Pueblo jail in a jam
Voters rejected a tax increase to help alleviate overcrowding
PUEBLO» There are walls that leach water, flies that spawn in shower drains and cells designed for one person holding three — one of whom sleeps on the floor — because space is so limited here that officials have had to get creative to pack everyone in.
This is the Pueblo County jail, which the local sheriff’s office says is the most overcrowded county jail in a state full of congested detention centers.
And when officials pleaded with voters in November for help, after deputies on edge from the jail’s conditions (700-plus inmates in a facility made for just 509) knocked on doors and made calls from phone banks, the community sent back a resounding message: Not this year.
“We’re kind of in a situation where we have a perfect storm,” a frustrated Pueblo County Sheriff Kirk Taylor said. “Not only do we have the increase in average daily population to the extent of being overcrowded to 147 percent, but we also have an aging and deteriorating facility.”
With the conditions worsening by the day, Pueblo County is bracing for what it sees as inevitable lawsuits over a jail whose operators say is borderline inhumane. The cost moving forward, they say, will be far greater than the 0.45-cents-per-dollar sales tax they asked for but that voters rejected.
“It’s like my undersheriff says,” Taylor
said, “you can’t put 18 eggs in a 12-egg carton without cracking a few.”
In Pueblo, a city hoping to reap the benefits of an economic boom being felt by its northern Front Range neighbors, officials say fixing their county’s jail is one of the final pieces in a public safety transformation that is crucial for the city’s greater revival. The Pueblo Police Department’s force size has rebounded to prerecession levels, homicides are down and joblessness has fallen to a rate near Denver’s — but the jail sticks out like a sore thumb.
In the past five years, not a month has gone by when the jail’s daily population hasn’t averaged at least 100 more people than it has beds, according to a Denver Post analysis of Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office data. The facility is also nearing the end of its intended lifetime.
“Over the years,” inmate Sonny Sanchez joked during a recent tour of the jail, “it’s aged like me.”
Backers of the failed jail tax are struggling to figure out why their community was unwilling to help. (The tally was 54 percent against and 46 percent for.) It’s all the more exasperating, they say, considering that conservative voters in Colorado Springs approved tax increases, as did voters in Weld County.
Voters in the city of Pueblo in November even approved a 0.2-cents-per-dollar sales tax to increase the city’s police force by 24 of- ficers after rebuffing a similar measure the year before.
“I think there is a disconnect about how this affects public safety overall,” said Pueblo County Commissioner Garrison Ortiz, who was pushing for the tax increase. “Until you address this issue, it’s going to make going out and doing other things — in terms of economic development and other projects — a lot harder.”
Take, for instance, the impact the overcrowded jail has had on the Pueblo Police Department.
Since the sheriff’s office no longer takes inmates facing or convicted of municipal charges, police have started in the past six months or so transporting people to jails in either Park County or Douglas County. That takes officers off the street while moving them out of county, and the costs of contracting with those other facilities add up.
“It contributes to the justification that we need more space in this community,” said Pueblo Police Chief Troy Davenport. “It’s costing us more not having it.”
The lack of jail space is also impacting the city’s and county’s battle against surging drug problems.
The proposal on the ballot called for a 30-year tax increase that was estimated to raise about $10.5 million in its first year. It would have taken care of the roughly $150 million price tag for a new jail and to turn the current facility into a state-of-the-art detoxification and health facility with a focus on opioid addiction — a major issue in Pueblo County.
It followed a failed 2015 effort to raise taxes by 1 cent per dollar, which also aimed to shoulder pay increases for deputies and new sheriff’s office equipment.
That’s why Ortiz led a jail task force this year that included dozens of local community and business leaders to explore how to best move forward. They ruled out using vacant southern Colorado detention facilities and settled on this year’s ballot question.
“In my perspective, it’s the most important foundational piece (of public safety),” Taylor said during a day when his jail was 254 inmates over capacity. “We have to have a place to incarcerate those people prior to adjudication. It was bizarre to me that we as a community passed (a measure in which) the city could get 24 more police officers, which is great — I’m sure they need them. But that’s going to translate into ‘You’re going to arrest more people. Are you still not going to have any place to put them?’ It just didn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
The measure’s backers suspect that voters either didn’t fully understand the tax question or that there was a disconnect between voters in the city of Pueblo (population 110,000) and the rest of the county (where 55,000 live).
They also admit that the idea of ponying up for jail inmates isn’t all that appealing to voters, even when deputies’ safety might be at stake.
“You have to deal with the imminent issues whether they are fun or not,” Ortiz said. “I knew that a jail, a detention facility, in any community is not necessarily the most attractive issue to go out there and sell. I would argue that there are other things that are a little more attractive to voters, but it’s what’s necessary.”
Voters obviously didn’t think a new jail was necessary, or at least worth paying for, although the reason isn’t clear.
“I can’t give you a specific reason, and I don’t think there is a specific reason,” said Colette Carter, professor of political science at Colorado State University at Pueblo. “There are different dynamics from Pueblo West and the city of Pueblo.”
As for now, there isn’t a clear path forward for the jail.
Officials say they will keep trying to make what they have work — whether it’s transforming a facility gymnasium into more housing or turning a kitchen into an intake area (both of which have already been done).
“When it gets busy,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Jonathan Zamora during a recent jail tour, “we just start putting people everywhere we can.”