.

So at a certain point they become eligible to see the parole board and have their institutional time converted to a parole period of time.

This program is intended to better prepare individuals who have higher needs and are higher risk to re-enter the community.

So DOC can refer individuals who have not who have been convicted of a non-crime of violence 16 months prior to that parole eligibility date, and for individuals convicted of a crime of violence six months prior to that eligibility date.

They're just eligible to be referred.

It doesn't mean they will be accepted and placed.

That's where the role of the community corrections boards come in, which I'll sort of elaborate on in a second.

If the person isn't accepted at any point in the referral process, they can be re-referred at a later date, usually within six to twelve months of the denial.

And that's to continually taking a second look at individuals who are eligible for community placement and reassessing kind of where they are in their progression.

The third option, and it's use less is the state board of parole can refer somebody to community corrections.

Typically, this is reserved for individuals that have been paroled from the prison system and are in a community-based setting but are struggling.

They've either relapsed or have other instability factors present, and the parole board will refer somebody to stabilize them in a residential setting.

The last two bullet points, again, I apologize, there's lots of language in there, but it's just to identify that statute allows for these residential programs to be used for a variety of ways.

They can be used in the pretrial phase of a case, they can be used for misdemeanor sentences.

The issue becomes one of funding.

So the state only reimburses local governments and private providers for felony level cases in the first three referral tracks I talked about.

So we we spent some time talking about the community corrections board.

Again, state statute authorizes community corrections boards to exist in each of Colorado's 23 judicial districts.

The citation is 1727-103.

And community corrections boards really are there to do two things, right?

To review all referrals and to accept or deny an individual's placement into their local community.

They're assessing whether that community has the services available to provide support to that individual and whether or not it's the right time to place that individual in our system.

They also serve in a variety of ways to recommend or actually in some districts approve of which programs operate in their judicial district boundary.

Denver is the second judicial district in addition to being a city and county, and our board sits in an advisory capacity to the Department of Safety to recommend and to the administration which providers we do business with, and then of course, council has the ultimate authority to approve contracts for those service providers.

Who's on the board?

So the state statute doesn't outline what each board in our state looks like, and they vary greatly, mostly in terms of the number of individuals.

I think the expertise that sits on boards across the state looks pretty similar.

Denver is a large board, it has 21 members.

The municipal code authorizes or outlines who sits on the board.

Each of the members are appointed by the mayor, and then go through a confirmation process with city council.

Generally speaking, we're talking about 10 individuals that work within the criminal justice or human services field, both at a state and local level.

We have six residents of the city and county of Denver, a locally elected official, representative of victim services.

And I highlighted the persons with experience, knowledge, expertise in criminal justice.

Up until about 10 years ago, that really set in a place where individuals with professional or paid experience who maybe worked outside of or lived outside of Denver, set on the board to help make those decisions.

More recently, the trend, and it's been a wonderful addition to the board in terms of diverse experience and thought process, is to identify individuals who are formally incarcerated or who have other types of lived experience, which has just added tremendous value to the discussions and expertise of the board.

The charts on the right depict sort of the demographics of the board, both from a gender and a race ethnicity standpoint.

I'll pause for just a second and let you all look there.

So what does the participant population look like in our residential programs?

We identified that 78% of them have identified mental health need.

71% of participants indicated current problem with drugs or alcohol.

43% of participants have a history of housing instability, and 70% of the folks placed assess at high risk to recidivate.

I want to just when I talk about risk, we're not talking about dangers, being people being dangerous.

Again, these are safe programs, and I'll talk more about that in a moment.

But they're the folks that are targeted for placement in residential programs, really have shown that they don't succeed in traditional non-residential environments, i.e.

probation or straight to parole.

So this is an intervention that provides 24-7 wraparound structure and support in hopes of really seeing success.

The top offenses, again, we know that they're felony level offenses, and you can see assault, and you'll see that throughout our slide deck, that assault tends to be the top offense across our programs.

Some of that is influenced by the significant number of domestic violence cases and that category of salt coming into the criminal justice system.

Rounding up the top five offenses are burglary, controlled substance, motor vehicle, and robbery.

If we were looking at this chart a few years ago, controlled substance might be first or second, but we know with the defelinization of possession, we're seeing drug use stripe, other types of crimes that come into the community correction system, not drug offenses themselves, if that makes sense.

Roughly 76% are male, 23% are female, and then we do work with transgender identified individuals on the most appropriate placement for them in our Denver run facilities.

You can see the race, ethnicity breakdown on the chart on the right.

Most of you have seen this slide multiple times, but we continue to show it because it depicts the serious change and evolution of our system here in Denver, right?

In 2019, there was a policy decision made to break away from relying on private for-profit, large national private prison operators, and move into a different environment.

So since that time, we've spent the last six years sort of closing that system and rebuilding it.

So just want to highlight that we continue to be challenged with capacity.

And when I say capacity, that's opportunities for folks both coming out of prison, returning to Denver, or being sentenced by a judge sitting in jail waiting to come to these programs where we sit at a third of our capacity from 2019.

We have almost 50 individuals in jail waiting for a bed, and we have over 90 in the Department of Corrections waiting for a bed.

We're four to eight months on wait times on any given period.

We do have 273 beds currently open, and certainly are working hard to open a fourth site, which I'll talk about on this slide.

Um I mentioned that our service model sort of moved away from private prison providers.

We do have one loan and remaining contract with a private provider.

Independence House has been the fabric in the Denver community for a long time in North Denver and has provided excellent service.

So they still continue to run the Independence House PECOS program at for 75 individuals.

We primarily place just our DOC clients there, and and they do great work.

Denver now has three directly operated residential programs, the impact center, 48 beds, Project Elevate, which is our program that provides services to women at 60 beds approximately, and then the Moore Center, our most recent program that opened in the Chairs District, Councilman Watson, and thank you for visiting is off to a tremendous start, and it provides services to 490 individuals.

Some of you are might be reminded that the city did purchase a property from the from Core Civic a couple of years ago, Dahlia, and you know, we are trying to get it reopened.

There were some challenges this year with some construction and some continued vandalism and break-ins at the site, and that has delayed opening.

And of course, now we are navigating certainly the challenges of reduced resources.

But our goal would be to hopefully see it open at the end of 26.

Um, just want to highlight things that we that we've talked about, and I know Councilwoman Torres was part of the community corrections advisory group, but one of these these are three things we really have tried to implement in our Denver run programs, right?

We are providing integrated services with community agencies and partners.

The Project Elevate program has empowerment as a community partner, and the second chant center is partnered alongside us at the Moore Center.

We really have tried to de-institutionalize and normalize our efforts, both in terms of building design and our approach.

We're absolutely taking a person-centered approach, and Stephanie can speak for hours about that if you'd like.

And again, I've mentioned the importance of identifying and really embracing the value added by having staff with different kinds of lived experience in the programs, both through a care management, an operation side, and even pure navigators.

So when we talk about outcomes, I mentioned these programs are safe, right?

And this statistic has been trending this way for a long time.

Less than two percent of individuals in our residential programs are terminated for the commission of a new crime while in residential programming.

So there sometimes is concern at the onset of this type of use being in a neighborhood, but they're safe programs.

Folks are not committing crimes while in placement.

Roughly 59% of the individuals in calendar year 24 completed the program successfully and moved on to the next phase of whether that be parole or non-residential services.

And I highlighted this because I think it's important that you know the whole thing, we're we're treating the person that's in placement, but there was harm done to community or other individuals as part of the offense.

And you know, the programs do collect restitution and set up plans.

And the last year over the past 12 months, the Denver programs have collected and seen 120,000 be paid towards victim restitution.

The bottom set of bullet points sometimes aren't captured in statistics, but it's why the staff come to work every day, why they work on weekends, why they work away from their families on holidays, why they're there overnight.

It's it's that person-centered approach.

So these were just snippets I pulled from a report that Stephanie sends to me regularly, and you know, I'll just highlight them, right?

Um staff really worked hard with an individual who saw intimate partner violence consistently throughout their life and was able to really overcome that unhealthy relationship and set positive boundaries for herself moving forward, right?

We see examples of family reunification, right?

Folks in placement, right, are our mothers or fathers, our brothers, our cousins and uncles, right?

And seeing folks reunite with their families is just a tremendous tremendous experience for for the staff and for our community.

And the last part is you know, I mentioned that a significant number of folks have a identified mental health need, and sometimes just see having the ability of the structured program to get medication stabilized is clearly important in their reentry journey.

So transitioning to pretrial services.

Again, as a reminder, pretrials that initial stage of the criminal case begins with that arrest or citation and concludes with the disposition of a charge.

When we talk about disposition, that means charges weren't filed, they were dismissed, a not guilty plea or finding was found, or they were sentenced.

Decisions at this stage though are really different than most criminal justice interventions, right?

Because this is a person hasn't yet been convicted.

So it sets into motion a whole other set of sort of legal principles in the framework.

Um we've talked about this in the past, and it continues to sort of be oftentimes misunderstood.

But with limited exception, everybody that's arrested has a fundamental constitutional right to release on bail.

The exception is first degree murder.

Everybody else has to be, bail has to be set, and they have to be allowed to be released into the community pending the disposition of their case.

US constitution defines or says that bail can't be punishment.

Individuals released on bail are innocent, and the case the case, the pretrial phase of the case is not intended to punish.

Bail can't be excessive, right?

And that's where when you start talking about financial conditions of release, that's where this debate about whether it's excessive bail or not.

I already referenced kind of who can be detained, and I want to speak to that a little bit more as we go through this Colorado work done at the state legislature around bail reform or moving to a more risk-based system and away from a financial one, which we know that financial conditions of release oftentimes don't do a great job of discerning who's at poses a risk to the community.

It really sets up who can pay and post their bond and be released.

Again, Colorado's laws talk about a release under the least restrictive conditions.

Folks have to have bail set within 48 hours of their arrest and be released within six hours of posting their bond.

A judge has to set bail.

They don't have the ability, with rare exception, to detain someone pretrial.

And there could be a long debate about who needs to be detained pretrial.

Unfortunately, Colorado judges don't have that option.

So they are forced to set either a monetary condition of release or a surety bond or cash bond or a PR bond.

Our process looks like this.

Someone is arrested.

Staff engage with that person within hours of being arrested.

We don't, we aren't able from a resource standpoint, able to work with everybody that comes into our jail system.

So it's been prioritized over the years.

We work with any person charged with a felony or arrested on a felony, all misdemeanors that are covered under the Victim Rights Act, and the Victim Rights Act generally covers more serious crimes that are crimes against person.

Any individual that's brought into the jail with a DUI or DWA, AI who has priors, and then all levels of domestic violence cases.

So this is where we do engage with municipal level cases.

Within 40 hours of arrest, again, staff have met with the individual, conducted the risk assessment, and provided a report to the court.

The court has the responsibility to do two things set the type of bond, right?

PR or some type of financial bond, and any conditions of release.

If there are conditions of release, those individuals process through our jail-based team and are set up for case management services, which is where Aubrey has spent a lot of time managing the folks over there.

And folks will remain under pretrial until bond is modified or the case is dispositioned.

Snapshot of the work that the team does.

You can see year over year, we're at about 11,000 reports that are produced for the court annually.

Although we did see it increase quite a bit in 2024.

So in 2024, we saw roughly 2300 individuals on any given day that were being supported, supervised through pretrial services.

Roughly, you might remember from the presentation we did earlier this year.

18 to 20% of those individuals have an electronic monitoring device requirement as part of their bond condition.

Who's supervised by pretrial?

Again, keeping the framework of this presentation, we see that it's still in that 80% male, which is what we see in the criminal justice system, 20% female.

The race-ethnicity breakdown is on the bottom.

And because pretrial works with all level of cases right after arrest, we broke out the top offenses a little differently.

We organize them by level of offense.

So we have felony charges, misdemeanor charges, and municipal charges.

Again, similar to community corrections, assault shows up as the top charge, and again, there's that domestic violence component to that.

Almost all, if not all of the municipal cases are domestic violence related, a significant number outside of the possession and driving in an influence from misdemeanors are going to be domestic violence related, and then certainly that trend continues in the felony cases.

When we discuss outcomes in pretrial, again, we're not punishing people, so we're trying to ensure that they attend their court appearance or their court dates, and we're also trying to ensure that they aren't committing new offenses while while they're on release.

We see that happen 63% of the time across the board.

Um, roughly three three fourths of individuals continue to attend court during their pretrial release.

And then the safety rate we talk about are those individuals who do not who are not rearrested for a crime while they're in that pretrial period.

Those rates are positive.

Part of that is the length of pretrial is somewhat short, right?

You're talking four to six months of pretrial, so you know you're gonna see higher rates of success there.

I do want to just call attention to the safety rate.

Um we aren't able to currently talk about when an individual fails to appear and their case is closed, track that individual to see if they were re-arrested or whether they just didn't show up for court.

Efforts are underway with the data analytics team in safety to produce that statistic, but I just as we're sharing this data, I just want to qualify it that that safety rate could be underreported for individuals who FTA'd and committed a new crime.

FT failure to appear.

There we go.

I am almost through this slide deck.

Uh the last model is in home detention.

Um, and again, quite simply, it was established in the mid-90s to create a sentencing alternative for our county court system for individuals, typically of lower level offenses to be directly sentenced to a period of home confinement in lieu of jail.

Um clients continue to either seek or maintain employment, there are um they have to attend any court order treatment and commit complete community service while on the program.

We see high success rates for this group.

Um, I think the judges do a tremendous job identifying who's a good risk and a good candidate to be in this environment.

Um, individuals on this program are assessed a fee for the electronic monitoring services, unlike pretrial where there are no client fees assessed.

A really poor slide, Councilman Flynn.

I saw your reaction to these lengthy word ones.

I just wanted to again copy that legislative authority on who who gets into the programs for home detention.

Um, our municipal code outlines that it's a county judge may use home detention as a condition of price probation or as an alternative sentence, and then the second highlight, it also empowers the court in the bond setting process to use electronic monitoring as a condition of their bond.

It was like an involuntary vision test for anyone trying to read it, but we appreciate the information, which I was struggling with this morning prepping myself.

We talk here about the number of individuals.

These sentences to electronic monitoring and in-home detention seem to be shorter.

Um, the average length of stays about 30 days, and so we see any the range from like 10 to 75 or 90.

Um annually, we're serving five to 700 participants, and again, the top charges are really good to be your um DUIs, which carry mandatory sentences to jail, but court can impose this as an alternative, and then some other crimes listed there, but certainly almost half are DUIs.

Race ethnicity is broken out on the top, and again, we continue to see that um predominantly more males are served in the criminal justice system.

And with that, that is the slide deck, so certainly turn it over to the experts and offer any responses or questions you may have.

Well, Greg, um, thank you so much for the presentation.

Thank you so much, Stephanie, um, and thank you so much, Aubrey, for all being here.

I I think this information uh is very important to community, and uh I think many of us um have folks that are impacted by the justice system, and having this opportunity to understand really what are the steps we're taking to ensure that folks do not remain in prison that don't need to, and that there are alternatives and how thoughtful the process is.

So thank you, as always, for your presentation.

Um we have a Q and I I want to start with Council President Pro Tem who's online to first see if there are any um if she has a question, and then I'll go into our queue that's in a room.

Uh thank you.

I don't have a question at this time.

Um, I do.

I just want to some of it I I was hoping.

Oops, I'm not on camera.

Here we go.

Um I know it was discussed um in the process, but just looking at the larger context of what's happening um across the country, uh, what have been the impacts for our court system and um in relationship to um ICE and uh people attending and process um going through the courts?

Greg, and anyone from your team if you're if you're able to answer.

If you're not, then you can always report back to us, but please.

Yeah, and and councilwoman Mr.

Chair, do you think that's really a better question posed to the courts?

I mean, um, but certainly we can sort of think about a thoughtful thoughtful response and back to you.

All right.

President Pratem, any additional questions?

Um, no, I guess it would be more.

Um, has there been impact in your in your scope then in your scope of work or how does it impact your scope?

Councilwoman, I mean, certainly um folks experience anxiety and uncertainty, as you know from you know the restrictions or what we're authorized or not authorized to collect as part of a city agency or city employee.

We don't ask for immigration status when we're providing these services, and we just serve the individual.

And I think kind of a follow-up uh for council president pretend if I if I may, are are you experiencing a reduction of folks showing up for pretrial?

Are we seeing fewer folks um actually responding or actually staying within um systems because they're afraid of their communicating fear of uh of additional uh penalties based on immigration status?

Is that something that your team is seeing or tracking for folks um when we're looking at the percent of folks who are Latino Hispanic that are impacted within this process?

Are you seeing any impacts to that?

So the challenge with tracking is we don't collect that data point.

Um anecdotally, do we hear that?

Yes, okay.

Um, the courts might have information in terms of failure to appear rates for that specific you know, specific group, but we don't track that data point.

Excellent.

We'll we will be following up on that.

Council President Pro Tem, I'll give you another opportunity for any other questions.

I'm good, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Councilmember Flynn and Councilmember Gonzalez Guterres.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh Greg, a couple of uh maybe uh clarifications for me so I make sure I understand the data that you're giving her on slide four.

You have greater than 90% of incarcerated population return to their community.

Is that is incarcerated population the entirety of those in the correction system overall, or is it just within community corrections?

Because if it's just community corrections, I'm wondering where the other fewer than 10 percent go.

Yeah, this is really speaking, the statistic is really based upon our prison populations.

Speak up a little bit.

Yep.

The 90 percent is related to our prison populations, so more than 90 percent of individuals who are sentenced to state prison return home.

So it's the totality of it's not just in the community correction.

No, okay.

Thank you.

And then on slide 14.

If I can more quickly get there.

Um under outcomes, excuse me.

Uh fewer than two percent of participants are terminated from the residential program for a commission of new crime.

Successful termination from residential programs last year, 59%.

Where are the other 41%?

What constitutes a successful termination and what constitutes an unsuccessful termination?

Simplest way to explain that, Councilmember Flynn, is to say unsuccessful terminations are the commission of a new crime.

And that's less than two percent.

Less than two percent, or the a return to custody or an unauthorized absence.

So a return to custody is for continuously and repeatedly breaking program roles or not sort of participating in their program.

Staff can return that individual to incarceration, and you know, perhaps down the road they might be more motivated or incentivized to complete the program.

The other group of folks is these are not locked facilities, so individuals are allowed to go into community to work, attend treatment, you know, go on privilege passes.

Sometimes they do not return.

So it's a failure to return or an unauthorized absence termination that accounts for that missing percentage.

Okay.

So the 59% figure that I'm looking at, I should see that as the bottom line success rate of the community corrections program.

I think you could, um, and and you know, maybe if Stephanie wants to sort of build on any response I provide.

Yes, in in its pure sense that's true, and I'll also remind you that individuals in community corrections often failed at multiple other types of intervention, right?

They weren't successful on probation, they weren't appropriate for going straight to parole.

That's why they're in this more structured system.

So we ought to be careful about, and I don't I don't know that you're doing this, I'm not implying that you are, but looking for a hundred percent success, right?

We're working with individuals with complex needs.

I would also offer though that sometimes when folks are returned, there's a success in there too.

And Stephanie, do you want to maybe talk about a couple of instances where we've seen that?

Yes, so sometimes individuals make mistakes, but they make growth in themselves, in their support structures, and those things.

Those things, even though they didn't successfully complete the program, they still keep those things.

Uh the number of days that they have been sober still continues.

And sometimes folks make a mistake and then come back to community corrections or go back to the community and are still able to be successful.

Uh, it just wasn't that initial attempt.

Um, and so that does evolve over time and looks different for different folks.

Uh many of our folks have a number of risk factors, and if they had five major risk factors and they were able to address four, I would still argue that there's been some success made.

Okay.

And Stephanie, I know in the beginning, introduced yourself.

Do you mind just so to quote so watching or aware of who you are in your role?

Uh yes, so my name is Stephanie Robertson.

I'm a residential services manager in the residential community corrections programs.

Um last I guess overall question, Greg, um, continuing to be concerned about the lack of capacity based on what we had in July of 2019, because that delta represents men and women who are who are languishing in prison when there could be, I guess most of them when there could be better pathways out for them, and we're very slowly building back capacity, but it's been, see, 2019 to uh to right now is you know, that's what is that six years, I have to think on the fly doing math.

Uh of the eight community corrections facilities we had at the time, uh, there were three of them in my district.

Little known fact.

Southwest never had the most facilities and the most beds.

But one of them was the federal independence house facility, which has been a great uh part of our district.

But the other two have closed, uh, not because of the issues that close the core civic and geo, but uh CU's uh the Pier 1 program at Fort Logan and the Haven, uh women's program also at Fort Logan.

Also very good programs, very sorry to see them go.

So that's contributed to the lack of bed capacity.

How what's the plan to catch back up?

I don't know if you say we want to be at 550.

We don't need to go back to 750.

How long is what's the plan?

How long will that take?

Longer than we all want, right?

Yeah, it's complicated from both just an identifying available properties that meet zoning requirements to finding the funding to purchase the building and then sort of operationalize it.

So um, you know, we have worked diligently, and I'll remind folks that in this six-year transition, we also had two years with a you know, the pandemic certainly wasn't accounted for in the strategy to to sort of rebuild.

Um we I guess the plan is real estate works diligently to identify properties that can be zoned for this use.

We have the Dahlia facility roughly at I-70 in Dahlia Street that's city purchased and once renovated will be open.

Uh we continue to advocate with all of you with the administration that hopefully this remains a priority to again get us back to a number where we don't have people waiting in jail who have been sentenced to go to community corrections, or people who are appropriately ready to come out of the prison system into community.

I wish I had a 12 months or more.

It takes time and funds, councilman.

I can tell you have a point that you wanted to make.

Do you mind jumping in?

Um actually I don't.

I appreciate the read because I do have very readable facial.

I think what you're reading is my motivation that yes, I'm excited for us to continue to have some more residential beds.

I saw a body language change, but I apologize for this read.

Thank you, Councilmember Flynn.

Uh, Councilmember Gonzalez Gutierrez.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um, going back to the makeup of the community corrections board.

Um, curious, so it says there are 10 positions that represent criminal justice and slash human services.

What is the breakdown of that and and who are those people?

Like what are their roles in their particular fields?

Thank you for the question, Councilmember.

Um, in really tiny print underneath the 10 positions, it outlines um what the language is in the ordinance.

So, for example, a representative from the district attorney's office, a representative from the state public defender's office, um, the Denver Sheriff's Department is represented.

We have the chief probation officers from both adult and juvenile probation.

Um, so that's sort of the makeup.

And like from human services, who is part of that?

Um, our chair is actually um Dana, and I'm drawing a blank on her name, Nimala from Human Services, and she um is an administrator of Denver Human Services, and also uh we have someone from state human services on the division of youth corrections, okay.

Um I see it now.

I pulled it up.

I was like, I apologize.

Um, okay.

I was just curious on that.

So those are listed in our code.

In the RMC, correct.

The as far as the breakdown of the organizations that need to be represented on the board, then the actual selection of individuals comes from the aid the agencies identified, and then the council and mayoral process.

And then the locally elected official of my understanding, it's been I think State Senator Julie Gonzalez for uh she was on it for a little bit.

So is it a local elected official or is it a like because I think local, I think us, um, and then there's like the state, you know, representation.

Great question.

It's been it that language is locally elected official.

Historically, it's been filled by a member of our general assembly.

Um, but certainly they're just a point to be vague about city council.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

Um, I'm not asking to be on this.

So you guys know.

I know they meet really early on like a lot of homework reviewing.

Yeah, no, I'm okay.

Um that's not what I'm asking.

Getting clarification.

So thank you for presenting on the demographic information.

I think that was one of the requests.

I think from the the last time you all came.

And I guess one of the questions I have on that is that having a comparison of the general population of folks that are incarcerated.

So you know, being able to compare, right?

So we see the numbers, we see for African Americans, it's at a certain percentage, but what is the relation to the total population?

Right?

Are we seeing that was like what I really wanted to get at?

I think is like, is there a disparity of who is being offered this kind of lower level, whether it's coming from the courts or it's coming from DOC that they're getting to transition or step down?

Who is getting that opportunity right to get to this next step or a lower level type of kind of supervision or um program rather than going into locked facility?

So I don't know if you have that information.

We do.

We actually worked with the sheriff's department to at least look at a point in time data point for um race ethnicity incarcerated in the Denver jail system back in mid-July.

And we will certainly provide that slide to you all after this.

Rough numbers, it represents the three major groups of white, Hispanic, and African American, about a third, about 30-some percent in each category, which we know right as well established that that looks very differently than the Denver population or state of Colorado.

We know there's overrepresentation of um people of color in our criminal justice system.

Our programs tend to mirror kind of what you see as far as who's in jail, right?

There's a little deviation, um Hispanic and Caucasian will flip depending on program.

Um African American tends to be sort of constant in that again, overrepresented, but similar to the jail population, and we will send that slide to you.

That would be helpful, yeah.

I just want to make sure that there's not a um disparity, right, of who is getting access, especially because we know who is represented in that system.

So thank you, Mr.

Chair.

That's all I had.

Thank you, Councilmember Gonzalez Guterres.

Uh council member parody.

Um yeah, I wanted to return to the electronic monitoring conversation that we had in this committee.

Who knows when?

Oh, yeah.

Um, in time.

Um, and specifically, I think you were working on a study.

Is that right?

There was an electron, there was a study happening about our electronic monitoring, how it impacts um, whether it's actually effective.

Right, whether it's effective, how it impacts both safety and like I don't think people hold on, I'm gonna look at my notes about it.

But anyway, that's what I want to ask about.

And I'm gonna aubre, you want to respond?

And if I remember, yes, yeah, I think um, so I think with that last presentation, um, we talked about both the in-home detention population electronic monitoring, which is all electronic monitoring, and then the pretrial population.

Yeah, generally.

The yes, and I think the research and kind of the studies that we were talking about were specifically specific to the pretrial population.

So, um, there has been um ongoing research that we partnered with ASU on, and I think that's what we we briefly spoke about around um GPS monitoring specifically.

Um, and the risk assessment, the Odara, if that rings any bells, which is the risk assessment that we use specifically for those domestic violence-related cases, right?

Um, and that research um really has for the most part concluded with the exception of one last piece, which involves um getting information from CBI, and I think that's kind of the final, yes, kind of the final piece.

What I can tell you from kind of the preliminary information we received from that was um really looking at is GPS effective, how is it related to new crime?

What it really showed us um is something that, and I think Greg talked about is some work that we are now doing somewhat independently and looking at when there is new crime pretrial specifically for people on GPS.

Um, when is that happening?

Um is that impacted whether they're on GPS or not?

So that is something that we're working with the analysts with state safety to really dig into and have some more information.

Again, preliminarily, what we've seen is that the good news is we are not seeing GPS new crimes having an impact whether they're on GPS or not.

That doesn't mean the GPS isn't impacting the behavior.

It just means that if we're removing it 60 or 90 days down the road, we're not seeing that it's increasing new crime.

Um that's it's kind of a complicated answer to your question in that there are research, there's things that we are looking at.

Um, but that was specific to the pretrial and kind of the ASU work, I think.

Yes, that's exactly what I was following up on.

Um, and I appreciate that.

So, I mean, you probably have no idea when CBI will get their piece of it done, but if there's anything shareable from the work so far or anything like that, we would love to see it.

Absolutely.

Yeah, and good luck with that.

Obviously, we now have an ally at CBI.

I know, right?

We have an we have an inside, we have a cell phone number unless he changes it.

Cool.

Thank you guys.

That's it, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Councilmember Parity.

Um, look around the room, make sure there are no other questions online, no other questions.

Uh I wanted to provide an opportunity.

Uh, Stephanie, I've had um the opportunity to do a few tours um and sit with um um residents that are living within um spaces that that you all um support.

Um, and I I know we have a lot of data on these slides, and wanted to make sure that we at least elevate some of the stories and demonstration of what success looks like.

And so I wanted to give the floor to you and to Auri if you all had any stories that you wanted to share, um, since the nonprofits who are actually walking hand to hand with you in these problems, these these spaces aren't here to present.

Yes, thank you.

Um, I think there are so many successes, and it is really exciting to see what that looks like.

And it's not just our definition of success, but also the definitions of success that are shared with us by the people we serve, our residents in our programs.

Um, what's very exciting is to see people who've experienced challenges over long periods of time.

Uh, we had a woman who was unhoused for more than a decade who was able to achieve stability through her residential community corrections experience, able to set some healthy boundaries in a relationship that was unhealthy, and is now thriving in our community in her own apartment and has about been out for quite some time, and is really able to just live a quote-unquote normal life like any other member of our community.

Um, we have folks that have struggled with mental illness for a very long period of time, but didn't have access to the resources that they needed in order to achieve stability and through a combination of mental health treatment and medication, um, and just stability of housing and other things are able to live healthy, again, quote unquote normal lives.

Uh, we have folks who celebrate uh regularly experiences of sobriety that are longer than any experience of sobriety they've ever had in their adult lives.

Many of our folks uh who do use substances started using very young and have no idea of what a life without the use of substances looks like as an adult out in the world, and solving for some people multiple problems, and for some people just solving one main problem has allowed them to re-enter and join our community.

Uh, they are able to take care of their children and break down that intergenerational pattern of incarceration.

And for many people, uh, really, that foster care to prison pipeline even gets disrupted when parents are able to parent their children and don't have their children being cared for by the system.

There are wins every single day.

Folks who are willing to be brave and go through an educational program and make ends meet in a legal and lawful manner that gives them a career that they're proud of, but also doesn't lead them to rely on criminal sources of income.

Uh, we've also seen a tremendous uh amount of progress in our community in breaking down their own community violence patterns that have plagued not only themselves, but the people around them.

Uh, we have folks going into their communities and acknowledging that they were able to make that change and sharing it with others.

Uh, a large piece of that really comes from our staff who have lived experience themselves and can look at participants in our programs and say, I was able to do this, I believe you can too.

I understand what's hard, I understand what's complicated, I understand what you're not saying that is creating a barrier, and really helping those participants find that path to success.

Um, so it is really our participants that are doing a lot of the hard work, and we are just there to help break down those barriers and present opportunities where there wasn't an opportunity before.

Well, that is a perfect way to end uh this committee meeting.

Stephanie Aubrey, Greg, thank you as always for the ways that you serve, and thank you so much for bringing forward this information so the community can hear more about this um uh great program that you lead.

Um, with that, we have two items on consent um and no action items tonight.

So um the meeting has been adjourned.

Thank you all.