Among the host of man-made problems our society could encounter from the fallout of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic is one of increased crime and an erosion of public safety. Unsurprisingly, there is an appetite among the criminal justice crowd and their allies in government to throw open the prison gates and relax enforcement of law in an effort to curtail the spread of the virus in correctional institutions. This is happening while, paradoxically, the law-abiding among us are ordered into self-confinement. It is bitter irony to imagine a father being handcuffed for the heinous offense of playing catch with his young daughter in a park while those imprisoned for violating persons or property are released from their own restraints.

Denver (true to form of late) has, by previous actions of its City Council, made its own situation even more of a mess. Months before the pandemic, the city was already facing a self-imposed dilemma in its community corrections environment. Having allowed ideological, and perhaps personal, agendas to trump public safety needs, Denver finds itself on course to shutter most of the city’s halfway houses – the transitional facilities which provide for offenders a graduated, controlled path from prison to ultimate release – with little in the way of a plan to replace them, potentially throwing yet more offenders onto the streets.

You will recall last summer that the council voted, rather suddenly, to end the contract the city had with two private corrections firms, GEO Group and CoreCivic, who for years operated the city’s halfway houses. The abrupt decision, instigated by the newly minted Councilwoman Candi CdeBaca, created some immediate conundrums for the city. The most pressing one was what to do with all the people currently in those facilities? The cancellation of the contracts did not happen to coincide with a plan of any sort; the city did not own any facilities of a like nature, and zoning rules which limited these facilities to industrial areas meant there was no more room anywhere for new ones.

This left the city with the unpalatable options of a) returning the individuals to their prison cells for the duration of their sentence, or b) releasing them, unsupervised onto the streets, well before they completed required programs and were ready to assume lives as law-abiding citizens. This sent the city, at the time, into a mad scramble to temporarily extend the contracts while searching hither and yon for an ideologically pure alternative. Now, several months later, contract expiration deadlines are looming, no real alternatives have materialized, and the pandemic response seems to have taken option a) off the table. Things, as the kids say, are about to get real.

A curious figure in all of this is former mayoral candidate Lisa Calderon, who is now chief of staff for Councilwoman CdeBaca. Her part extends back a few years, and it’s an interesting timeline; between 2007 and 2017 Calderon’s non-profit, the Community Re-Entry Program, enjoyed an annual $550,000 municipal contract to run the city’s Transition From Jail to Community program. In 2011 a city Executive Order required all city contracts to undergo a competitive selection process every 3-5 years. In 2016, executive director Calderon’s contract came up for bid, and she lost it. She hasn’t forgiven anyone since.

Calderon did what you would expect anyone to do who got outbid on a lucrative government contract, she sued the city for a civil rights violation. To be sure, she had been a quite vocal critic of Mayor Hancock and the policies of the city whose money she was taking, and in her lawsuit claimed that the contract was taken from her in a fit of retaliation, a claim the mayor’s office denies.

Evidently Calderon feels perpetual renewal of a city contract is a right as sacrosanct as the Fifth Amendment.

Anyway, after losing the lawsuit and subsequently filing an appeal, Caldron decided to up the ante by running against Hancock for mayor in 2018. She lost that too, but wasn’t unemployed for long, as she found a new job shortly thereafter as the chief of staff to the freshly elected city council member and fellow-traveler Candi CdeBaca. A few short months later, Councilwoman CdeBaca threw her grenade into the August City Council proceedings, pulling the annual renewal of the halfway-house contracts off the consent calendar and triggering the community corrections avalanche which followed.

What followed, of course, was a maelstrom of frenetic public activity to try and figure out how to navigate the manufactured debacle. At the head of it all was CdeBaca, fervently trying to clear the path for some more politically sympathetic organization – a non-profit perhaps – to fill in the hole she blew in the city’s criminal justice system. Since then, among other things, she has also been trying to change the zoning laws to allow mini-halfway-houses to pop up in neighborhoods which, by design, would be too small to be feasible for a professional corrections company to operate. That idea ought to be immensely appealing to the neighbors.

She is also trying everything in her power to keep CoreCivic from selling their buildings on the open market once their contract is up. CoreCivic has every right to sell their buildings to whomever they wish, of course, but CdeBaca wants desperately for the city to take them over to be operated by the new preferred, justice-reform minded non-profit she envisions. Like any good revolutionary, she wants this to happen ten minutes ago. Ergo, even though failing to extend CoreCivic’s contract past the looming June 30 deadline means the city losing 330 more transitional beds, CdeBaca is resisting, saying that “we want to end this contract – or this relationship – permanently,” even while admitting: “but we still haven’t opened a door for new people to come in”. So, she’s beginning to pry that door open.

Politics breeds a bit of chronic cynicism, granted, but one cannot help but wonder who ultimately stands to benefit from Councilwoman CdeBaca’s door-opening and systematic elimination of private competition. Obviously the preferred option would appear to be an organization (like Calderon’s?) taxonomized as a non-profit, a designation which has an especially appealing egalitarian ring to it, but in reality means little beyond the fact that the money granted to it by the city, after expenses, need not be dispersed among shareholders in a parent company, but directly to payrolls, including to the executive director. Calderon, for what it’s worth, must be at least somewhat satisfied with where she finds herself placed in all this, and the opportunity for ultimate revenge it presents her. Not to mention that her boss does not appear uncomfortable with testing the bounds of her leverage, having attempted last year to hire her live-in girlfriend as her office assistant – a paid city government position.

It will be interesting to see how this eventually develops, and who ultimately will be left standing. In any case, it is a convoluted mess, and one despairs of the impact it will have on crime and safety in our communities. But what did anyone expect? This is precisely the kind of unnecessary drama that results from public safety decisions being guided by considerations – ideology, revenge, or what have you – which are extrinsic to the safety of the public.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.