Dean Williams, who pushed to reform Colorado’s prisons as executive director of the state’s Department of Corrections, announced in an email to employees that he is resigning from his position.
“I have made the difficult decision to transition out of my role as Executive Director as of December 2, 2022,” Williams said in the email.
Executive Director of Colorado Department of Correction Dean Williams
“I have been discussing this move with the Governor’s Office over the last week or so, and I am very grateful to Governor Polis for choosing me to lead the DOC these past four years,” Williams added. “As the ‘Good Book’ says, however, to everything there is a season. My season of leadership here in the DOC is coming to a close, but my love for the department will not ebb.”
Gov. Jared Polis' spokesman, Conor Cahill, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Williams took the top position overseeing Colorado’s prisons in 2019 after he was removed from his Alaska prisons chief position by the governor in Alaska after some of his reforms prompted controversy in Alaska.
Williams, after arriving in Colorado, talked often about the need to put in place wholesale changes and reforms to Colorado’s prisons. He looked to Norway’s incarceration policies as a path to driving down stubbornly high recidivism rates in Colorado, touting a film about one prison in Norway where prisoners are incarcerated in facilities that look more like apartments or dorm rooms.
“The big lie is that the worse we make prisons, the less prisoners we’ll have because they won’t want to end up there,” Williams said in one interview early in his tenure in Colorado. “They think people won’t want to go there if we make them like a hellhole. The problem with that is it doesn’t work.”
During Williams' time as corrections chief, corrections officers in one prison in the state took to wearing polo shirts and jeans as opposed to uniforms, all part of Williams' effort to dismantle the us-vs.-them mentality he believed dominated incarceration in Colorado.
Williams’ resignation comes four years into a tenure in which some of his initiatives prompted pushback from law enforcement officers. He clashed at one point with then-Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen, who argued that too many homicides in Denver were tied to parolees Pazen contended were under lax supervision.
The escape of a minimum-security inmate earlier this year effectively shut down a prison-work program called Take Two, an initiative launched during Williams’ tenure.
In July, the Department of Corrections rescinded a new policy barring parole officers from seeking criminal charges for escapes from community-corrections halfway houses after law enforcement officials, prosecutors and halfway house operators criticized the policy as jeopardizing public safety.
The ACLU of Colorado and civil rights attorneys sued Williams and the state’s prison system in 2020, prompting the state to enter into a legal agreement later that year to strengthen coronavirus protections for medically vulnerable prisoners.
“It has been an honor of a lifetime to be the executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections,” Williams said in his email to DOC employee announcing his resignation. “The respect and admiration I have for the staff of this department is difficult to explain to people outside the Department. Even during the challenges of the pandemic, that in addition to the regular challenges, I have seen all of you respond with the highest regard for you sense of duty and care of each other.”
He added: “I guess my last words of counsel would be this. We live in a world that unfortunately amplifies negativity, anger, division, cynicism, etc. I know, believe me, it’s easy to curse the ‘state of things’ no matter the issue. ‘Curse the darkness or light a candle, Dean’ as a close friend would tell me. The challenges of this job have been made easier because so many of you have been a support, especially on those very difficult days when we are walking through the tough stuff.”
