The state’s Joint Budget Committee voted on Wednesday to deny the Department of Corrections’ $2.4 million request for additional prison beds, citing the department’s lack of a plan to address its ongoing overcrowding problems.

In September, the committee approved the DOC’s $2.8 million supplemental request for additional beds following the governor’s implementation of the Prison Population Management Measures. Established by a 2018 law, the management measures require the parole board to compile a list of inmates with low-level offenses who are eligible for parole and can be released from DOC facilities to bring population numbers back to more manageable levels if vacancy rates are at 3% or lower for 30 consecutive days.

However, according to JBC staffer Justin Brakke, the current inmate population is 660 above this year’s budget. The department requested ongoing funding for 788 beds for this fiscal year, primarily for facilities in Sterling, Delta, and Buena Vista.

Democratic lawmakers opposed supporting the request, arguing that doing so wouldn’t solve any of DOC’s problems.

“They presented us a whole variety of options for us to address the population coming in, and nothing about how to exit people who don’t need to be there,” said JBC Chair Rep. Emily Sirota, D-Denver. “I have a real challenge moving parts of this request forward at this time.”

Sen. Judy Amabile, D-Boulder, who has spent much of her time in the legislature advocating for criminal justice reform, said she wanted to know why more inmates are being admitted into DOC prisons than released. According to the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice’s June 2025 interim prison population report, the number of new commitments to DOC facilities first surpassed the number of discretionary parole releases last winter, and that number has continued to rise since.

Brakke said he didn’t know why discretionary parole numbers are down.

Amabile said she was “really surprised” that DOC hasn’t asked JBC members, or any lawmakers for that matter, to run a bill that would help address some of the roadblocks to parole eligibility and receiving mental health treatment.

“I get asked all the time by other departments to run bills to fix problems, and I haven’t been asked [by DOC], and I don’t know if anybody else has either, and that’s a problem for me,” she said.

Rep. Kyle Brown, D-Louisville, the JBC’s newest member, argued that continuing to “throw beds” at the problem will only lead to even more overcrowding in the state’s prisons.

“Until I see a more comprehensive plan about how we manage our prison population, including what kinds of proactive steps through legislation or otherwise we should be taking, I don’t feel comfortable moving the caseload forward at this point,” he said.

Taggart said he was worried about how denying the request could impact county jails. Over the summer, a coalition of county sheriffs urged the state to address prolonged delays in transferring DOC-sentenced inmates from county jails to state custody, which was pushing their facilities over capacity.

“The burden we’re putting on our counties in particular is very worrisome to me,” Taggart said. “I don’t know if there’s a middle position on that, but they’ve gotta be running up against capacity issues at this point at our local jails.”

The committee’s four Democratic members voted to deny the request, while the two Republicans voted to accept it.

The governor’s office will be able to address the JBC with a “comeback” offer during its meeting on Monday.