Low Expectations Won’t Help Anybody0

• October 3, 2007

Full disclosure: My wife got good grades in law school. She graduated third in her class. She practices law with a firm downtown that only hires lawyers with good grades, just like every attorney there.

How will Colorado pay for the coming prison boom?0

• August 6, 2007

Opinion Editorial August 6, 2007 By  Mike Krause This year the legislature created the Colorado Criminal and Juvenile Justice Commission, tasked with examining the state’s sentencing structure and making recommendations to the legislature to address the ever-increasing prison population. But if lawmakers lack the will to actually act on sentencing, then the commission will be

Real problems with Real ID0

• May 28, 2007

Near the end of the 2007 legislative session, the Colorado House of Representatives enacted a joint, non-binding resolution against the looming federal takeover of state driver’s license standards and issuance. But Montana recently took its own opposition a step further by passing a law outright refusing to implement the federal Real ID Act.

The road to Darfur runs through the 2008 Olympics in Beijing0

• May 4, 2007

The Communist government in China just can’t help but show its true colors.

The same authoritarian regime that is desperately trying to put on a friendly face for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing recently detained and then deported Colorado resident Kirsten Westby and four other Americans for peacefully displaying a banner saying “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.

Seat belt laws trivialize law enforcement0

• February 23, 2007

In the book Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, author James V. DeLong writes, “When the government criminalizes almost everything, it also trivializes the very concept of criminality.”

A perfect example of this is Senate Bill 151, the primary seat belt law currently under consideration in the Colorado Legislature. Far from a legitimate public safety measure, this law is little more than a finger-wagging nanny state edict, with high potential to distract police from their public safety mission in favor of trivial enforcement of unpopular personal behavior.

Prison Spending in Colorado: Anatomy of a Fiscal Train-Wreck0

• January 11, 2007

After decades of an ambitious incarceration campaign, Colorado’s booming prison population requires thousands of new prison beds.

In other words, Colorado faces a prison spending meltdown that will likely require Governor Ritter and the Democrat Legislature to put aside any grand new spending plans in order to pay for a hugely expensive long-term prison expansion project.