Colorado Sheriff says newly developed jail requirements are hard to meet without state funding

FREMONT COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) -- A bill introduced in the Colorado legislature aims to create specific requirements for county jails across Colorado, requirements that have never before been developed in the Centennial State. However, an elected Sheriff in a more rural piece of Southern Colorado says, without funding from the state, the requirements will be difficult to implement.

HB24-1054 is a continuation of a bill passed last year and will create a list of requirements for safety, facility security and treatment of inmates.

This comes after four inmates escaped the Bent County Jail through a hole in the drywall ceiling of their cell in July 2023. Just a little over six months later, in January 2024, another Bent County inmate and trustee escaped through another hole in the drywall ceiling of a changeout room he was supposed to be cleaning.

Bent County Sheriff Jake Six told KRDO13 that the fifth escape in a year was evidence of a much larger problem that runs statewide. He said that if there had been more than the two staff on shift that night, it was likely that the escape wouldn't have happened.

It's not that Six can't find people to hire, it's that he can't afford to employ them.

County jails in Colorado are primarily funded by property taxes, leaving rural jails without a wide tax base vulnerable to underfunding that creates real problems.

Representative Judy Amabile has been aware of the underfunding and lack of standards for county jails for a while. In 2022, she began working on a bill to create a Jail Standards Commission that was passed the following year.

The 20-person commission, made up of sheriffs, mental and physical health professionals and other lawmakers, was tasked with touring jails around the state and creating a list of standards and recommendations for security, humane treatment and general facility requirements. Their recommendations hit the floor this legislative session.

Amabile says she was disturbed by the conditions at some of the jails she toured.

"I don't want to say what jail it was, but in one of the places people were in cages where they could reach their hands through, and we were told to walk as near the wall so somebody wouldn't reach out and grab [us]," Representative from Boulder Judy Amabile said.

She also mentioned a situation where inmates were told they couldn't go to the bathroom in a group of two because it would cause raw sewage to flow through the jail.

"Rural counties are not going to be able to sustain their detention centers because most of these detention centers are 30, 40, 50 years old," Fremont County Sheriff Allen Cooper said.

Cooper sat on the commission and helped develop the standards now passing through the Colorado Legislature to get approved. He has firsthand experience of running a jail while facing underfunding.

"My feeling, based on the makeup of the board and the tone of the legislature was that if we didn't get some representation from people that are in the field that have been doing this work, then we were going to get saddled with some regulations that, quite frankly, I believe would shut down a lot of smaller jails," Cooper said.

Cooper detailed multiple instances where the rising costs of maintaining a facility and providing adequate healthcare for inmates caused him to dip into his financial reserves this year.

"Now have to build up my reserve funds, and so there were some things that I had to cut this year that I didn't want to cut," Cooper said. "But I have to be a good steward of my tax dollars."

While understaffing and lack of facility maintenance is something Rep. Amabile is aware of, she's primarily concerned about the lack of mental health resources and humane treatment of inmates.

"You do have to make sure that you're treating people well while they're in jail, particularly because, I mean, I feel this way about prisons, too, but particularly because most of the people in jail at any given time have not been convicted of a crime," Rep. Amabile said.

Sheriff Cooper admits most of the people in his jail at any given time haven't faced trial yet.

"They're being held there [on] pretrial," Rep. Amabile said. "They either don't qualify for bail, they don't have the money for bail and they're there, or they're waiting on the competency waitlist to get to the state hospital. And so we should be taking extra care because these are people who in America are not guilty until they are innocent. They haven't been proven guilty."

However, Amabile has a more personal connection to the issue: watching her son experience mental health and substance use disorders she says caused him to be "criminal justice involved." When she watched her son go through the system, she learned more about criminal justice in Colorado and began to advocate for the humane treatment of inmates.

"This is real for me, this problem," Rep. Amabile said.

Still, for Sheriff Cooper, being "saddled" with extra requirements doesn't help with the tight budget he has to balance every year. Amabile says the Standards Advisory Committee, enforcing this year's jail standards bill upon approval, will help jails meet what requirements they can with the current resources they have and can qualify for waivers if needed.

In terms of finding more funding to eventually meet these requirements, Amabile admits she doesn't have those answers yet.

"Even if every single person in Jackson County said, 'you can have all of my income for a year,' they wouldn't get enough money to build a new jail," Rep. Amabile said.

She said she's looking into other funding structures, like federal and state funding to meet the requirements in the following year.

"[Lawmakers] are aware that a lot of the smaller jails are struggling. But I don't think we're in the top five of the list of things they worry about," Cooper said.

More than that, a lack of funding isn't simply a population and wealth issue, but an issue of public perception.

"I mean, it's very it's not very popular to run ballot measures to fund jails," Rep. Amabile said. "People want people to be put in jail, but they don't want to pay for it."