We’re all taught crime doesn’t pay, but some lawmakers in Colorado’s Legislature apparently didn’t learn that lesson. They propose to hand $3,000 in cash to ex-cons leaving prison. Yes, really.

Senate Bill 24-012 is yet another proposal from the upside-down world of “justice reform,” in which criminals are recast as victims. The bill’s premise is that paying those exiting prison life for their “basic life expenses” will help them readjust to life on the outside. It is supposed to lower their chances of returning to prison.

Even if the approach worked, it would be an affront to law-abiding Coloradans.

The legislation requires recipients of the cash payments to be enrolled in a job-training program – itself, a worthy goal. Maybe career prep should be the bill’s focus, in fact. Many ex-cons are ill-prepared for the job market.

But to hand cold hard cash to ex-cons – many with an extensive history of substance addiction – sends them a convoluted message and practically invites them back down the path that led them to prison in the first place.

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Cash payments totaling $3,000 – not vouchers, not even a requirement for receipts – cross a line. The money tempts recipients with all the usual bad choices and rewards them for their time behind bars – as if society owed them a debt rather than the other way around.

It amounts to subsidizing convicts for having led lives of crime.

“But we already subsidize criminals,” proponents of this proposal are sure to remind us, pointing out how much we pay for prisons.

Yes, incarceration is costly to taxpayers. But it serves taxpayers, first and foremost, by shielding them from criminals who otherwise would prey on them. Regrettably, there’s no way to seek restitution from those lawbreakers to recoup the cost of their room and board.

SB 24-012’s sponsors include some of the usual suspects in the wildly misguided justice-reform movement – state Sens. Julie Gonzales and James Coleman, both Denver Democrats, and Reps. Mary Young, D-Greeley, and Javier Mabrey, D-Denver. The bill’s top champion and likely ghost writer is the New York-based Center for Employment Opportunities.

The center’s mission statement shares the bill’s core assumption that employment is a good way to reform those with a criminal past. Fine and well. But the application of that assumption in this proposal is way off base.

A press statement distributed by the nonprofit center in support of the bill last week asserts vague assurances the cash payments won’t be misspent and will achieve their goal. The center claims its own use of such cash payments in a similar program have shown, “a transformative impact on a person’s ability to successfully reintegrate into their communities.”

In theory, perhaps. But can the center actually show a link between the payments and the outcomes – whatever they were – for those who participated?

Whats more, the bill rests on a fundamental misconception that economics is somehow to blame for crime.

The press statement quotes sponsor Coleman on how, “poverty and incarceration are inextricably linked…” He wants to, “…stop the poverty to prison pipeline.”

That insults not only the general public, which would foot the bill for SB 24-012, but also the vast majority of low-income Coloradans who never have committed a crime and likely never will.

Even if justice-reform advocates like the Center for Employment Opportunities could produce data suggesting some level of cash handouts could cut recidivism, it’s fair to ask why the public must pay ex-cons not to commit more crimes.

Don’t they owe the rest of society, and not the other way around?

Denver Gazette Editorial Board