A wide-sweeping experiment of social "normalization" in Colorado's correctional system has an uncertain future after executive Director Dean Williams announced the end of his nearly four-year tenure. Williams is an outspoken advocate for rehabilitation in incarceration and looks to international practices as reform models. He expanded arts, mentorship and education programs, allowed inmates to travel for theater performances they created and recently appeared as himself in one of those plays.
"When I was in Halden Prison (in Norway) five or six years ago, I think a saying was on their water cup or coffee cup, and translated it says, 'Just don't sit there,'" Williams said. "I just love this saying."
But Williams' reforms in Colorado have also been controversial, coinciding with a period when many voters named crime rates as a key concern ahead of the midterm elections and GOP candidates campaigned heavily with the theme that their Democratic opponents were too soft on crime.
Williams took over in 2019 after his appointment by Gov. Jared Polis, coming to Colorado after he was ousted as Alaska's corrections chief for his similar pushes to reform. He announced his resignation in Colorado in an internal email Nov. 9, the day after the midterm elections.
He has overseen a correctional system with a budget that spanned between $949 million and more than $998 million annually during his tenure. Since January 2019, the total number of people under the Department of Corrections’ authority has fluctuated between more than 20,200 at its peak in February 2019 and a low of around 15,400 in June 2021 during Williams’ tenure.
During his run, Williams has been a lightning rod for the central question of how punitive correctional systems should be. A punitive approach has the underlying theory that making incarceration unpleasant enough deters people from future crimes because they wouldn’t want to return to prison.
The key tenet of normalization, the approach championed by Williams and his recent predecessors, focuses on incarceration — and the accompanying separation from society and deprivation of freedoms — as the punishment itself and moves away from an institutionalized, militant environment. Normalization seeks to make incarceration more similar to everyday life outside, and to give inmates opportunities for work and education programs.
“That's going to be Dean's legacy in the mindset, I believe, of the people incarcerated, is they believe that the person at the top no longer just saw them as a number,” said Eric Davis, who works for the University of Denver’s Prison Arts Initiative and spent 34 years in prison. Gov. Jared Polis granted him release in 2021 as part of the Juveniles Convicted As Adults program, which allows people to apply for early release after they have served at least twenty-five years of their sentence for first-degree murder or twenty years for other crimes.
“They saw me as Eric Davis, a human being who tomorrow could actually do a great thing, even though everybody never believed I could.”
Among other programs, Williams began initiatives such as Take TWO work release and a seminary study for inmates to serve as chaplains to other incarcerated people. He oversaw the expansion of the DU Prison Arts Initiative, which has created a newspaper, literary arts magazine, radio station, podcast, theater and film productions.
Last summer he appeared as himself in a play about the criminal justice system produced and performed by inmates titled, “If Light Closed Its Eyes.”
“All those things are vehicles to helping change prison culture. So one, we don't have idle hands inside the walls. And two, there's actually purpose and direction and giving back,” Williams said.
For advocates of normalization, building a correctional system around the philosophy has practical benefits. They don’t see it as a denial that many people incarcerated have done terrible things and caused irreversible harm. Education and work programs equip incarcerated people with skills and money for life after their release. Programs are focused on accountability, Williams said, give inmates a way to take responsibility for the actions that landed them in prison.
“No one would raise children without meaningful opportunities for them to be involved,” Williams said. “Ironically, it's not much different in terms of running a prison system.”
But Williams' views on corrections haven't found popularity with everyone. Former Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen was one sharp critic of Williams. He argued that too many homicides in Denver were tied to parolees Pazen argued were under lax supervision.
"Let's go get the guy who that has a 66% rate of recidivism, hire that person away and expect a different outcome. The definition of insanity. We actually did the worst aspect of the definition of insanity," Pazen said in a previous interview with The Denver Gazette.
Reducing recidivism is a key metric of success, Pazen said, because it reduces prison populations while enhancing public safety.
"We often talk about crime and punishment. Take the punishment away, all you've got left is crime."
Williams told the state legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee in a 2020 SMART Act hearing that he believes changing the culture of incarceration is the single most significant way to reduce recidivism and make prisons safer for inmates and staff.
Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, said that because the U.S. has an entrenched status quo of punitive corrections practices, any change to the norm can feel radical.
“He’s not just trying to normalize. He’s trying to humanize an environment that is incredibly dehumanizing,” she said, and “modernizing correctional industries and aligning prison culture with what works, in terms of promoting behaviors inside that will be adaptive to the outside.”
Williams has built on approaches implemented by Tom Clements and Rick Raemisch, the two corrections chiefs before Williams. They had an instrumental role in limiting the use of solitary confinement, and in 2017 under Raemisch the Department of Corrections ended long-term solitary confinement altogether. Stays in confinement, also called administrative segregation, are now limited to 15 days.
“People called me progressive, and I just felt I was doing the right thing,” said Raemisch, a former prosecutor and sheriff in Dane County, Wisc., who thinks of himself as a “hardcore law and order” person. Before his tenure as Colorado’s corrections chief from 2013 to 2019, Raemisch also led Wisconsin’s Department of Corrections.
“The fact of the matter is, the majority of what I did was for safety. To increase the safety of the staff and increase the safety of the community, because the more we did make these individuals change their lifestyle so that they would be law-abiding citizens, that's what we needed to do.”
In a 2017 opinion piece for the New York Times, Raemisch wrote that solitary confinement exacerbates mental illness and makes the chance a person will reoffend higher. He said the practice was designed as a last resort for people deemed too dangerous for a prison’s general population. But it expanded to include inmates who “disrupted the efficient running of an institution,” he wrote, meaning people could be put in confinement for nearly any reason.
Clements was assassinated in 2013, likely by a man who may have been directed by a white supremacist prison gang. The man had been released directly into the community after spending several years in solitary confinement.
The normalization philosophy also raises the question whether rehabilitative programs can seem discordant with the onerous control incarceration imposes over inmates’ day-to-day lives. But Davis, who was granted release under the state’s JCAP program, doesn’t see the two as contradictory. Separation from society is at the core of punishment and nothing will change that, he said, and so programs focused on rehabilitation and keeping inmates engaged can make the biggest difference in humanizing day-to-day life.
“It's the mentality of feeling like you can engage in your own existence that matters.”
Ashley Hamilton, founder of DU’s Prison Arts Initiative, said to her it makes sense to focus on the improvements each reform can realistically make, rather than discounting a change because it doesn’t fix all the system’s problems.
“I don't think that's fair to the hard work that is happening. And yet, it's a long game, right? We're going to keep working on it.”
Corrections policies carry risk of blame if statistics such as recidivism and parole violations worsen or if a worst-case scenario comes true, like an inmate escaping and harming someone.
Colorado’s Department of Corrections includes returns to prison for technical violations and new crimes in its statistics on parole supervision to measure recidivism. During Williams’ years, returns to prison for a new crime during parole supervision climbed as high as 18% in February 2020, while returns for technical parole violations got as high as 29% in August 2019.
In the five years before his tenure, returns for technical violations reached a high of 51% in March 2015. In the same period, parolee returns to prison for a new crime tended to hover between 10% and 12%.
Parole decisions are to an extent governed by state law. For example, in 2019, the state legislature made changes that limited parole revocation by the board to a majority vote for inmates deemed low-risk if parole guidelines recommend release. The act also allows the board to revoke an inmate’s parole for technical violations such as possessing a deadly weapon, not complying with sex offender treatment requirements and tampering with an electronic monitoring device.
But dustups emerged during Williams’ tenure about how much control the corrections director had over circumstances that contributed to issues such as parole violations and recidivism. For one, the Department of Corrections came under fire this year for its position of not pursuing criminal charges for people who fled from halfway houses. Williams said the public response frustrated him because he felt the practice was misunderstood. The intention wasn’t to block charges for people who fled community corrections, he said, but rather keep those decisions in the hands of local jurisdictions because of their different views on how escapes should be handled.
“What was a little frustrating to me is that this was not about us making a decision that we're going to be softer on people that ran away from a halfway house. All I was saying is … you make the decisions on every other case, on every other criminal violation that occurs in your halfway house,” Williams said. “So if somebody runs away, why wouldn't you want to make the decision about whether or not you want to refer a criminal charge?”
But The Gazette previously reported that some officials, including Weld County District Attorney Michael Rourke and Larimer County’s community corrections director, Tim Hand, said they were blindsided by the department’s stance not to seek charges for halfway house escapes.
Rourke told The Gazette at the time that when he requested names of people who fled community corrections he couldn't get enough information from the Department of Corrections to pursue arrest warrants.
The correctional system didn't give him and other law enforcement officials notice about the policy shift, he said.
“There was no communication with the district attorneys at all,” Rourke said.
Earlier this year the Department of Corrections indefinitely paused the Take TWO work-release program after an inmate cut off his ankle monitor and fled to New Mexico. Law enforcement captured him within hours of his escape.
Take TWO, short for Transitional Work Opportunity, partners with private employers and focuses on incarcerated people nearing release deemed low risk. It paid the workers at least minimum wage and employed more than 100 people as recently as March, according to 5280 magazine, before it was put on hold.
Michael Dougherty, the district attorney for Boulder County who co-chairs the state’s sentencing reform task force, said tolerance for correctional system reforms tends to go down when people believe they are threatening public safety.
“We are in a risky business. Anytime a judge releases someone on bond or a prosecutor gives someone a plea offer that doesn't involve jail or prison, we're taking the chance that that individual is going to go on to commit another criminal offense,” he said.
“There will never be 100% success. So it's really about what level of tolerance you have for individuals who are given an opportunity to reform, while recognizing that there are going to be times that risk is, unfortunately, realized.”
Davis said the pausing of Take TWO has been a blow for inmates. The engagement offered by the program and chance to save up enough money for financial stability after release felt empowering for inmates.
“Take TWO, on the inside, probably gave more people hope than almost anything,” he said.
State Rep. Matt Soper, a Republican from Delta who represents House District 54, said policymakers have a responsibility to put up guardrails that reduce the risk of programs such as Take TWO as much as possible to protect public safety, but that those analyses are inherently imperfect. He has requested a meeting with the man who escaped while on release for Take TWO to find out why he chose to flee.
“Unfortunately, just like someone who's never committed a crime could walk out of their house and commit a murder — luckily that rarely happens — but it's the same in prison. You have an inmate who models as being the perfect candidate for Take TWO but for whatever reason, there's a trigger where they go off the rails.”
Soper sponsored a bill this year that, among other provisions, guaranteed Take TWO program workers minimum wage. He said he had a lot of skepticism about the normalization approach at the beginning of Williams’ tenure. He worried that it would take focus off of crime victims. But he said his opinion of the philosophy started to change as he spent more time in prisons, talking with inmates. He met with one man who has participated in a DOC program that trains inmates to fight wildland fires, who said he believed the public service would make his son proud.
“I was worried as we normalize prisons and make them feel not so punitive but make them feel more like home and regular life, that the person who would get marginalized would be the victim. And that we wouldn't actually be doing our job in society, which is to punish someone for a crime they committed,” Soper said.
“But over the course of Dean Williams’ tenure, he and I have spent an awful lot of time together. And I will say that I've actually come around to where I actually felt like the direction he was headed was a really good approach.”
Williams didn’t comment on the possibility of resuming the Take TWO program, saying it’s now up to his successor.
Polis has not yet named the next corrections director, and questions linger about where that person will steer the department.
Raemisch said the professional lifespan of a corrections executive director tends to be about two-and-a-half years. Much depends on the priorities of the governor, and Raemisch said he felt fortunate to have wide latitude from then-Gov. John Hickenlooper to run the department how he saw fit.
“As head of corrections in any state, you're hired to be a leader. If you just want to be a place-setter, be a place-setter. That's not my definition of leadership.”
