Display a point of pride for jail employees
In a hallway of the administrative section of the Boulder County Jail is a detailed and expertly created display of the county’s jail history. The area is not open to the public, or to inmates, and only can be viewed by jail employees and visiting professionals.
The extensive display covers the county’s current and five former jail locations. Two wall panels of photographs and text flank both sides of a cardboard footprint of the current jail at 3200 Airport Road. Below the panels are glass display cases with various artifacts ranging from confiscated handmade shanks to simulated handguns.
According to retired division chief Phil West, one of six members of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office’s historical committee, “It’s a point of pride for employees and provides a sense of tradition.”
Boulder County’s first jail opened in 1867 in a no-longer-standing small brick building on the south side of Pearl Street near its intersection with 10th Street. A visiting newspaper reporter commented, at the time, that “conditions were almost as bad as a privy vault.”
The inmates’ situations improved in 1882, when county offices were moved to Boulder’s former Victorian-era brick courthouse on Pearl Street, between 13th and 14th streets. The Sheriff’s Office was on the first floor, and a new jail, the county’s second, was opened in a garden-level basement.
The Victorian-era courthouse burned beyond repair in 1932 and was replaced in 1934 (and on the same footprint) by the current Art Deco-style courthouse. Approximately 30 inmates were relocated to the county’s third jail, then located on the fifth floor. In an interview in 1954, Sheriff Arthur Everson called it “decent and humane.”
For several administrations, the sheriff and his family also lived on the fifth floor, in an adjoining apartment.
The sheriffs’ wives did all of the cooking and even slid homemade pies through slits in the cell-room doors.
In 1962, two additions were made to the current courthouse —— a criminal and civil court building on the east side and an annex (housing the county’s fourth jail) on the west. This new jail was built to house 56 inmates, it but temporarily overflowed during a three-day riot, on the Hill, in 1971.
The county’s fifth jail, with a capacity of 112 inmates, opened in 1976 in the Boulder County Justice Center at Canyon Boulevard and Sixth Street. At the time, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, the Boulder Police Department, the county’s courts, and the jail were again located in the same complex.
In the 1860s, the county’s population was approximately 1,500. By 1988, it topped 190,000. No wonder the fifth jail, too, became overcrowded. The sixth jail, in use today, was designed with a 287-bed capacity and opened in 1988 on Airport Road.
The incarceration rate jumped in the 1990s, resulting in “double-bunking” in previously single-occupancy cells. Overcrowding has continued to be a problem. Currently, the jail holds 434 inmates.
So, what’s next for the historical committee? Some of their handiwork, like the jail display, is behind the scenes, but the public can view the hallway of historical artifacts and photographs in the lobby of the Sheriff’s Headquarters, at 5600 Flatiron Parkway, in Boulder. On the drawing boards is a similar project in the Lyons substation in a former railroad depot.
Hopefully, the public will get to see it.