Annual arrests in Boulder County have fallen almost 25 percent since 2000, yet more people than ever are sitting in jail, and they’re staying there for record lengths of time.
The county jail, built to sleep fewer than 300, is operating at a near-breaking point as a result, regularly housing more than 500 in a night.
It’s a problem that’s been building for years, as the county struggles to contend with an increasingly older, more chronically mentally ill population — two factors largely responsible for the overcrowding.
These days, the jail is routinely forced into double- and triple-bunking cells, while cutting back on programming for inmates and limiting them to just one hour of outdoor recreation every other day.
The circumstances have also put immense stress on jail employees, who struggle daily to keep inmates safe from one another — and to keep themselves safe from inmates.
“It’s hard to be scared at your job,” says Sgt. Lydia Mitchell, who oversees the jail’s self-improvement programming, among other roles. “I don’t think too many other people have to worry about that when they go to work.”
But when the jail is at or near capacity, as it has been for most of the last decade, there is an even more troubling outcome.
“It’s an ugly truth,” Mitchell says, “but we don’t consider ourselves rehabilitating people in here. And that’s because resources are too strapped.”
In response, Boulder County is considering a new, separate alternative sentencing facility where low-level criminals can take part in work-release and day-reporting programs. It would free up space in the jail and get low-level offenders into a more nurturing environment.
Construction on such a facility likely wouldn’t start until at least 2016.
‘It’s wearing away at my soul’
Stefanie Miles, 20, lives in a module where upward of 70 women are routinely crammed into just 16 rooms.
After being booked on DUI and theft charges, she now hopes to transition out of jail and into an alternative sentencing program, which she sees as a step toward reconnecting with family and eventually becoming a nurse.
That progression is on hold for now, though, because jail overcrowding has spilled into nearly every pocket of the county’s criminal justice system, leaving halfway houses and work-release programs backed up with wait lists that can keep people in custody for up to two extra months.
“Having to be in here longer than I have to,” Miles says, “I feel like it’s wearing away at my soul.”
The jail, on a hill just north of Valmont Road and across the street from the Boulder Municipal Airport, was built in 1987 for up to 287 inmates a night.
And yet, jail director Bruce Haas says, “it was full the day we moved in.”
That the facility has remained crowded since then stands to reason: Boulder County’s population is 38 percent greater today than it was in 1990, when Louisville and Lafayette were little more than half their current sizes and Erie and Superior held about 1,500 people combined.
But the jail has always found ways to manage without increasing its footprint. That’s due in large part to double-bunking some inmates, and using halfway houses and alternate treatment programs whenever possible.
It became a lot easier for the jail to make do in 2006, when Boulder County spent $2.1 million on a new 64-bed module in space previously used as a courtyard. At the time, Haas says, the expansion was viewed as a Band-Aid on a crowding problem that would invariably begin bleeding again in five or 10 years. And so it has.
At this point, however, overcrowding can neither be explained by the growth of the region, nor solved by simply expanding the jail’s bed count, officials say.
Age, mental illness affect crowding
Despite fewer arrests, as well as diversion programs aimed at keeping minor criminals out of jail, the county can’t compete with two trends: Its criminal population is getting older, and there’s an increase in the number of mentally ill inmates.
Older people are more likely to have a previous criminal record, so their bonds tend to be higher and their jail sentences longer, officials say.
In 2012, the jail had almost 1,200 inmates 50 or older. In 2006, that number was fewer than 800.
Boulder County’s median age is about three years higher today than it was 15 years ago, but other measures are contributing to the aging jail population.
For instance, the state Legislature has ordered mandatory jail time for repeat DUI offenders and anyone whose case may result in domestic violence charges. Measures like that, court officials say, lead to a gradual spike in the average age of inmates.
The struggle to rehabilitate an older population is made even tougher by the rise in the number of mentally ill inmates, who now comprise 40 percent of the jail population.
In the past, mental health patients might have had other outlets for treatment, but they’re now landing in jail more frequently, officials say. And once they’re behind bars, they often struggle to make bond and advocate for themselves, meaning they tend to be incarcerated much longer than others.
In response to the trend, county law enforcement relies heavily on programs such as Early Diversion, Get Engaged, in which mental health professionals ride along with officers and help de-escalate situations that would otherwise lead to arrests. Boulder County is one of the only places in the country to have secured a federal grant for that type of program.
Some states have crisis stabilization centers, which allow officers to bring people they’ve arrested in for immediate psychiatric treatment. Colorado does not, though the funding for one was nearly awarded last year.
That means when people with behavioral health issues are booked for a crime that could be as minor as disturbing the peace — and often is — they get taken to jail.
‘We’re deputies, not mental health specialists’
Jail time may be far from the best treatment for the mentally ill, but it’s their most likely landing spot around here. The jail has more psychiatric beds than any other facility in Boulder County, and the same can be said for many other Colorado jurisdictions.
According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a Virginia-based group working to eliminate barriers around mental health care in the U.S., the 1,100 psychiatric beds in Colorado qualify the state as having as a “severe” shortage, and a far cry from the “minimal standard” of 50 beds per 100,000.
“You’re a cop and you’re dealing with someone who is a danger to themselves or others, where are you going to bring them?” Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle says. “The officers have no other choice. There’s nowhere else.”
The rate at which people with mental health issues are being sent to the Boulder County Jail, and staying there, is alarming: According to jail records, between 2009 and 2013, 25 percent more of them were taken into custody, with an 18 percent longer average length of stay.
That about 40 percent of the jail’s inmates have a diagnosed mental health problem — more than twice the amount than when Pelle took office in 2003 — is a trend that’s been building for decades. Ask mental health professionals what’s going on, and they’ll point to the deinstitutionalization of mental health care that began with the Kennedy administration shutting down psychiatric hospitals in the hopes that patients would transition into community-based care.
“The idea that people would get out of living in institutions and be returned to the community was a good thing, but the funding and the resources never followed,” says Beth Lonergan, a psychiatrist for the Colorado nonprofit Mental Health Partners.
“If legislatures have the choice of cutting mental health or school funding,” Pelle adds, “you can guess what’s going to get whacked pretty hard.
“I can go to the county commissioners with proposals for community outreach and more deputies for open space and parks, and I won’t have a lot of trouble funding it. It’s always hard to find money for the jail, though. It’s not a popular one.”
Now, jurisdictions across the country are facing the same crisis that plays out every day in Boulder County: People with mental health issues are booked for low-level crimes and brought to jail, where they tend to stay three times longer than others.
In some cases, they must wait in jail before being evaluated for competency at the state psychiatric hospital in Pueblo.
“If you’re dealing with someone who is, in fact, not competent, and not understanding what’s going on, it’s very important that those people get assessed,” says Maria Berkenkotter, chief judge of the 20th Judicial District. “Having them sit in jail for days or weeks or even months is extremely counterproductive.”
In addition to contracting with Mental Health Partners, the jail has two mental health experts on payroll, though Pelle would prefer a minimum of four. The lack of attention given to those inmates is hard on them, and hard on the staff.
“We’re deputies, not mental health specialists,” Sgt. Mitchell says. “Some of the hardest decisions we make currently are in housing our mental health population. What level of issue do they have, and who can they be housed with? We’re trying to figure out in limited space who’s extreme, who could potentially be victimized more easily by other people who spend a lifetime trying to figure out how to victimize people.”
The atmosphere can be harmful for the mentally ill, officials say.
“It’s detrimental for anybody’s mental state to be in jail,” Lonergan says. “It’s an environment that’s just not conducive to well-being. For someone who has a major mental illness, being there is obviously not treatment.”
‘A lack of space and a lack of time’
It’s not just the mental health population suffering from a lack of treatment.
“We try to be very progressive in regards to the programs we offer in jail,” Pelle says, “but we are cutting back and running out of capacity to do that because we don’t have the physical space to do the classes. A lot of the things that we try to do to help people in that whole cycle of criminality is being interrupted by a lack of space and a lack of time, due to the crowding conditions.”
As a result, prospects for rehabilitation have become slim for inmates like Lawrence Cortez.
“I know I have an alcohol problem, but they’ve never addressed it,” says Cortez, 48. “What I feel I need is alcohol treatment. I’m tired of coming to jail. Incarceration isn’t helping me. Most people that are in here like me, they’re waiting for the second they get out so they can go to the liquor store or their drug dealer.”
Cortez has promised himself that when he next goes to court, he’ll be honest with the judge about the kind of help he needs.
“I’m going to beg them this time,” he says.
Chad Southern, 25, locked up for domestic violence and assault charges, sums up the struggle with painful self-awareness: “I get drunk, I get in trouble and I get in trouble with my wife. It’s really hard to better myself.”
Of course, as Mitchell points out, no one is forcing Southern to drink or fight with his wife. With or without overcrowding, jails can only hope to inspire inmates to change their destructive routines.
“To help guide them to never come back here again, that would be the goal of our programs,” she says. “To give them the tools and resources to walk out this door and be able to better themselves and take care of themselves, their family, their education, their work. Get clothes, get food, get a bus pass — those are things that we work on vigorously.
“We’re trying to create the awareness that you have the ability to control your mind and think differently.”
But some inmates say it’s hard to think differently under their current circumstances. Overcrowding has also left inmates with more idle time than they, or the jail, want them to have. It’s too unsafe for entire modules to be out of their cells at once, so the facility has entered into a tiered release system, with far fewer recreation hours to go around.
“We get a one-hour rec, and that’s about the only time that we get out to release energy,” says Cory Morales, 29. “You just sit back there, and whatever criminal thoughts you’ve already had, they either get worse or more criminalized.
“My mind’s progressing to be better, but it’s kind of hard when you’re stuck behind a wall all day. No time to get out and release the energy. We’re just like dogs. You got a lot of energy, you want to go out and play, release it, but you put it toward criminal activities instead of productive ones.”
Jail deputy and recreation supervisor Mark Zeman calls the tier system a “negative way of management.”
“If you lock a man in a small space and he has nothing to do,” he says, “it’s just not a productive way to go forward. When your resources are tapped and you can’t give them a program, they’re going to go back to what they know.”
‘Not just a warehouse’
For all its problems, Boulder County’s facility still has a reputation as having one of the most progressive jail environments in the country. Pelle says law enforcement officials from across the U.S. have toured the jail and met with the staff about their approaches to programming and organization.
“We take a lot of pride in terms of people doing the right thing,” Haas says. “I see staff going above and beyond to help people with their situations. In our jail, direct supervision means that the staff member is in the housing unit. Through that process, they develop a relationship.”
“We try to treat people like human beings here, compared to other jails I’ve been in,” Zeman adds. “It’s not just a warehouse.”
Inmate Sarah Stevens appreciates the staff’s efforts. The 24-year-old, booked on auto and identity theft charges, has spent time in Los Angeles County Jail, and she describes her time incarcerated in Boulder as a relative vacation.
“This is nowhere as extreme. It’s a lot more humanity here,” she says.
But Pelle says good intentions are no longer enough.
“From the time I was young, a street cop, the jail was a place where you hook ’em up, dump ’em off, and you’re done,” he says. “You never really have to view the jail or the correctional system in any kind of in-depth fashion. Well, now I’m forced to re-evaluate everything. Just throwing people in jail isn’t working.”
According to District Attorney Stan Garnett, that openmindedness has made Boulder County a victim of its own success. Judges he’s worked with, he says, will often sentence defendants to the jail, knowing that they’ll get gentler, more humane treatment there than at the state prison.
Garnett agrees that the jail can’t stay afloat without some form of intervention, and soon — whether that takes the form of an auxiliary facility for low-level offenders or something else.
“Now is the time,” he says, “for Boulder County to commit resources to this issue. Some people are dangerous, and some people, less so. We need to be realistic about this.”
Contact Camera Staff Writer Alex Burness at 303-473-1389, burnessa@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/alex_burness.
