Colorado Lawmakers Vote Against Mandating Prison Time for Child Sex Assaults, Saying It’s Too Costly to Incarcerate

Colorado parents, prosecutors, and child advocates are asking who the state is protecting by rejecting mandatory prison time for child rapists, after lawmakers declined — for the third consecutive year — to mandate prison time for adults convicted of sexual assault on a child. 2026 is the third year in a row that the Democratic majority in the legislature looked at the evidence, heard from victims, and still said no. Senate Bill 26-111, titled “Protections Against Child Rape,” died on a 4-3 party-line vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee on March 18, 2026. The bill would have required incarceration for class 4 felony sexual assault on a child, class 4 felony sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, and class 3 felony sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust when the victim is under 15 years old.Under current Colorado law, a person convicted of any of those offenses can be sentenced to probation rather than prison, for a period that can run from 10 years to the offender’s natural life.“If you rape a child, you belong in prison. You do not belong in society on probation only,” Representative Brandi Bradley told KKTV in Colorado Springs. Speaking separately on the Kim Monson radio program, Ms. Bradley said, “In our state, in Colorado, you can rape multiple children as long as it’s only one time and receive probation.”Costly enforcement for repeat offendersThe effort by the bill’s sponsors to increase penalties began in 2024 with HB 24-1092, targeting sentencing for crimes against sexually exploited children. It was killed 8-3 on a party-line vote in the House State, Civic, Military, and Veterans Affairs Committee — a panel critics have long dubbed the “kill committee.” A 2025 House version narrowed the scope specifically to removing probation as a sentencing option for child sexual assault. It was defeated 6-5 in the House Judiciary Committee. This year’s Senate version was narrower still and failed by a 4-3 margin in its Judiciary Committee vote.Mirroring arguments from previous years, the stated objections of the four Democrats who voted to kill the bill — Senators Adrienne Benavidez, Nick Hinrichsen, Katie Wallace, and Mike Weissman — were twofold: mandatory incarceration removes judicial discretion and the fiscal cost, estimated at $3.5 million in the first year alone, is too high a price during a session already burdened by an estimated $850 million budget deficit.The fiscal note attached to the 2026 bill projected no additional costs in its first year of implementation — given the time required for cases to move through the courts — but estimated expenditures of approximately $3.5 million in the second year, with costs continuing to rise as more offenders were routed to the Department of Corrections rather than probation supervision.Voting to move the bill forward were Senators John Carson and Lynda Zamora Wilson, both Republicans, and Dylan Roberts, a Democrat.The bill had bipartisan backing on paper. Senator Janice Rich, a Republican, led the effort in the Senate chamber, while Ms. Bradley, a Republican, and Representative Regina English, a Democrat cosponsored the House measure over the three consecutive years. However, the show of cross-party unity was thinner than it appeared. Ms. Rich had initially secured Democratic cosponsors in the Senate only to see them withdraw before the hearing ever took place. Senator Marc Snyder, a Democrat who had cosponsored the 2025 House version of the bill, also declined to lend his name to this year’s Senate effort.Supporters of the bill have pointed to evidence that they say makes the stakes difficult to dismiss. The bill’s fiscal note estimated that approximately 56 offenders per year currently avoid prison for these crimes under existing law.According to 2024 House committee testimony covered by ColoradoPolitics.com, one investigator with the Jefferson County Crimes Against Children Unit said his unit arrested 91 predators targeting children for sexual purposes in 2021 and 2022. Of those, 47 received probation sentences, and 20 received deferred sentences, meaning 73 percent of child predators in the county received nothing more than a “slap on the wrist,” in the investigator’s own words.Of the 47 placed on probation, 16 had already violated their terms. Even then, many were given a second chance on probation rather than be sent to prison.Victim services manager for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, Courtney Hill, told legislators at the hearing that offenders in these cases are often white men of higher socioeconomic standing who have the means to hire well-known, experienced attorneys to fight and plead down their punishment.Ms. Hill told the committee that she had witnessed defendants return to court after violating the terms of their probation and receive probation again rather than a prison sentence. “Probation is not an appropriate sentence for someone who enjoys buying children,” Ms. Hill said. However, one voice raised against Senate Bill 26-111 at the committee hearing this year came from a man who pleaded guilty to child sexual assault as a teenager, Rob Sanchez. “This well-intended bill brings unintended consequences,” Mr. Sanchez told lawmakers. “It ties the hands of every judge in Colorado, saying that their judicial wisdom is irrelevant. It sidelines the recommendations of prosecutors and tells victims that their voices don’t count if they ask for something other than incarceration.”Punishment vs. rehabilitationWhether incarceration or probation produces better outcomes for this class of offense is more contested than advocates on either side tend to acknowledge.A clinical psychologist and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Elizabeth Jeglic, told The New York Sun that the evidence does not support the assertion that mandatory incarceration will prevent repeat offenses. “The research does not support a clear conclusion in the available literature that incarceration is more effective than probation in reducing recidivism for individuals convicted of sexual offenses,” Dr. Jeglic said. “Studies indicate that custodial sentences are not consistently associated with lower rates of reoffending and, in some cases, may be associated with higher rates of non-sexual recidivism.”Ms. Jeglic also cautions that the underlying studies are largely Canadian, draw on correlations, and cannot easily account for the fact that higher-risk individuals are more likely to receive prison sentences to begin with, a selection effect that complicates direct comparison between incarcerated and probationary populations. A senior research analyst at The Sentencing Project, Kristen Budd, told the Sun she has not encountered research that specifically compares probation to incarceration outcomes broken down by conviction type for child sex offenses. “For studies that I’m aware of that have compared probation to incarceration, there is generally one pooled sample of people,” Ms. Budd said. “I haven’t seen anything specific about sex-related crimes and probation versus incarceration.”The Sentencing Project notes that Colorado, Utah, and Washington have some of the highest proportions of people serving life sentences for sex-related crimes in their overall life-sentenced populations, with Washington at 69 percent, Utah at 54 percent, and Colorado at 48 percent, driven in large part by the state’s 1998 Sex Offender Lifetime Supervision Act, which mandates indeterminate sentences that can run to natural life. That law’s reach has more than doubled the number of individuals sentenced under it since 2005, to over 1,600.Ms. Budd said her group’s broader concern is with what she sees as a misallocation of legislative energy — spending millions of dollars on “highly punitive laws with little to show in return instead of supporting the community members and families to prevent incidents of sex-related crimes in the first place.”While the trajectory of the legislative votes suggests the margin is closing, a different outcome next session will depend in part on the composition of the Senate Judiciary Committee and whether sponsors choose to return with a fourth attempt.Inaction by the legislature may become a moot point. Supporters of taking the question directly to voters announced this month that a ballot initiative to increase the penalty for trafficking of a minor for sexual servitude to life in prison without parole had gotten enough signatures to qualify for a ballot vote in November.

Colorado Lawmakers Vote Against Mandating Prison Time for Child Sex Assaults, Saying It’s Too Costly to Incarcerate

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