The first and most basic duty of Colorado’s criminal justice system is to protect the innocent from force and fraud. And as a government service, the roughly $32,000 (average cost)1 taxpayers spend annually per state prisoner is a good bargain for the separation of violent and predatory criminals from the public.

Like other American states, Colorado has long been dependent on federal assistance in carrying out illicit drug control policies. And as with most federal assistance to the states, federal tax dollars are accompanied by federal influence on local practices and priorities.

There is a principle in jurisprudence that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.”1 In other words, no one can justify his illegal conduct on the grounds that he was unaware of the law. But what happens when the sheer volume, complexity, and ambiguity of the law means that neither citizens, nor the government, can reasonably know what is and is not against the law?

Colorado is in the midst of a prison population crisis. Overburdened state prisons and a demand for yet more new prison beds are in conflict with a state budget dilemma. The legislature can begin to address the prison problem by rethinking Colorado’s sentencing structure as it relates to drug offenses, which are a major cause of prison population growth. Two fundamental reforms are needed:

As a whole, we citizens routinely hand over large amounts of personal and intrusive information to the state as a matter of law. Whether to obtain a license, to comply with the police officer who has just pulled you over, or to tell the tax man how much money we make, it seems that we are always handing over another bit of information about ourselves. The Colorado legislature last year introduced us to the next generation of surveillance technology, facial recognition, in a nation already under intense scrutiny.