Gov. Bill Owens and the Colorado legislature insist that they're doing everything they can to resolve the budget crisis. They're talking about closing state parks, cutting programs for senior citizens, increasing college tuition by 40 percent, suspending the TABOR amendment for two years, and siphoning $200 million away from K-12 schools.

Yet glaringly absent from this conversation is the state's prison budget.

No one can talk about prisons, because politicians have spent so much time feeding us the lie that jail cells are filled with violent offenders who are just itching to break into your home and commit rape and murder.

Incarceration rates have skyrocketed. Prosecutors, cops and politicians trumpet that they're putting away the bad guys and protecting us from harm. Even in this crippling budget crisis, when we're so desperate for money that we're willing to cut core programs, no one will talk about prisons.

Apparently, no one wants to be accused of being the legislator who advocated putting the bad guys back on the street.

But right now, we need our legislators to grow up, get beyond the inflammatory rhetoric and start dealing in facts: The biggest and least painful budget cuts will come from prisons.

I've downloaded a copy of the 110-page Department of Corrections Statistical Report for Fiscal Year 2002. Page 36 includes a chart that shows 71.9 percent of all the people sentenced to prison in fiscal years 2001 and 2002 were non-violent offenders.

I'll be the first to agree that murderers, rapists, armed robbers, pedophiles, arsonists and kidnappers should stay locked up, but given our current budget shortfall, it is simply irresponsible to keep sending non-violent offenders to prison.

We've developed a love affair with prisons that is now strangling us and threatening our most vital education programs. According to the DOC report, the incarcerated population of 17,367 represents an "unprecedented growth" of "384 percent since 1985, when the population was 3,586."

Here's the line that every Coloradan needs to consider: "The average annual cost of incarcerating one inmate \[is\] $28,218." That doesn't include the cost of the loss of productivity or the human and emotional toll that prisons exact on perpetrators, guards and the families of both.

So instead of complaining that they have to cut funding for K-12 and higher education, parks and senior citizens programs, Gov. Owens and the Colorado legislature need to first figure out how much they can save on prisons.

We're currently spending nearly half a billion dollars to hold 17,367 people, and the projections just keep going up. Another chart in the report shows a steady climb from 24,788 to 25,481 inmates by 2008, at which time our prison system will cost us more than $700 million.

Every non-violent offender we send to prison costs as much as four public school students. We can accept the governor's suggestion and cut $100 million a year for years from K-12 funding, or we can find a way to move 3,544 non-violent inmates into alternative sentencing.

Clearly, these are not easy choices, and I don't believe we should be cavalier about opening the doors of our prisons. But when we're faced with these hard decisions, we have to make rational judgments about what's more important to us.

In this budget climate, should we take $28,218 away from our schools in order to hold a drug user, trespasser, car thief or writer of bad checks? Or should we use probation, electronic monitoring, restitution or some other form of sentencing to save money and continue to fund the programs that really matter?

I understand our collective desire to punish people who break the law, but when we send someone to prison, we have to think about who's getting the worst end of the punishment: the bad guy or the rest of us?

Former Denver Bronco Reggie Rivers is the host of "Drawing the Line" Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on KBDI Channel 12. He writes Fridays on the op-ed page.