Colorado Grants, Then Revokes Earned Time Credits
by Michael Dean Thompson
Colorado’s prisons are experiencing overcrowding and have been for some time. In August 2025, the number of free beds fell below 3% for more than 30 days and has largely remained there.
Governor Jared Polis (D) would like to see two new prisons built, but lawmakers instead authorized an additional, but still unavailable, 941 beds from previously closed private prisons.
Meanwhile, a labyrinth built on court decisions, legislation and a voter referendum has misled prisoners into believing they were being granted earned time credits for good behavior and program participation only to have the credits taken away—sometimes while they were in community corrections (halfway houses) or even on parole.
Billy Hailey had served 16 years on two felony assault charges. After serving eight months in community corrections while working as a CrossFit instructor, he was ready to transition into full parole in August 2025. An audit of his records led to his rearrest and return to the state Department of Corrections (DOC). The kicker was his previous kidnapping conviction. The DOC had a time calculation from October 2021 that corelated to the two assault cases, but ignored that the previous kidnapping charge made him ineligible for the credits. Advocate interest in Hailey’s case goaded Jeremy Brandt, the DOC’s Assistant Director of Offender Services, to ask DOC’s Time and Release Operations to audit people on the wait list at that time.
One of those audited, prisoner Jesse Miller, is consequently serving eight more years and removed from the waitlist. During his plea and sentencing, Miller and his family were told he would be eligible for earned time credits. The regular time computation reports he received also said as much. But the audit applied “more recent guidance from the Attorney General’s office,” according to Brandt. That guidance caused his concurrent sentencing, which considers only the longest sentence, to be treated so that the two sentences were treated as one continuous sentence.
When asked about this by Colorado Newsline, the Attorney General’s office spokesman, Lawrence Pacheco, would not confirm or comment on the guidance. Heidi Tripp, a Denver-based lawyer, said she spoke with someone in the office who “insisted that there has been no new memo, there has been no new case law, that there has been no new statute,” and that the Attorney General did not direct the change.
Clerical errors have resulted in at least ten different people getting decades of additional time. Dan Meyer of the Spero Justice Center said of the earned time credit revocations that “the rules and the laws are supposed to be clear, and there should be a clear consequence for breaking or following the rules. This really undermines that idea, because it makes the rules seem unknowable.”
He added, “The key to rehabilitation is hope. People understandably build up hope that they’re going to have a chance to see the parole board and potentially earn release, and those hopes get dashed through no fault of their own, and there’s very little explanation, it really undermines the motivation people need to actually engage in rehabilitation.”
Source: Colorado Newsline
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