Making it easier for ex-inmates to get their driver's licenses once they're back in society is among 66 suggestions in a new report on how to shrink Colorado's bulging prison system.

The report, unveiled Thursday by the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice, is the first phase of a comprehensive plan.

The 66 recommendations include the driver' s license proposal as well as incentives that would allow inmates to be released from prison earlier for showing "extraordinary, positive behavior" or by completing educational programs.

Many of the recommendations were contained in a preliminary report issued this fall, but that didn't include the details and research of the present plan.

All the recommendations are aimed at reducing recidivism - repeat offenders - which is considered by Gov. Bill Ritter and correctional experts to be the key to prison reform. It was the only topic tackled in the 35-page report.

In the next year, the commission will issue four or five more reports that deal with other specific reform issues, such as crime prevention.

Some of the recommendations need new legislation and some can be done administratively within the Department of Corrections. Ritter may choose to make some or all of the recommendations part of his 2009-10 crime- prevention and recidivism package, which carries a one-year price tag of $10.6 million.

Prison costs - which eat up about 8 percent of the state's budget and are moving toward 12 percent in the next few years - led to the creation of the commission by the legislature. The governor appointed its 27 members, who include correctional experts, lawmakers and civic leaders.

If all the recommendations are followed, the commission believes Colorado could eliminate the planned 2,061-bed expansion of the Trinidad Correctional Facility, which is projected to cost $336 million, according to Lance Clem, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.

"(The plan) has a lot of common-sense but little-known components that will serve, hopefully, to keep offenders from committing new crimes and victimizing people all over again," Clem said.

Among the recommendations:

* Today, driver's licences are destroyed when inmates enter prison, Clem said. But when inmates try to re-enter society, "you want them to reintegrate as fast as possible - and the best way is to get a job, and the best way to get a job is to have an ID," which a license provides.

* Formulas that give inmates incentives to behave and get out of jail early follow a longstanding Colorado tradition of trying to tailor plans to suit individual inmates, Clem said.