Listening to the entire four-hour Working Group on Transforming Criminal and Juvenile Justice Friday, January 19, was worth the time simply to learn this one fact.

In Colorado, lawmakers have an introduction limit of five bills each. However, bills proposed by the old Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice (CCJJ) did not count against lawmaker five bill limits. Several legislators in the new Working Group (TCJC) joked about how tired they are of having to beg fellow legislators to sponsor CCJJ bills. That’s when we learned that the CCJJ bills didn’t count against their five.

They agreed that that feature should be part of the new TCJC too, so they don’t have to beg for bill sponsors.

Not only was the old CCJJ and the new TCJC a powerful policy monopoly, but they even got and will get a legislative pass by not having to sell their bills to lawmakers the same way everyone else does.

There was an encouraging, yet ironic, overriding message in the four-hour discussion, which was the need for more affected citizen engagement when it comes to policy design and development, but all acknowledged not knowing how to solve that problem.

At the end of the nearly four hours, I as a “public comment citizen” was allowed four minutes to give my qualifications as a professional and as lived experiences along with the request to present our Citizen Policy Workgroups concept as a solution to the need for more citizen engagement, but was told, and you can hear it on the recorded meeting, they do not allow for extended presentations from individual citizens and that it is only a one-way testimony, not an opportunity for questions and engagement. They spent four hours stating the problem, then use old processes to dismiss affected citizen inputs and solutions.

I will update on the specific interagency problems and challenges they discussed in the next post. That the CCJJ and TCJC bills don’t count against the lawmaker bill limits is worth a post all on its own.

The TCJC was created in October of 2023. They are expected to have a purpose, a mission, a reason for existing, by March 1 so that Governor Polis can push it to the legislature with the intent of having them vote to make the TCJC a permanent policy monopoly with legislative powers.

We will update our questions with answers as we learn those answers. If you know the answer to these questions, please let us know.

Our Questions

• What problem or problems is the CCJJ meant to solve?
• Are there other ways the problems can be addressed effectively other than with the creation of a permanent policy monopoly?
• Why don’t CCJJ bills count against the five-bills limit the way most other special interests and causes do?
• Why are we giving legislative powers to a policy monopoly over citizens at citizens’ expense?
• Why did Governor Polis create a policy monopoly with legislative powers without a clear mission? He had to have a basis, a purpose, for issuing the executive order that brought it back to life?
• Why aren’t citizens allowed to present solutions to government task forces and commissions? Especially when the need for affected citizen inputs at the policy development stages was acknowledged by every member of the group?

Links

Colorado Commission Working Group On Transforming Criminal and Juvenile Justice website

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Post Author: Krystyn Hartman is a graduate student in the Masters of Public Policy program at the University of Colorado School of Public Affairs. This site is a test research project.

Policy Work Groups posts are an extension of citizen PolicyWorkGroups.com.

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^{Updated/edited 1-26-24}