EchoBridge Initiative

By Design · Where people come from

Conditions are built

“The government doesn’t know who’s gonna do what, but they can create conditions via policy that create certain outcomes.”
Michael Clifton

Most people understand that a city can gentrify a neighborhood on purpose: change the zoning, steer the money, build the park. Fewer see that the neighborhoods prisons fill up from were shaped the same way, by maps, highways, housing and school decisions made decades ago. No one decided who would do what. The policies decided the odds.

Pick a lever below, then flip the switch to see the same lever run the other way.

Where you grow up

Researchers tracked millions of children into adulthood. On a single day in 2010, 21% of Black men who grew up in the lowest-income families were incarcerated, far higher than any other group; Black boys who moved to better neighborhoods as children were less likely to be.^[chetty20] Neighborhood by neighborhood the gap is stark: over 40% for low-income Black men who grew up in Watts, 6% next door in Compton.^[censusoa]

The rose from concrete

Hard places still raise artists, organizers, scholars and leaders, people who turn out the opposite of what the conditions predicted. They are real, and they are the exception. A design is judged by what it usually produces.

Prison Towns · Fremont County, Colorado

Cañon City

Colorado had a prison before it was a state. The territorial penitentiary in Cañon City was built in 1871 and became a state prison in 1876. It still runs today as the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, the oldest prison in the state system.^[ctcf] It started with three prisoners.^[lifelaw]

Today seven state prisons stand in and around Cañon City.^[csp]^[c1prison] Also in Fremont County, near Florence, sits the Federal Correctional Complex, home of the federal supermax, opened in 1995.^[adx]

A town that runs on prisons

In 2013 reporting, the state corrections department and the federal Bureau of Prisons were the area's largest and best-paying employers. A new state correctional officer started at $32,000, in a county where income per person was about $17,400.^[lifelaw]

When the prison leaves

In Huerfano County, a private prison built in 1997 and run by Corrections Corporation of America closed in 2010. The state denied a 2018 request to reopen it.^[vera]

Question for the reader: what does a town owe the people inside its walls, and what does it owe its own workers?

Built on Bad Land · Where prisons go

Far from town, near the waste

Where a prison is built decides what the people inside breathe, drink and live through. During the boom, prisons went where land was cheap and towns wanted jobs.

The rural boom

Before 1980, 36% of prisons were in rural areas. In the 1990s, 245 prisons opened in rural America, about one every 15 days.^[huling] The number of U.S. prisons grew from 511 in 1970 to 1,663 in 2000, mostly in rural places that were often looking for an economic lifeline.^[eason]

Next to toxic sites

A 2016 mapping found 589 federal and state prisons within 3 miles of a Superfund cleanup site, and 134 within 1 mile.^[pep]^[gejp] In Michigan, two prisons holding more than 3,500 people sit about 1.5 miles from the Velsicol chemical Superfund site, where water was contaminated.^[bradshaw]

In Colorado

About 2 miles south of Cañon City is the Lincoln Park / Cotter Uranium Mill Superfund site, listed in 1984 for uranium, molybdenum and TCE contamination.^[cdphe] Across the state, 11 of 43 state and federal prisons have a Superfund site within 5 km (about 3 miles), including the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City.^[mh]

Explore every prison's hazards in the Research Hub →

The Drug War · 1971 to 2010

Five grams, five years

Nixon named drug abuse “public enemy number one” on June 17, 1971.^[nixon] Fifteen years later, Congress wrote the fear into sentencing law.

Under the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, 5 grams of crack cocaine triggered the same five-year mandatory minimum as 500 grams of powder cocaine. Same drug, different form, one hundred times the weight.^[adaa]

In 2010 the Fair Sentencing Act cut the gap to 18-to-1. It did not end it.^[fsa]^[ussc15]

Who is inside, in Colorado

In 2022, Colorado held Black residents in state prison at about 1,563 per 100,000 people aged 15 to 64, and white residents at about 302 per 100,000: more than five times the rate.^[vera]

Control and Profit · Who gains

Always about control

“I don’t think there was ever a time where the intent was from a good place. It has always been about control. I think it’s gotten worse over time in how it shows up.”
Michael Clifton, founder, who spent 24½ years in Colorado prisons

Control, from the start

When slavery ended, the 13th Amendment left one door open: “except as a punishment for crime.”^[s13] Southern states passed Black Codes that applied only to Black people and turned things like vagrancy, or not being able to prove you had a job, into crimes. States then leased prisoners to railways, mines and plantations, a practice that lasted into the 1930s.^[eji] People who could no longer be owned could be convicted.

Fear makes the law

Harsher laws often followed one terrible case. After 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped and murdered in 1993, California passed “three strikes”; under it, a man got 25 years to life for stealing three golf clubs.^[ewing] President Clinton named her when he signed the 1994 crime bill, which then-Senator Joe Biden largely wrote and shepherded through Congress.^[clinton94]^[fc94] It authorized $9.7 billion for state prisons.^[crime94]^[doj94] Researchers say the bill did not start mass incarceration, which began in the 1970s, but added to it.^[pf94]

Colorado followed the same path. A 1985 law doubled the top of the sentencing ranges, and the prison population more than doubled, from 3,586 in 1985 to 7,794 in 1991.^[cdoc92] After the 1993 “Summer of Violence,” a special session let prosecutors send 14- to 17-year-olds straight to adult court and created the Youthful Offender System.^[ojjdp93]^[yos93] Homicides that year rose by two over 1992.^[m5280]

Worse over time: death by incarceration

In Colorado, a life sentence once meant parole review after 10 years. The wait rose to 20 years in 1977 and 40 years in 1985. Since July 1, 1990, life for a class 1 felony has meant no parole at all.^[pln00]^[crs17]^[hb1203] Many people serving these sentences call them “death by incarceration.”^[alc]

Nationally, 194,803 people were serving life or 50 years or more in 2024, about 1 in 6 people in prison; life without parole hit a record 56,245.^[tsp25] In Colorado the share is higher: 3,642 people, 21% of the prison population.^[tsp25] From 1990 to 2006, Colorado also sentenced children to life without parole; 48 people were serving those sentences when the state changed the law in 2016.^[cbs16] In 2024, 46 people died in Colorado prison custody, and one in five people inside was over 50.^[cdoc24]

Here is how that control shows up today: who works, who pays, and who is paid.

Work, by rule

In 2018, Colorado voters struck the same “punishment for crime” exception from the state constitution with 66.2% of the vote.^[amA]^[bpamA] Prison rules still required eligible people to work, and reporters found at least 727 disciplinary cases for refusing work in the years after the vote.^[bolts23]

In a class-action case, the Department of Corrections agreed there had been more than 10,000 failure-to-work incidents in four years. On February 13, 2026, a Denver judge ordered the state to stop threatening isolation to make people work.^[pln26]^[bolts26]

Pennies a day

Colorado's 2017 pay scale ran from 84 cents to $2.45 a day for full-time prison jobs.^[ppiwage] Colorado Correctional Industries, the state's prison business, took in $26.4 million in 2024 making license plates, signs, uniforms, flags and more.^[cci24] Nationally, about 800,000 incarcerated workers earn an average of 13 to 52 cents an hour and produce more than $2 billion a year in goods.^[aclu22]

Families pay

Until 2023, Colorado families paid 8 cents a minute for prison phone calls; a 2023 law made calls free by July 2025.^[hb1133] The prison canteen sold $22.5 million in goods in 2025.^[canteen25] Medical visits still cost $3 to $5; a 2025 bill to end those copays passed the legislature and was vetoed.^[hb1026]^[veto25]

Beds as business

CoreCivic, a private prison company, runs Bent County and Crowley County for the state at $66.52 per person per day.^[kiowa26] In 2013, Colorado guaranteed the company 3,300 prisoners while state prisons had about 1,000 empty beds.^[kunc13] In 2026, budget writers chose a new private contract, about $115 per person per day for about 700 people, over state-run options.^[sun26] CoreCivic reported $2.21 billion in revenue for 2025.^[cxw25]

Built for control

Colorado State Penitentiary opened in 1993 for administrative segregation, about 23 hours a day in a cell.^[csp]^[c1prison] A second solitary prison cost $208 million, opened in 2010, and was emptied two years later.^[csp2] In 2017 the state capped solitary at 15 days in a row.^[den17]

Does it make us safer?

The National Research Council found the deterrent effect of longer sentences “modest at best.”^[nrc14] The National Institute of Justice: “The certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment.”^[nij16] In Colorado, incarceration rose 19% after 2021 while crime fell, and a state audit update counted 4,627 people held past their parole eligibility date as of October 31, 2025.^[kunc26]^[cdocaud]

Invest instead

A year in a Colorado prison costs about $57,000, nearly five times the $11,900 a year in state and local school funding per student.^[cpo23]^[sf26] Money spent in neighborhoods has measurable effects. In Philadelphia, cleaning and greening vacant lots cut gun violence by up to 29% in poor neighborhoods.^[branas] In Chicago, a summer jobs program cut violent-crime arrests among teens by up to 43%.^[heller] Across 264 cities, more local nonprofits went with less violent crime.^[sharkey] Colorado has tried this on a small scale: a 2017 law moved $6.6 million from the prison budget into small-business loans and crime-prevention grants in north Aurora and southeast Colorado Springs.^[hb1326]

“If we invested that more in our communities and our people and our youth, we would have healthier communities that would need less prisons.”
Michael Clifton

Heat Inside · Environmental justice

85 to stay alive

The 85 to Stay Alive campaign, led by Texas Prisons Community Advocates, asks for an indoor temperature standard of 65 to 85°F in prisons, the same range Texas already requires in county jails. It also calls for air conditioning in every housing, work and common area, and for free cold water during extreme heat.^[tpca85]^[tpr24]

The campaign now has a national coalition with state partners, including Colorado.^[tpcanat] In Colorado, TPCA works with CU Boulder's RISE program; together they built an exhibit that includes recordings of incarcerated Americans describing extreme heat.^[tpcaco]

Colorado is not immune

CIRCol (the Climate and Incarceration Research Collective, pronounced “Circle”) is a national research collective that works with directly impacted communities on the environmental harms people face inside (climateandincarceration.org ↗). Its director is at CU Boulder, and its core leadership spans CU Boulder, CU Anschutz, UCLA, the University of Arizona, Texas Prisons Community Advocates and FreeWorld, including members with lived experience.^[circol] In Colorado, researchers at CU Anschutz and CU Boulder are studying heat and cold inside together, with formerly incarcerated people on the team (see the Colorado study). Its researchers mapped 110 Colorado lockups for exposure to wildfire, flood, extreme temperatures and landslides. Three in four had moderate or high exposure to at least one hazard, and those facilities hold about 33,300 people, 83% of everyone incarcerated in the state.^[cuheat]^[kunc23]

In interviews with 35 formerly incarcerated Coloradans, about 65% said extreme temperatures, wildfire or flooding had affected them inside. People described long stretches above 90°F, and filing complaints that were dismissed over small errors, with fear of losing privileges or being transferred.^[cuheat] Black and Latino people were more exposed, because of where their facilities are.^[cuheat]

Texas, September 2026

A federal judge found that Texas's heat measures “have not prevented ongoing deaths and heat-related injuries,” and ordered air conditioning in every state prison by the end of 2029.^[tpr]

Then and now

One clause, 160 years

Slavery ends, with an exception

Laws written to arrest freedom

Leasing ends. The labor does not.

“Public enemy number one”

The 100-to-1 rule

The crime bill

Prisons come to rural towns

The gap narrows, but stays

The Sugar Land 95

A judge orders Texas to cool its prisons

Watch the map fill in

The places that prove it