Children and Incarceration in Colorado: A Complete Guide

People picture Colorado as a postcard. Mountains, ski resorts, outdoor people with sunburned faces. The reality of incarceration in Colorado is different. It is Canon City in the high desert south of the Rockies, a small city that has been a company town for prisons since the 1870s and hosts one of the densest clusters of correctional facilities anywhere in the country. It is Sterling out on the eastern plains, where the landscape flattens into sky and the nearest city is over an hour away. It is Limon, two hours east of Denver on I-70, a town whose main feature for many Colorado families is that it is where their loved one is locked up. It is Rifle on the western slope, cut off from the Front Range by the Continental Divide.

I went into the federal system, not the CDOC. But I know what it means to be separated from your children by systems and distances that were not of your choosing. I went in when my kids were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20. What I want to talk about, before anything about phone rates or visiting hours, is the thing that determines what happens to those children more than anything the Colorado Department of Corrections can do or not do. It is the choices both parents make about how to parent through the years of a sentence.

The mountains as metaphor and as fact

Colorado's incarceration geography does something specific. The Rockies divide the state into regions that are not simply far apart but structurally separated. A family in Denver with someone at the Rifle Correctional Center on the western slope faces Vail Pass, Glenwood Canyon, and 180 miles of mountain driving to get to a visit. A family in Colorado Springs with someone at Sterling is looking at nearly three hours across the plains in the other direction.

For a child, those mountains are not a ski destination. They are what stands between them and their parent. A child who gets told "Daddy is at the prison in Buena Vista" is hearing about a town in a mountain valley at 7,900 feet elevation, two hours from Denver, on the other side of a pass that closes in winter weather. The distance is real and the barriers are physical.

What this means for the parent inside is the same thing it means in every state where geography creates distance: the phone call, the letter, the video visit become the primary substance of the parent-child relationship for months or years at a time. The quality of those contacts matters more, not less, when they are all a child is getting.

Two things Colorado just did

The Colorado Legislature did something significant in 2025 that every incarcerated parent in the state needs to know about.

First, House Bill 25-1013 changed the legal status of family visitation in Colorado's prisons. Under the old policy, social visiting was a privilege that facility heads could approve, deny, suspend, or revoke. Under the new law, family visitation is a right. The department can still set rules to govern how visitation works, but it can no longer restrict it beyond what safety actually requires, and it can no longer use it as a punishment. The law that turned visitation from something that could be taken away into something a family is entitled to is a meaningful shift.

Second, Senate Bill 25-208 is moving Colorado toward fully state-funded phone calls. The cost was 75 percent covered by the state as of July 1, 2025, and becomes 100 percent covered on July 1, 2026. Colorado is days away from that transition as of this writing. When it takes effect, phone calls from Colorado state prisons become free to the incarcerated person and the family receiving the call, following the model California established in 2023.

Both of those changes matter enormously for children. The combination of a right to visitation and free phone calls is a significant step toward what the research consistently shows children of incarcerated parents actually need: maintained contact with the incarcerated parent.

The decision both parents make in Colorado

My wife kept six children from turning against their father for 66 months of incarceration. She had every reason and every right to tell them the full truth of what I had done. She chose not to. She let them love me without cost. And the relationships I have with my adult children are the direct result of that choice she made over and over, for years.

The parent inside a Colorado facility carries the same obligation from the other direction. Free phone calls, once they are fully in effect, remove the cost barrier from every family in the CDOC system. What remains is the question of how the parent uses that access. A call from Limon or Sterling that opens with genuine curiosity about the child's specific life, that responds to what the child actually says, that ends with something the child will carry with them, does the work of the relationship. A call that uses the free minutes to pressure, instruct, or complain is spending the most valuable contact currency the relationship has on things that push the child away.

Neither parent can afford to use the children as the place where the adult conflict lives. Colorado just made it cheaper and more legally protected to maintain contact with incarcerated loved ones. The point of that contact is the children. Both adults have to decide, separately and together, that the children come first.

What the ages mean from inside a Colorado cell

My children were 9, 11, 12, 15, 18, and 20 when I went in. Those ages map onto different things in Colorado's context.

The 9-year-old needs the most basic thing: to hear the parent's voice regularly and to hear, directly and often, that none of what happened is their fault. A child under 10 in Colorado whose parent is at Buena Vista or Rifle will likely not visit often. The drive is real, the expense is real, the disruption to a school week is real. What the 9-year-old has is the call. Make the call count. Make it predictable. Call on the same days. Ask the same kinds of questions. Let the child know when to expect the phone to ring. That predictability is a form of parenting.

The 11 and 12-year-old is entering the years that demand more from the outside parent than any others. Middle school in Colorado, with its particular mix of the academic pressure of the Denver suburbs and the isolation of smaller mountain or plains communities, is when identity starts to form and solidify. A parent's incarceration is not invisible at this age. The child knows, peers know, and the child knows that peers know. What the incarcerated parent in Colorado can do is use the access they now have, the approaching free calls, the protected right to visits, to stay genuinely present in the child's life. Ask what happened this week. Ask what they are worried about. Ask the follow-up question next time. The middle school child who knows their parent is tracking their life remains in the relationship.

The 15-year-old measures authenticity. A teenager whose parent calls from a Colorado facility to instruct them about life choices will evaluate the irony and decide accordingly. The incarcerated parent who calls to listen, who asks questions and stays with the answers, who can acknowledge honestly what happened without turning every call into a referendum on it, will keep the teenager in the conversation. Ask more than you tell. A 15-year-old in Colorado who still answers the call from Limon or Canon City by the end of the sentence is a teenager who felt that the person calling was real.

The 18 and 20-year-old is an adult in the process of deciding what relationship to carry forward. Respect that process. Do not pressure it. Show up as someone worth deciding to keep.

What the outside parent carries in Colorado

The outside parent in Colorado is managing children, a household, and the cost of living in a state where both housing and childcare have become some of the most expensive in the country. They are doing this without the person who was supposed to be their partner in it. They may be driving through a mountain pass twice a year to give their children a few hours with the incarcerated parent, and absorbing both the financial and emotional cost of that trip each time.

What they need from the incarcerated parent is acknowledgment. One sentence on a phone call, or in a letter, that names specifically what you see the outside parent doing and says thank you, is one of the most valuable things an incarcerated parent can deliver. It is free. It costs honesty and attention. It is also what sustains the outside parent's willingness to keep the door open, to keep making the drive, to keep speaking carefully about the incarcerated parent in front of the children who are watching both adults to understand what this situation means about their family.

The children need both parents to be adults about this. My wife deserved a medal for what she carried during those 66 months, and I said so as often as I could. That acknowledgment, even from inside a cell, matters.

How communication works in Colorado right now

The CDOC uses a tablet-based system for phone calls with ViaPath (GTL) as the platform. As of July 1, 2025, the state covers 75 percent of call costs. As of July 1, 2026, the state covers 100 percent. Check cdoc.colorado.gov for current status as this transition completes.

For in-person visitation, visitors register online at codoc.gtlvisitme.com. The Visitor Application is AR Form 300-01A; completed forms go to the specific facility where the person is housed. Photo ID is required for adults. Background checks are conducted annually. A visitor who is not listed as the minor's legal guardian must have written approval from the parent or guardian using AR Form 300-01F. Visitors who have not visited in a year are automatically deactivated from the approved list.

Video visitation is available through the GTL/ViaPath system for most facilities. Check the CDOC website for current availability.

Note: As of June 7, 2026, CDOC temporarily suspended all visitation statewide due to an incident at Bent County Correctional Facility. Visitation was reinstated at all facilities except Bent County as of June 8, 2026. Confirm current status for any specific facility before traveling.

Physical mail is accepted at all CDOC facilities. Books and publications follow facility-specific rules. CDOC headquarters: (719) 579-9580. Website: cdoc.colorado.gov.

Federal inmates in Colorado are held in federal facilities under BOP jurisdiction. BOP communication uses TRULINCS for email via CORRLINKS and TRUFONE for phone. The same FCC rate caps apply; First Step Act programming offers 300 free minutes per month.

Where this leaves you

Colorado is at a genuine inflection point for families of incarcerated people. Free phone calls are arriving. The right to family visitation is now law. The mountains are still there, and Limon is still two hours east of Denver, and Canon City is still two hours south of Colorado Springs, and Rifle is still over a pass on the western slope. The geography does not change. But the tools for maintaining the relationship across that geography have gotten measurably better in the past year, and they are about to get better again.

Use them. Call as often as the schedule and the budget allow. Visit when it is possible, even if it is hard. Write the letter that is addressed to the specific child, about the specific thing happening in their specific life. Do not use any of those contacts to fight the battle between the adults. The children of Colorado families who come through a parent's incarceration with both parents refusing to weaponize the situation come through it intact. The children who do not have that protection come through it wounded in ways that take years to name. The choice is available from inside any CDOC facility in this state. Make it.