State lawmakers have yet to fund an $11 million effort to reform Colorado courts’ long-troubled competency system, raising alarm among supporters as the end of the legislative session looms.
If funded, the bill, HB24-1355, would create a statewide diversion program aimed at shifting thousands of people with mental illness out of the criminal justice system and into comprehensive care in a first-of-its-kind effort to slow the flow of people into Colorado’s overcrowded court competency system.
The state’s competency process aims to ensure people are not prosecuted for crimes if they are too sick or too disabled to understand the court process. But the system is overloaded and understaffed, and those who cycle through it often end up warehoused in jails and stuck in a process that loops them around in the legal system without access to mental health care, an investigation by The Denver Post found last year.
The reform effort is now on the rocks as the bill competes for a slice of limited state funding, supporters said. If not funded in the next week or so, the bill won’t have time to make it through the rest of the legislative process, and the reform effort will fail.
“There’s just tons of bills,” said Rep. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat sponsoring the competency bill. “We’re being told that bills are going to die on the appropriations calendar because there is no money to fund them.”
Legislators have $25 million on hand to fund new legislation this year, and expect the state budget to remain tight for the next few years, said James Karbach, director of legislative policy for the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender.
The bill needs just $1.7 million this year in order to launch, but the diversion program’s costs go up to $4.2 million as it expands in its second year, and then to $5 million annually when fully implemented.
The bill’s supporters say the total $11 million cost will pay off in the long run as people with mental illness are connected to care instead of being held unconstitutionally in jail while they wait for competency treatment. The state has for years been under federal court-ordered reform for violating people’s constitutional rights in the competency process, and has paid $41 million in fines for the ongoing problems.
At the end of March, 326 people were waiting in jail for competency restoration treatment even though they had not been convicted of a crime, with an average wait time of 92 days, according to a report this week from the Colorado Department of Human Services.
The cycle of competency
The Denver Post examined why hundreds of Coloradans repeatedly cycle through the state courts’ competency process, caught in the failures of both the criminal justice and mental health systems.
Criminal prosecutions are paused while defendants go through treatment designed to restore them to competency. If a person is restored, the prosecution can proceed; if a person can’t recover, the criminal charges must be dismissed.
“Right now the highest cost of what is happening around competency is paid in human suffering,” said Lauren Snyder, vice president of government affairs at Mental Health Colorado. “That to me should be a priority for our state in making sure we are not letting people languish in jail who are there just because they have a mental health condition.”
The state has poured money into the competency system in recent years, including $68 million that Gov. Jared Polis asked for in the 2024-2025 budget to increase competency bed capacity. That money isn’t available to fund the proposed diversion program, Amabile said.
“It’s not like we didn’t ask,” she said. “That started out as a higher number and got reduced, and I think that’s part of why we’re hearing, ‘No, you can’t dip into that.’”
Jack Johnson, public policy liaison at nonprofit Disability Law Colorado, said that while increasing the state’s overall capacity for in-patient competency treatment by “surging beds” may help in the short term, it isn’t a sustainable solution.
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“I think at best — truly at best — it temporarily alleviates the waitlist, and you either have to keep those bed numbers high and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to do that, or after you surge beds, you go down to close to zero and (the waitlist) goes way back up so you have to keep surging beds, and you are spending $100 million every three years to deal with this problem,” he said. “Whereas a program that is diverting people year over year, keeping people out of jail and off the waitlist, it seems like a steal at $1 million this year and $5 million going forward.”
Karbach said the diversion program, which has bipartisan support, can’t be put off.
“If the short-term tension in the budget sees this bill die because we’re worried about the next two years, we are going to get three or four years down the line and see a disaster,” he said. “A disaster we’ve already lived with for a decade. We are at a decade of human suffering, we are at a decade of systemic constitutional rights violations. We are a decade past a federal court being involved… And painful as it is and as tough as the job is to prioritize our state’s values, we can’t keep waiting on this problem.”
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