As this moving blog demonstrates, people who have honestly and openly wrestled with the idea of Juvenile Justice and Sentencing issues must inevitable reach a point where they see that, as our justice system stands now, it is incapable of giving youthful offenders the chance at rehabilitation that they deserve while simultaneously giving them the correction that their crime demands.

It is no surprise that we as a society find ourselves in this situation.  Life can be brutal, and especially so for children.  The number of violent crimes committed by minors is direct proof that we as a society have made some enormous errors, somewhere along the way.  For example, we rightly condemn forced sterilization, but at the same time do nothing to protect innocent babies born to drug addicted prostitute mothers.  We set up a foster care system that too often takes children from one abusive situation only to place them in a worse one.

Conservatives who preach ad nauseam about “traditional family values” are among the first in line to turn their backs on the possibility of meaningful reform to the current foster care system, preferring to insist that the state has no place coming between a child and has/her parents.  I would love to whole heartedly agree with them, but for the fact that they cannot see that their ideology depends upon the parents actually being parents.  It is not enough to insist that the government stay out of peoples lives.  What has to be realized is that the government should only stay out of peoples lives when the people show that they are capable of living those lives responsibly.  On the other hand, liberals whose hearts bleed for every young person in jail are the first to turn their backs on the very real and painful plight of the victims and their families.  Yet apart from these two view points, what else is there?

As the number of broken homes and children in foster care continues to grow, as membership in violent gangs grows, and as the number of minors behind bars increases, we as a society cannot sit back and rely on our justice system, designed for adults, to adequately dispense justice.

Yet the question remains, what else is there?  It is a heinous idea to argue that the government take some sort of active role in preventing the birth of a child into a certain set of circumstances.  It is an impossible idea to argue that any governmental, or private, entity can provide for the thousands of children trapped in our deeply flawed foster care system.  Yet again, what else is there?

Until that question is answered, miscarriages of justice in the name of being “tough on crime” will continue, young people will continue to be ineptly dealt with by a justice system not equipped or intended to deal with them, and violence and social decay will continue to advance in our national statistical studies.

It is time we looked at ourselves in the mirror and for once honestly asked ourselves to answer the question, what else is there?.

The greatest miscarriage of justice happens when a supposedly self-correcting system fails to correct itself. Alan Sudduth was convicted as a juvenile for murder in 1995 and sentenced to 70 years in prison on a plea deal.  The problem is that Sudduth didn’t actually kill anyone and someone else has repeatedly confessed to the murder.

According to Westword, the Colorado State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Sudduth waited too long before filing his appeal based on ineffective counsel. Sudduth’s attorney, Alison Ruttenberg, is appealing to the state supreme court. While the Court of Appeals may be technically correct according to the law, they have utterly failed to recognize the injustice that has been done.

As a general rule, there is no statute of limitations on filing murder charges and there should be no statute of limitations on overturning a wrongful conviction. The Arapahoe County District Attorney in 1995 knowingly filed adult charges against Sudduth when the preponderance of evidence pointed to someone else.  Sudduth was too young and too naive to understand the gravity of the decisions his attorneys were making on his behalf. The reason we have court appointed attorneys is to protect defendants against their own ignorance of the law. If they fail to effectively and faithfully represent the interests of their client, the system fails. No judge should ever condone that–whether it fits on their calendar or not.

Sudduth deserves parole.

There are many types of crimes, and there are many types of criminals.  Some criminals are murders, some are rapists, some rob from little old ladies in a make money online scheme, and some make the headlines of the NYTimes.  However, without a doubt, the lowest form of criminals are the pimps.  These bottom of the human barrel criminals manipulate, abuse, rape, and profit from the suffering of young girls day in and day out.  Young girls, just like Sara Kruzan, who grow up in broken homes, are forced by these people to give up their most precious human right, the right to self respect and dignity.  Pimps manipulate these young girls, tell them they are “special,” treat them like celebrities, such as an Audrina Patridge or a Jennifer Love Hewitt, and then turn around and rape them, beat them, and force them to sell their underage bodies to decrepit pedophiles.  If there was ever a prime candidate for the term “lowest of the low,” pimps are it.

When it comes to prosecuting these human refuse, however,  one might as well try to get rid of stink bugs.  The simple fact is that Pandering, the legal term for what pimps do, is a very difficult thing to prove to a jury.  To say nothing of the fact that the girls a pimp “owns” are often times so abused and confused that they will try and protect the very man that makes his living off of their daily degradation.  Given that reality, what choice does a young girl like Sara Kruzan have?  She knows that if she goes to the police, and they cannot make a case against her pimp, she will get hit, kicked, raped, and hit some more as soon as her pimp finds her.  For girls like this there is no escape, there is no protection from the law, and there are no maps to a better life.

Sara Kruzan chose to kill her pimp, a man who had manipulated and raped her from the age of 11.  This girl now sits behind bars, hoping that the California justice system will show her some mercy.  What Stop Direct File wants to know is how could it not?  Born to a home life deprived of parental love, raised by a drug addicted mother, manipulated by a pimp, who promised to be the father she so desperately wanted, and then raped and abused into a life of prostitution — how could any justice system blame her for killing her abuser when she was 16?

There is no question that murder is wrong.  However, there are many many times when extenuating circumstances make a person less guilty, or not guilty at all, of a crime.  Kill a man in self-defense, for example.  A woman who manages to kill a man who is raping her would never be convicted of murder by a jury.  Why is it different for Sara Kruzan?  The only difference I see is that she lacked the social network necessary to gain access to a decent lawyer.

At an age when more fortunate children are playing Nintendo 3DS, taking guitar lessons at the Guitar Center, or scheming ways of finding the hidden files on their Dads iPad, this poor girl was being raped, manipulated, and sold as a sex toy by a piece of human filth.  The fact that she was even prosecuted for killing such a piece of slime is bad enough, but the fact that she was given life without parole is even worse.  If there was ever a person who deserved mercy, or a situation where the demands of mercy and justice were the same, it is this one.  Free Sara Kruzan.

In 2006 there were a total of 892 incarcerated juveniles being held in Colorado. The total number of families with children living in Colorado was approximately 580,286. To put that in perspective: If you identified 650 families with children in the White Pages and called them all, at least one of them would have a child who is currently incarcerated. If you just called 1,500 phone numbers in the White Pages and asked if they knew anyone who was incarcerated, you’d find at least one who would respond “yes.”

On the face of it, that might not seem so bad, but when you look at it from a cost-effectiveness standpoint, the numbers are horrific. Every year the state of Colorado spends $28,000 on each inmate. It spends even more on juvenile inmates, but if we use the $28,000 number Colorado spends at least $25 million a year just to hold juvenile offenders. That doesn’t count the cost of trying, sentencing, convicting, paroling and eventually re-incarcerating them.

At the 2008 rate of national re-incarceration,  142 of those juvenile prisoners will be released and eventually return to Colorado’s prisons or jails. That means that over a period of approximately 6 to 7 years, all juvenile offenders in Colorado will most likely return to prison as adults. Here’s the point: An incarcerated prisoner makes no money and, therefore, pays no taxes to help cover the expense of their incarceration. Prisoners aren’t even allowed to access the Internet so they can make money online. That means that, as taxpayers, you and I foot most of the bill.

According to a paper discussed in the September 2008 Edition of The Monthly Labor Review entitled Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders (Keith Finlay, Tulane University) Males under the age of 24 who have been previously incarcerated “are less likely to be employed, have lower wages, and have lower earnings.”  Former juvenile prisoners get out of jail, can’t get work because of mandatory reporting requirements or lack of education and end up going back to prison. In fact, a lack of employment opportunities is the number one reason ex-offenders return to prison. Nationally, that fact costs us $68 Billion per year.

In a nutshell–we don’t just foot the bill for a juvenile prisoner’s incarceration. We foot the bill for as long as he can’t find a job and keeps going back to prison. That might be his entire life. Employers’ perceptions about former felons are the real reason juvenile offenders can’t get back to work. In theory, incarcerated juveniles have paid their debt to society, but you can’t blame employers for being skeptical.   The only way to nip this problem in the bud and get the kid a job so he’ll stop draining the public coffers is to restore employers’ confidence in each individual offender. To do that, the state needs to institute comprehensive community corrections programs that retrain, reform and certify juvenile offenders re-entering society.

Felony reporting, in many states, is mandatory and it should be. Employers who don’t know if someone has a felony conviction are more likely to discriminate based on racial and demographic biases when making a hiring decision. The only way to restore employer confidence and stop the cycle of recidivism is to balance felony reporting with ex-offender certification.

By Mary Ellen Johnson, Executive Director, The Pendulum Foundation

John Caudle was fourteen-years-old when he killed his mother and step-father in their secluded home near Monte Vista, Colorado. The crime made national news. Parricide generally does.

There are two ways of handling a parricide case. If the child’s lucky, prosecutors and press will investigate before “creating a narrative.” They’ll key on one truth – kids who kill their parents generally have a very good reason, so let’s determine that reason before playing Mr. Hardcore and gunning for the kid’s life. Or, they’ll declare this kid is Satan’s spawn and we’re going to take him out.

In John Caudle’s case there was a bit of both. Looking at this skinny kid in over-sized glasses, the community didn’t see the devil in a tattered t-shirt. Plus stories of abuse immediately began circulating.

A family friend told us, “There are some really weird stories which make me think his mom was mentally unstable.  Joanne used to do some weird sadistic sorts of things that were more emotionally abusive and really cruel…Apparently, John kept quiet about a lot of the abuse because his mother would threaten him.  The stories I have heard from credible sources even involve John being tasered by his mom for punishment.  And this is when he was 7 or 8 years old.  John did not qualify for the school breakfast and lunch program because his step father made too much money.  Yet, his teachers noticed that he always seemed to have a lunch that looked scraped together.  And from the police report, when they went to the crime scene they noted very little food in the house.  Apparently, his mother and step-father would eat dinner and then when they finished John was allowed to make his own dinner.  Consequently, he lived on hot dogs and spaghetti.  I guess life is actually better in prison in some ways.  At least he gets regular meals.”

In many cases of child abuse, these kids are invisible to anyone with the authority to intervene. “I didn’t know anything was wrong,” they say after a tragedy.  “The parents seemed like nice people.” “He was a good student – a little different maybe. But we had no idea.” Such was not the case with John. Social Services followed Joanne and John through various states and investigations, including Colorado. Here, a teacher reported John after he came to school with a black eye. John was never removed from his house, though classes were ordered.

Despite the abuse, despite community sympathy, despite available legal alternatives to a harsh adult sentence, District Attorney David Mahonee believes it’s his duty to make sure a severely abused kid who got no help from the system and felt trapped in a endless nightmare, should be locked away for the rest of his natural life. Because make no mistake: when John Caudle is convicted — and he will be in a state where DA’s have a 90% conviction rate – he will be immediately sent into the adult prison system. No stopover in juvenile hall until John’s 18 or 21. No sir, not here in Colorado. Put him in with the biggest and baddest. He killed his parents, he was convicted, he deserves no mercy. And he won’t receive any.

John Caudle is still months away from trial. Because of Colorado law, he is kept isolated.  John exists in a legal limbo: the state says he’s an adult and he must be treated as an adult. The state also says he’s a kid and has to be kept separated from adults. However, since there are few accommodations for children in your local jail the solution is to keep him walled off from most human contact. While John’s attorneys are consumed by his case, pre-trial preparation  does NOT necessarily include a lot of one-on-one time with your client, especially when the jail is 45 minutes away.  During the school year former teachers volunteered to keep John abreast of his studies, but their visits averaged about 4 hours a week, and for the rest of the valley it’s still summer. No classes. Most of John’s time is spent watching television, sometimes reading, occasionally writing  letters. No friends. Little communication. Lots of time to think .No one to help him sort through his past, or his deed. Recently two other juveniles who were direct filed into the adult system and kept isolated as  John is being isolated, committed suicide.

Isn’t it ironic that a kid who went through hell with his parents is going through hell at the hands of the state?

Colorado by all accounts is under extreme fiscal stress. Indeed, a recent report by the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute found that “job losses in 2009 and 2010 indicate a full rebound[from the Great Recession in Colorado] is years away.” In short hand that means a long-term slump in the tax base that supports warehousing children for the rest of their lives.

According to a recent opinion article by Paul Wachter at aolnews.com, the economic slump is the perfect opportunity for the Obama Administration to take up prison reform. StopDirectFile.org agrees and suggests that prison reform ought to start where the system is most detrimental to budgets: juvenile justice.

As Wachter notes, many prison reform activists argue that the justice system should focus more on rehabilitation efforts and reduce penalties…” But the reason we should focus on juvenile justice reform first is simply that society suffers the most prolonged effects of incarceration and repeat crime from juvenile offenders that we fail to reform or keep locked up because of the “heinousness of their crimes.”

What we fail to realize is that some of the “most heinous” criminals are also the least dangerous. In Colorado the Department of Corrections currently houses about 15 inmates who were sentenced to life as juveniles for crimes like aiding and abetting a murder suspect. While helping a known murder suspect get away with the crime certainly shows poor judgment and is certainly worthy of punishment, a life sentence might be a bit stiff. When you consider that the total cost to incarcerate those non-violent offenders is just under $500,000 per year, it just seems ridiculous. When you figure that over their lifetimes they’ll cost the state just over $26 million, you want to rip your hair out.

If anyone qualifies as a political enigma, Senate Majority Leader John Morse may be at the top of the list. A Democrat from traditionally conservative Colorado Springs, Morse made a career out of law enforcement and holds several advanced degrees including a PhD in Public Administration and an MBA. His tenure as a Sergeant in the Colorado Springs Police Department eventually led him to a long-term position as Police Chief in Fountain where he made community policing a hallmark of his department. StopDirectFile.org had the extraordinary opportunity to interview the lawmaker about criminal and juvenile justice issues. Judging from that interview, it is safe to say that Senator Morse stands at the pinnacle of leadership in the State of Colorado and it is our privilege to endorse him.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: You’ve spoken a lot about the importance of Community Policing. What is community policing?

SENATOR MORSE: Community Policing is actively engaging the community in identifying and resolving the issues that lead to crime and disorder. So often, the police sort of figure out for themselves what the problems are or what they want to address and leave the community out of it. We sort of police on to the community instead of policing from within the community. So, community policing is actively working with the community to figure out what issues are important to them and how those issues should be addressed.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG:  Why did you choose to go into law enforcement?

SENATOR MORSE: I worked my way through college on a paramedic ambulance and every day I bounced out of bed and said ‘I get to go to work this morning.’ I was going to college; getting an accounting and finance degree. When I finished my degree, I went to work as a CPA and that was great, but I didn’t bounce out of bed every morning saying ‘I want to go to work today.’  With ambulances you sit and wait for calls to come in, but in a police department you get to go out and meet people and that’s exciting in its own right.  The police thing is fascinating on many different levels, but that’s how I got into it and eventually ended up being Chief of Police in Fountain.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: What in your background and experience most informs your work as a state legislator?

SENATOR MORSE: I touched on the fact that I was a paramedic. The CPA also informs my work a great deal as I spent a year on the Joint Budget Committee. That was huge. After I left my position as Police Chief in Fountain, I was president and CEO of Silver Key Senior Services, a non-profit organization that enables people over 60 to stay in their homes as long as possible. That taught me about seniors and the importance of senior issues.  One of the things I learned at Silver Key, that seems to be common sense, is that dental work is so important because as you age into your 80s and 90s you lose your teeth. If you pay attention to seniors’ diet and see that they get at least one hot meal a day, the benefits are enormous, but if their teeth don’t support their nutrition their health deteriorates rapidly. Medicare doesn’t cover dental so when their teeth start to go bad you can just watch them lose their lives.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: You seem very detail oriented. In 2008 you voted to reduce consequences for parolees who violate minor provisions of their parole. Can you tell us more about that legislation and what sort of budgetary implications it had?

SENATOR MORSE: I can’t be too specific without the fiscal note in front of me, but  we estimate it costs us about $28,000 per year to hold someone in prison. Keeping them on the street preferably as a law abiding, fully employed, productive member of society they’re actually contributing to the tax base.  You subtract the cost of incarceration and add the revenue from a productive citizen and it seems like a pretty good net improvement in the fiscal scheme of things. If you watch people long enough, especially as a police officer, it is only a matter of time before they violate a traffic law. When you’ve got somebody on parole, by definition you’re watching them very carefully. People are people and they’re going to make mistakes so you have to be able to differentiate between the stupid things and dangerous things parolees do that might be red flags. What this bill, in my view, was really about was making the distinction between those things so that we don’t send everybody back automatically, but we send just those back that really need to go back. Again, if you watch people long enough we will all make mistakes.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: For you, what is the balance between punishment and rehabilitation?

I wish I had a pithy answer for the difference between punishment and rehabilitation. Punishment is sometimes absolutely necessary both from a societal standpoint as well as an individual standpoint. But punishment needs to be consistent with the crime committed and often we’re punishing people for the rest of their lives over once in a lifetime mistakes.  That’s not appropriate.

One thing we did last session, specifically in Colorado Springs, is we instituted a veteran’s court.  We send lots of young men and women to Iraq and Afghanistan  and they are submitted to huge stresses including  lots of blast injuries.  The soldiers within a block or two of a blast radius end up having their brains rattled. We’re now learning that some of those soldiers come back more aggressive, less patient, less tolerant of society and, for lack of a better term, ‘snap.’ They end up doing something – drink and drive, incur accidents, abuse drugs.  We created the veteran’s court so that judges can consider why veterans might be acting out and devise ways to mitigate their behavior without necessarily putting them in prison and throwing away the key.  Its a pretty good idea, in my view. Every criminal probably has a ‘reason’ why they are the way they are.  So if we can start with this veteran’s court where we take the issues that people have and mitigate them and learn how to do that for everyone then we can start drilling down and say ‘hey, this kid is suffering PTSD related to the way that he was [abused] and that’s why [he] did this and this is how we can fix it to put [him] back on the straight and narrow.’

I think it is fascinating how we’re starting to realize that our soldiers aren’t fully responsible for what they’ve done. Sure we have to punish them and hold them accountable on the one hand, but we have to make darn sure they get the treatment they need so that they don’t fall back into this trap later. That’s a good idea. We should do that for everybody.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: In 2010 you sponsored legislation that reduced drug use to a misdemeanor. Why did you decide to fight for reductions in sentencing?

SENATOR MORSE: We have to look at the system as a whole and what it is really accomplishing. If we’re dinging people for doing drugs, are we really accomplishing something? Is that really having a societal benefit? I think the answer is not only no, but hell no. People tried prohibition and that didn’t really work. You absolutely shouldn’t drink and drive. I have probably made more arrests for drinking and driving as a patrol officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department than any other patrol officer. If I were to go back to that, it would be the same. I would continue to make more DUI arrests because I think people’s lives can be totally altered in an instant because someone was drinking and driving. The reality is that people are going to drink and we should manage that so that it doesn’t have a down side for the rest of us, but we shouldn’t try to prohibit it. It just doesn’t work.

It is the same with drugs. I personally haven’t tasted alcohol. I’ve never been drunk. I’ve never done any drugs; never even been tempted to do drugs. You could legalize drugs tomorrow and I still wouldn’t do them. But I think we need to figure out how to help people get through their lives as opposed to just locking them up when they do something that we, as a society, find morally repugnant. We need to save our limited prison dollars for offenders that need to be locked up for a little while in order to make society safer.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: Are kids redeemable and what do you think of the practice of direct file from a policy perspective?

SENATOR MORSE: Kids are absolutely redeemable. From a policy perspective, I think there are a couple of problems with direct file. First, direct file gives District Attorneys an awful lot of power. They get to decide whether or not to file [adult charges against kids]. I think that’s too much power to put in the hands of that particular office. Second, I think [the decision to file adult charges is] a matter of statewide concern, especially because the rest of us are going to have to pay for charging, trying and holding that person, in some cases, for the rest of their lives. Why are we leaving that up to an individual District Attorney who was only elected by 1/23 of the population when all of us are going to have to bear the cost? Direct file needs to be looked at very, very carefully. We also need to intervene early and often to make sure that kids don’t get into that situation.

STOPDIRECTFILE.ORG: Do you agree with Justice Clarence Thomas that state legislatures need to take up the issue of life sentences for kids?

SENATOR MORSE: I agree that state legislatures [should take up the issue of life sentences for kids]. I think we need to look very carefully at what we’re accomplishing. As a society, we have this idea that if we’re very tough on crime, criminals will recognize that and stop committing crimes and we’ll all live happily ever after. There isn’t a shred of evidence to support that theory and yet we’ve clung to it tenaciously for the last 25 years. So let’s stop, figure out what works and start implementing that. Let’s be careful about giving up on any human being, but especially children.  What I don’t think society gets is that we really only throw away 3% of [offenders]. The other 97% we put away for awhile and then they come back. What are they going to do when they come back? Are they going to be able to get jobs, provide for their families and become good taxpayers? No, they’re not because we make it darn near impossible. We say, ‘you can’t live here, you can’t work here, you can’t associate with these people and don’t forget to pay all your fees on time or we’ll put you back.’ We have to stop being just tough on crime and start being really, really, smart on crime.

Noting the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to end juvenile life without parole for non-homicide offenses, the Nebraska Democratic Party recently passed a resolution that adds the elimination of JLWOP to their state legislative platform.

The Nebraska resolution states, in part, that:

WHEREAS the United States Supreme Court has again, in Graham v. Florida, reaffirmed the fundamental differences between youth and adults in their ability to exercise judgment, foresee consequences and resist peer pressure, and

WHEREAS the Court has also noted the greater capacity of youth to change, thereby making it impossible to determine at sentencing that a youth cannot be reformed…

THEREFORE be it resolved that the Democratic Party in Nebraska support legislative efforts to eliminate sentences of life without possibility of parole for crimes committed by a youth who has not yet reached the age of 18.

While Colorado eliminated Juvenile LWOP several years ago, the state still practices direct file and consecutive sentencing that can amount to virtual life sentences for kids. In Grand County, 15-year-old John Caudle is being tried as an adult and faces 80 years for allegedly slaying his abusive parents. Children like Caudle cannot forsee the consequences of their actions and have great capacity to learn from their mistakes. They should not, therefore, be subject to abusive practices like consecutive 40 year sentences that ultimately just mean another life lost at great taxpayer expense. Supreme Court members noted the limited scope of their decision by citing Colorado’s consecutive sentencing practices. An adult sentence, whether it is 40, 80, or 120 years for a juvenile does not account for an individual child’s capacity to change.

There is probably no soul sorrier for its master’s mistakes than is John Caudle’s. But the question is: Does his soul deserve redemption or condemnation? And is it the state of Colorado’s purview to make such lasting and ill-begotten judgments on its children? Every religion in the world teaches love and forgiveness and yet here we are as a state encouraging, seeking, enforcing and even disguising the basest revenge we can possibly imagine.  The Nebraska Democratic Party clearly isn’t afraid to face its demons. StopDirectFile.org hopes that in next legislative session, Colorado too can come to terms with its own, very fallible humanity.

StopDirectFile.org has been fairly critical of corrections practices in the past. Today, we had opportunity to test some of those criticisms through a tour of the Level 4 Limon Correctional Faciltity. Entering the Correctional Facility under a darkened sky we were not optimistic that our views would change much. We were intimidated by the imposing fences and high walls.  But as we reached the other side of the yard our perceptions began to change.

We were ushered quickly up some stairs and into a meeting room where we were met by Warden Angel Medina and his team. After some brief introductions Captain Ken Sokol began his presentation on the facility’s new STAR Program. Far from intimidating, the program he presented was down right impressive.  Focused entirely on cognitive behavior change, the STAR program interfaces with vocational education and distance learning programs to incentivize individual  responsibility and is designed to positively influence the culture of the entire facility.

While Department of Corrections employees steadfastly clung to the necessity of abandonment practices like administrative segregation, the mission statement of the Limon facility reflected a deep dedication to both security and rehabilitation.

Limon Correctional Facility serves the Colorado Department of Corrections by providing a progressive and comprehensive risk reduction program in a Level IV correctional facility to offenders who continue to, or have demonstrated behaviors that are dangerous, disruptive and/or defiant.

We are a powerful team who work collaboratively with others to interrupt an offender’s risk and threat through proactive assessment, case management, and cognitive restructuring programs that are evidenced-based.

We believe in holding offenders accountable while supporting their change….

Many organizations tout their mission in name, but fail to keep to its letter. But at the Limon Correctional Facility, the mission is sacrosanct among employees. Stopping in the yard before moving to the “incentive pod,” Warden Medina proved this point by quizzing several new corrections officers: “How do we make decisions in our facility?” The answer was almost immediate: “According to the mission, sir.”

Even prisoners who had not yet entered the STAR program understood its value and told us that, while they doubted that STAR had any real-world application or relevance to prison life, it had the potential to hasten their release.  Meeting with prisoners who were in the program, the effects were more than evident. One prisoner told our group that the most valuable element in his education was “to simply stop and think.”

StopDirectFile.org has stated several times over that we support “sentence reform that provides appropriate community protections by removing offenders from society until they are no longer a threat; provides victims with a sense of justice, not revenge; and gives offenders an opportunity for rehabilitation, not cold storage.”

While StopDirectFile.org disagrees with practices like administrative segregation and sentences that offer offenders little incentive to cooperate, we wholeheartedly support both the mission and practices demonstrated at the Limon Correctional Facility. Other facilities and the entire criminal justice system should, and can, learn from Limon’s example.

According to a recent Denver Post article, Gov. Bill Ritter is set to appoint several judges to the bench, including a vacancy created by Supreme Court Judge Mary Mullarkey’s recent decision to step down.   StopDirectFile.org has to ask, “what’s the point?” What’s the point when the judges you’re appointing aren’t really allowed the full scope of decision-making power that Coloradans believe they ought to have? What’s the point when a prosecutor can make an extra-judicial decision that no judge can overturn?

The power to direct file charges against a child isn’t just procedural authority, it is judicial authority. In effect, when a prosecutor chooses to file adult charges against a child, he or she is choosing a sentencing range for that child and pronouncing their judgment on that child in open court. Legal precedent in Colorado is clear. According to Colorado Revised Statutes,”the authoritative expression of legal conclusions in declaring the sentence of the law…and the pronouncing of judgment in open court in the presence of those affected thereby, so as to bind and control persons and property” are judicial functions that “cannot be lawfully exercised, except by those entrusted therewith by the people under the constitution.” De Votie v. McGerr, 14 Colo. 577, 23 P. 980 (1890).

Most states preserve separation of powers in filing adult charges by holding what is called a ‘transfer hearing.’ During a transfer hearing, from juvenile to adult court, a prosecutor presents his or her evidence against an accused child. A defense attorney then has the opportunity to cross examine that evidence before a judge. Based on the presentation and cross examination of evidence, the judge then determines the appropriate venue for trying a child. But NOT in Colorado. In Colorado we presume a child’s guilt just enough to make sure that they face consequences as an adult. In Colorado we make sure that a prosecutor’s decision to file adult charges is not subject to judicial review. That’s wrong and Gov. Ritter’s appointments, as a result, have no real meaning.