Corrections Department rescinds halfway house escape policy

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The Colorado Department of Corrections has rescinded a new policy barring parole officers from seeking criminal charges for people escaping community-corrections halfway houses after criticism that it would jeopardize public safety.

State corrections officials reversed course this week and reinstituted seeking arrest warrants for halfway house escapes, The Gazette reported.

The move by the Corrections Department to not pursue arrest warrants for individuals transitioning from prison who had escaped from halfway houses had generated criticism from law enforcement officials, prosecutors and halfway house operators.

“This is nothing short of a dereliction of DOC’s duty to keep local communities safe while transitioning offenders back into those same communities,” wrote Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Shrader in a June 27 letter to Dean Williams, the executive director of the Department of Corrections.

Because of the pushback, Williams and Stan Hilkey, executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety, the state agency that oversees community-corrections halfway houses, had planned to discuss the subject this week.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Merideth McGrath, the Corrections Department’s director of parole, announced to her department that she was reinstating seeking arrest warrants for such cases.

“After careful review of our current process, as well as in speaking with stakeholders throughout the state, we have decided as a department to file charges of unauthorized absence for every case who chooses to walk away from community corrections supervision and/or tampers with/removes electronic monitoring,” she wrote to her staff.

An arrest warrant in such cases alerts law enforcement officers, who then can take a halfway house escapee into custody, resulting in the filing of criminal escape charges.

The DOC had a long-standing practice of seeking arrest warrants for halfway house escapes along with an administrative process, which prioritized individuals for the DOC fugitive unit. Sometime in 2021, the DOC stopped seeking arrest warrants and began relying solely on the administrative process, partly because of a loss of several positions and reclassification of some parole staff to civilian status, said Annie Skinner, a spokeswoman for the Corrections Department.

In defending the policy shift, Skinner previously noted that the criminal charges for halfway house escapes for those serving time on nonviolent offenses often are just misdemeanors.

It wasn’t immediately known how many people may have walked away from halfway houses while the arrest warrant policy was not in effect.