Colorado’s prisons are on the verge of total collapse. 

By Ahnaf Kalam | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

Colorado’s prisons are on the verge of total collapse. As of late 2025, state facilities are operating at nearly 98% capacity, while being severely understaffed. Men’s prisons alone are projected to run out of beds entirely in the next fiscal year unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the population or add capacity. Inmates are backing up into county jails which were never designed or funded for long-term state housing, while prison staff face mandatory overtime, burnout, and reduced security and rehabilitation programs.

And yet, amid this crisis, the Colorado Department of Corrections has found it in its budget to staff a full-time, taxpayer-funded practitioner of “gender-affirming care” for prison inmates.

The department is actively recruiting for a mid-level provider whose primary responsibility is to deliver so-called gender-affirming care to inmates. 

The posted salary—$8,788 to $12,302 per month, reaching nearly $148,000 per year—is paid entirely by Colorado taxpayers. This Denver-based position, open as of late 2025, requires experience in diagnosing gender dysphoria, initiating and managing hormone therapy (with special emphasis on the first year and ongoing maintenance), providing post-operative care, making surgical referrals, and chairing the department’s Gender Dysphoria Treatment Committee.

This job exists because of a 2024 class-action settlement that forced the CDOC to provide gender-affirming care equivalent to what Colorado Medicaid covers for the general population, including hormone treatments and surgical pathways. The state has committed to specialized housing options for transgender inmates, independent medical oversight, and expedited processes for these interventions.

This is a deliberate, grotesque misallocation of priorities. The state has chosen to treat gender affirmation as a top-tier medical necessity inside its prisons, dedicating a high-salary specialist role, a formal committee structure, and significant public funding to hormone regimens and surgical referrals for convicted offenders—many serving time for violent crimes—while the system as a whole buckles under overcrowding, staffing crises, and unmet basic needs.

Taxpayers—who often cannot afford or access similar medical care themselves—are forced to subsidize this specialized treatment for people who have been removed from society precisely because of their criminal behavior. 

Victims of those crimes receive no equivalent priority funding, no dedicated committees, no bespoke medical pathways. Ordinary citizens struggling with healthcare costs get no such largesse.

This is not equity. It is ideological extremism dressed up as compassion: a corrections system that punishes the law-abiding while indulging the law-breaking in the name of self-declared identity. It mocks the very concept of consequence, erodes public confidence in government, and diverts desperately needed resources away from security, rehabilitation, and victim support.

And the chaos doesn’t stop at hormones and committees. 

Under the 2024 class-action settlement now being implemented, biological males identifying as women—after hormone therapy for at least six months—can apply for transfer to women’s facilities, including an “integration unit” at the Denver Women’s Correctional Facility leading to general population. 

Biological females identifying as men? The policy focuses almost entirely on trans women, but the logic opens the door: if self-declared identity and medical interventions dictate housing, what’s next for biological women who transition into men being moved into the general population at men’s prisons – place notorious for having the highest concentration of rapists and sexual assailants all under one roof. 

We are creating a system where prisons become ideological battlegrounds instead of secure punishment facilities. Women’s safety gets traded for affirmation experiments, vulnerable female inmates face unknown risks from transfers, and the already-strained system descends further into dysfunction. This path erodes justice, invites abuse, and guarantees more lawsuits, more taxpayer waste, and more victims—both inside and out. 

When ideology overrides biology, security, and common sense in prisons, the fallout will be dangerous, expensive, and entirely predictable.

Colorado taxpayers have every right to be furious. Prisons exist for punishment, containment, and protection of society—not for state-funded experiments in gender affirmation. When the state can afford to pay six-figure salaries to oversee hormone therapy behind bars in the middle of a full-blown capacity and staffing emergency, it has lost all moral and practical perspective.

The question is no longer whether this policy is sustainable. It is whether it is defensible—or even remotely sane.

Ahnaf Kalam is a journalist and analyst based in Denver, CO. He writes regularly on issues of counter-terrorism, U.S. national security, Middle East and South Asian geopolitics, and local, national, and global politics. He is currently authoring a book on the 1971 war and genocide in Bangladesh (release date TBD).

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.