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This month, the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) announced that it would begin transitioning more than 300 inmates out of administrative segregation, commonly known as solitary confinement, and send them back to locations within the general prison population.
It might not sound like earthshaking news. But as we reflect on this decision to move toward a safer, less costly and more humane state prison system, it is important to note that every person in Colorado has a stake in this.
In this country, we believe that if someone is punished for a crime, they should have a clear picture of what their punishment will look like — especially of when it will end. In Colorado, however, hundreds of inmates have languished in solitary confinement for years at a time, with no clear path out, even when they have fully complied with all the rules and regulations of the institution.
There have long been cries for reform. Last year, State Senator Morgan Carroll introduced legislation to fundamentally change solitary confinement practices, calling for policy that would reaffirm our core values, effectively prioritize scarce law enforcement resources, and protect the safety of our communities. Carroll’s Senate Bill 176 was scaled back to allow the CDOC to audit its own practices and determine the best course of action. The result is the announcement of reducing solitary numbers made by CDOC Director Tom Clements.
Despite the depiction in the movies that solitary confinement is reserved for the worst of the worst, the independent audit found that most of those in solitary confinement in Colorado are not disruptive and have been in good standing with prison rules for a long time. In fact, the average length of stay in solitary confinement is not the 30 days that you see on TV, but instead two years or more. The independent consultants recommended a more transparent system that would allow an inmate to return to the general population in no more than nine months, if they are in compliance with all the rules.
Sentencing Project
he Bureau of Justice Statistics recently reported the number of people in
prison declined in 2010 for the first time since 1972; state and federal prison
populations fell by more than 9,200 between 2009 and 2010, a decline of
0.6%. Currently, more than 7.1 million men and women are under some form of
correctional supervision. The majority of persons – 4.8 million – under criminal
justice supervision are in the community on probation or parole, while 2.2 million
are incarcerated in prison or jail. The United States continues to maintain the
highest rate of incarceration in the world at 731 per 100,000 population.
Reductions in the scale of incarceration are the result of declining crime rates and a
mix of legislative and administrative policies that vary by state. Lower demand for
correctional capacity resulted in at least 13 states closing prison institutions or
contemplating doing so during the past year. One salient reason for prison closures
is the reduction in state revenues caused by the recession. According to a report by
the National Governors Association, at least 40 states made cuts to correctional
expenditures between 2009 and 2010 by reducing labor costs, eliminating prison
programs, and making food-service changes. Additionally, states have increasingly
focused on finding ways to downscale prisons.
Wall Street Journal
Prison systems in the U.S. have an aging problem, one that has nothing to do with steel bars and cement walls.
The fastest-growing population in federal and state prisons are those 55 and older, a trend that is forcing cash-strapped local governments to wrestle with the growing cost of caring for the aging inmates. Some experts are pushing states to take the controversial step of releasing certain older prisoners before their sentences are up.
According to a study being released Friday by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, the number of state and federal prisoners 55 or over nearly quadrupled to 124,400 between 1995 and 2010, while the prison population as a whole grew by only 42%.
![[OLDPRISON]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BP163_OLDPRI_DV_20120126204037.jpg)
Human Rights Watch Anthony Harvey dropped out of eighth grade and went on to become an established small-business owner in Fort Collins.
But it wasn't until he was charged with running one of Northern Colorado's largest cocaine-trafficking operations that he got his GED, or General Educational Development, diploma.
"The rug's been pulled out from under my feet," said Harvey, 35, of Fort Collins, adding that he "finally" had the time for the test.
Harvey was one of 55 Larimer County Jail inmates in 2011 to receive a GED certificate, taking the high school equivalency exam while behind bars. Hundreds of inmates receive tutoring for the test each year, but many leave the shorter-term facility before they take it.
Harvey was arrested Sept. 30. Less than a month later, he had his diploma.
the Denver Post
Few events have shaped school discipline policies the way the 1999 Columbine High School massacre has — not just in Colorado but around the nation.
Zero tolerance became a catchphrase for "doing-everything-possible-to-make-sure-this-never-happens-again."
And we get that. Keeping children safe is the very least we should expect of our schools.
It has become apparent, however, that too many children are being suspended and expelled for mundane matters, and the system needs to recalibrate.
We are glad to see such an effort embodied in Senate Bill 46, a bipartisan measure in the state legislature that is the product of hours of meetings and input from educators.
The bill puts disciplinary flexibility where it belongs — with the districts. It boils zero tolerance down to its core, which is a prohibition on guns in schools.
It directs districts to create their own disciplinary codes, shaped to fit the students and issues that make each district unique. It encourages districts to limit out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. And it encourages the use of peer mediation and restorative justice.
Some, however, are concerned the bill would amount to another unfunded mandate. Costs are deeply concerning to many districts struggling to absorb funding cuts.
Jane Urschel, deputy executive director of the Colorado Association of School Boards, said that's why the bill emphasizes flexibility.
Beyond the three dozen Front Range school districts, the majority of the state's 178 districts are in rural areas. Restorative justice, which focuses on repairing the harm done, could take very different forms in rural and urban districts.
The Denver Post
The Department of Corrections is transferring 321 inmates out of administrative segregation following a new directive by the department's executive director.
Executive Director Tom Clements acknowledged that the state's prisons relied too heavily on administrative segregation. He said one of the reasons it should be reduced is because 97 percent of all offenders will some day be released.
"Our efforts to ease an offender's transition from administrative segregation to eventual release into the community should also reduce recidivism," Clements said in a news release Friday.
Inmates are placed in administrative segregation, or 23-hour lock-down, when they violate prison rules by fighting, drug dealing or organizing gangs.
The reduction in administrative segregation was also called for following an independent analysis by the National Institute of Corrections, the U.S. Department of Justice and two national corrections experts.
"This is an excellent example of good government and how to tackle tough issues head on," Gov. John Hickenlooper said. "In these times of tight budgets, the department is doing a remarkable job of balancing costs with appropriate levels of security."
Last August, Clements began requiring that two prison administrators review all instances in which an offender was held for more than one year.
Of 870 cases that were reviewed, prison officials determined that 321 inmates or 37 percent should be moved out of segregation. The moves are still underway.
Administrative segregation keeps prisons safer, but Colorado prisons had become over-reliant on the tool, Clements said.
The Denver Post
About 18 students bounced between nervousness and overwhelming excitement as they showed off their work during a biannual art show Thursday.
"It just lets you have fun. It makes you feel proud," said 10-year-old Noemi as she showed off her artwork: a pirate spaceship in which an alien travels the galaxies rescuing princesses.
The alien art projects encompasses the two features — academic and mental support — that make the Intensive Day School, a center program at Valdez Elementary, unique.
"They are using that as a vehicle to express their needs and their creativity. For instance, they are making pillows for their aliens, blankets and pets so they learn about different needs," said Sarah Hammer, a full-time social worker at the school. "They're not always used to getting positive attention, so it's a really good opportunity for them."
The program started when a coalition of four mental-health advocacy groups got together to fund six projects, including the Denver Public Schools program.
The program aims to keep students in grades two through six with severe mental or emotional issues in school, as opposed to sending them out of the district to receive mental care. This way, program organizers say, mental or emotional issues don't make learning take a back seat.
Noemi's mother, Gerylann, is thrilled by the progress her daughter has made since she entered the program three years ago. She now reads at a partially proficient level, up from being unsatisfactory before starting the program.
" She's learning to use skills for controlling her aggravation, and she's able to talk with other kids," Gerylann said. "It's her ability to have a life. She actually laughs and smiles now."
The coalition stopped funding the program two years ago, but DPS has managed to keep the program running.
From Jeralyn over at Talk Left:
The newly crowned Miss America, Laura Kaeppeler aka Ms. Wisconsin, has a special cause: Children of the Incarcerated. At one time, she was one. Check out her organization, Circles of Support.
As to her post-Miss America plans, her website says in addition to her mentoring work, she will pursue a degree in Family and Child Advocacy Law. She also owns a music studio and teaches voice and piano. For her talent competition, she performed (sang) Luigi Arditi's classical aria, Il Bacio. [More...]
Westword
The use of private prisons by states and the federal government continues to increase, yielding billions in annual revenues for two dominant companies in the industry -- despite a lack of solid research that America's experiment with for-profit incarceration actually saves taxpayers money in the long run.
A new report by The Sentencing Project, "Too Good to Be True: Private Prisons in America," delves into the history and growth of private prison operators and reaches some fairly bleak conclusions.
The industry is thriving: While the overall prison population grew by 17 percent in the last decade, the number of inmates shipped to private operations went up by 80 percent. Roughly one out of twelve state and federal prisoners is currently in a for-profit hoosegow, one probably operated by either Corrections Corporation of America or the GEO Group; the two companies control more than half the contracts.
Colorado has stashed about a fifth if its inmates in private prisons, such as CCA's Bent County Correctional Facility (scene of this "natural" death) and Crowley County Correctional Facility (target of a long-running lawsuit over a 2004 riot). But the state has become less reliant on the private companies to handle its overload in recent years as its overall inmate population has declined. The greatest growth area has been in contracts with the federal government, which has seen a whopping 784 percent surge in its use of the privateers since 1999, thanks largely to "War on Drugs" sentencing provisions and other legislation that has packed the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' existing facilities.
Colorado Springs Independent
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream didn't include more black men being in prison than in college.
But nearly 50 years after his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, that's the reality.
In the past few decades, blacks and Hispanics have become grossly overrepresented in the nation's prison population. In fact, of the 2.3 million people incarcerated nationwide, 60 percent are black or Hispanic, according to The Sentencing Project, a national organization that advocates for system reform.
Black men today have a 1-in-3 likelihood of being incarcerated in state or federal prison in their lifetime, and Hispanics a 1-in-6 chance, compared with a 1-in-17 chance for white men. In Colorado, blacks are incarcerated at 6.6 times the rate of their white counterparts, and Hispanics at twice the rate.
Overall, blacks are arrested, imprisoned, denied early parole, re-arrested, and sent to death row at rates far greater than their representation in the population.
If he were alive today, King would speak out against such racial disparity, believes Rosemary Harris Lytle, president of the Colorado Springs Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.
"When you are incarcerating people disproportionately to their [population] numbers, there's nothing there that says 'civil rights,'" she says. "The criminal justice system is fraught with disproportionately."
The Denver Post
Denver paid $1.34 million in 2011 to settle lawsuits that alleged police used excessive force, only the second year since 2004 that the total substantially topped $1 million.
Last year also accounted for the largest payout since 2004, when the city settled the fatal shooting of Paul Childs, a mentally disabled teen who died after confronting an office with a knife.
As in previous years when payments approached or topped $1 million, one case accounted for most of 2011's total settlement. The city paid $795,000 to Alexander Landau, an aspiring rapper/musician and college student who suffered brain injuries and trauma during a 2009 traffic stop for an illegal left turn.
It is often cheaper to settle the cases than take them to court, where it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay legal experts and other costs, even if the city wins, said City Attorney Doug Friednash.
"It's easy to look at these cases and try to make a media splash," he said. "In none of these cases do we admit liability. You have to look at the economics as a steward on behalf of the taxpayers."
The average amount paid per officer to settle cases in Denver per-year — $697 — is far lower than that spent by some other cities, Friednash said. He cited Associated Press data that found Chicago averaged $2,930, New York $2,700, Los Angeles, $2,200, and Philadelphia, $1,360.
In Denver, the $1.325 million paid to Childs' estate accounted for the bulk of $1.778 million that excessive force suits cost the city in 2004.
Mark Silverstein, ACLU of Colorado legal director, said the per-officer payouts minimize the true cost of excessive force by police.
"We can't let public officials minimize the expense of police brutality by by pointing to a lower per-officer cost than other cities," he said. "None of those dollar amounts factor in the real human cost. They leave behind a trail of bruised bodies, broken bones and shattered lives and you can't put a dollar amount on that."
The Denver Post
The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday renewed its call for a federal investigation of the Denver Police Department's use of force after outgoing law enforcement watchdog Richard Rosenthal said the department is incapable of investigating itself.
"We will be in communication" with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, said Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado.
Told of the ACLU's intentions Wednesday, Daelene Mix, spokeswoman for Denver Manager of Safety Alex Martinez, said in an e-mail: "Although the examples cited in Rosenthal's report do not support an investigation by the Department of Justice, the new Manager of Safety and new Chief of Police have always intended to assess and make appropriate changes in the police department, including internal affairs."
There is no guarantee the DOJ will launch an investigation, although Xochitl Hinojosa, spokeswoman for the Civil Rights Division, said the agency would review the requests.
In his last quarterly report before leaving the Office of Independent Monitor to set up a similar watchdog agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, Rosenthal said Internal Affairs Bureau investigators favor officers they investigate, in part by failing to ask obvious questions or request documents that will illuminate instances of alleged excessive force.
Martinez slammed the report, saying none of the points Rosenthal raised would have changed the outcome of any investigations. In response, Rosenthal said the DOJ should investigate the department, calling "deficiencies" in the bureau serious.
"I think Rosenthal finally said some things that we at the ACLU have been noticing for years," Silverstein said.
The New York Times
IN 2010, the Chicago Public Schools declined to hire Darrell Langdon for a job as a boiler-room engineer, because he had been convicted of possessing a half-gram of cocaine in 1985, a felony for which he received probation. It didn’t matter that Mr. Langdon, a single parent of two sons, had been clean since 1988 and hadn’t run into further trouble with the law. Only after The Chicago Tribune wrote about his case did the school system reverse its decision and offer him the job.
The Digital Journal
More than 2,500 youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in United States adult prisons experience conditions violating basic human rights, including denied access to education, isolationism, rape, and assault, according to a new report.
eloquent testimony to the stunting and desperation felt by youth serving life without parole sentences.The new research reveals severe prison conditions - conditions HRW states “violate fundamental international human rights laws and standards” - youth offenders serving LWOP are facing. Often entering prison while still children, these offenders must cope with solitary confinement, increased risk of suicide, denied adequate mental health care, and the ever-present abuse. Some spend years with only fleeting human contact. Of the 560 youth offenders in 11 states contacted by HRW for the report, none had managed to avoid prison violence. HRW noted prison officials condoning such violence become part of the “serious human rights abuse” problem.
We'd like to welcome back Michael Connelly (former blogmaster of Corrections Sentencing), his new blog is called Corrections Sentencing 2020. (round of applause). You can find Corrections Sentencing 2020 on our blogroll to the left.
From CS2020
Welcome to Our New Website and Home
Thank you for visiting our new website and home. We hope you will make it a regular stop, hopefully even bestow upon it that hallowed bookmark. As you will see from the What This Blog Is and What This Blog Is Not posts, we will take a proactive, futures approach to corrections and sentencing policy. The approach will perhaps seem confrontational because it rejects acceptance of the current status quo in the face of an arriving Perfect Storm of fiscal and environmental pressures that are already assaulting most state and local budgets and will continue to do so for years and years to come. We will provide you the latest research and news not only concerning corrections and sentencing but also concerning those fiscal and environment concerns, spiced by commentaries by us and the kind contributors we bring on board.
We refuse to be a gloom and doom site, though. We will be diligent about providing ideas and examples of ways to address the practical and the theoretical issues facing corrections and sentencing as they adjust to the unpredictably changing world evolving before us. We hope you will find us a useful and convenient site for information and options to deal with problems and issues that either don’t respond to the old practices or have never really been addressed before. If you are attuned to the world we’re facing but wary that you’ve been alone, you’re not, and we will do our best to make sure you aren’t disappointed whenever you visit. Even if you don’t accept part or all of what we’re talking about right now, we feel that the new realities hurtling down on all of us in corrections and sentencing will bring you back, whether you want to or not. Don’t worry. We’ll just be glad to see you again.
Our point is that the world of corrections and sentencing will dramatically change by 2020, even more and in different ways than it has changed in the last few years. It goes without saying that we can deal with that well or badly or somewhere in between, with precious public safety and scarce tax dollars in the balance. We vote for “well.” We think we have something to contribute to that, and what we can’t help with, we’ll find and get to you here as fast and as much as possible. We don’t have to take this swirling, disruptive future lying down.
We’ll look forward to seeing you here.
The New York Times
The Supreme Court has not banned capital punishment, as it should, but it has long held that the death penalty is unconstitutional if randomly imposed on a handful of people. An important new study based on capital cases in Connecticut provides powerful evidence that death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime.
A number of studies in the last three decades have shown that black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim is white rather than black. But defenders of capital punishment often respond to those studies by arguing that the “worst of the worst” are sentenced to death because their crimes are the most egregious.
The Connecticut study, conducted by John Donohue, a Stanford law professor, completely dispels this erroneous reasoning. It analyzed all murder cases in Connecticut over a 34-year period and found that inmates on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape that penalty. It shows that the process in Connecticut — similar to those in other death-penalty states — is utterly arbitrary and discriminatory.
From 1973, when Connecticut passed a death penalty law, to 2007, 4,686 murders were committed in the state. Of those, 205 were death-eligible cases (capital murders that include the killing of a police officer, murder for hire, murder-rape and murder committed during a kidnapping) that resulted in some kind of conviction, either through a plea bargain or conviction at trial. The arbitrariness started at the charging level: nearly a third of these death-eligible cases were not charged as capital offenses as they could have been, but as lesser crimes. Sixty-six defendants were convicted of capital murder, 29 went to a hearing for a death sentence, nine death sentences were sustained and one person was executed.
Why was this small group of defendants singled out for death? Did their crimes make them more deserving of execution than all the others?
To get answers, Professor Donohue designed an “egregiousness” ratings system to compare all 205 cases. It considered four factors: victim suffering (like duration of pain); victim characteristics (like age, vulnerability); defendant’s culpability (motive, intoxication or premeditation); and the number of victims. He enlisted students from two law schools to rate each case (based on fact summaries without revealing the case’s outcome or the race of the defendant or victim) on a scale from 1 to 3 (most egregious) for each of the four factors. The raters also gave each case an overall subjective assessment of egregiousness, from 1 (low) to 5 (high), to ensure that more general reactions could be captured.
The egregiousness scores for those charged with capital murder and those who were not were virtually identical; the nature of the crime bore almost no relationship to how the case came out. Among the 29 who had a death penalty hearing, there is no clear difference in the level of egregiousness for the 17 who got life without parole and the 12 sentenced to death (three eventually had their sentences vacated for various reasons). Among the 32 most awful cases on the four-factor egregiousness scale, only one resulted in a death sentence.READ MORE
The Denver Post
Ronald Sena's troubles started with heroin, which led him to thievery and shoplifting and larceny, which led him to prison. He was 19 the first time he went in. For much of the next 20 years, he made regular use of the revolving door, accumulating a lengthy record of nonviolent crime.
That was all many years ago, but I'm laying it out first because Sena's past refuses to stay in his past and because his terrible choices will be all that matters to some readers, so I'll save them the trouble of reading further.
By 1994, Sena was a free man in the workforce. He worked continuously for the next 14 years — most of that for a cardboard-box manufacturer. He became Joe Taxpayer, drug-free, with a car and a bank account and health insurance. He screwed up twice in recent years with two arrests for drunken driving. One he disputes; the other he admits. The charges were reduced in both instances, and he pleaded guilty to driving while ability impaired.
To simplify: Sena spent almost 20 years in and out of jail, followed by almost 20 years of uninterrupted employment.
On Dec. 30, 2008, he was laid off. He's hasn't been able to find steady work since. He's 58. "How much consideration does an ex-con, an old ex-con, get?" Sena asks. "Zero."
This is not an unusual story. Especially not in this job market. An employer who can choose between a convicted felon and someone with a clean record is going to pick the clean record. That's just reality.
"When I last left prison, the associate warden came up, and he handed all of us parolees $100 each and a bus ticket, and he shook our hand and said, 'You've paid your debt to society,' " Sena says. "Well, that was a lie. I'm 20 years out and I'm still paying."
No matter what you think of Sena, he raises a point applicable to all who served their time. (And I have a cousin among them.) When is a debt repaid? How long out of prison is long enough?
"The haters out there are going to say, 'It's your fault you're in this situation.' Well, they're right," Sena says. "It is. I admit that. I should get the least consideration of everyone in society. That being said, then what? What am I supposed to do now?"
He collected unemployment and then fell ill, racking up more than $40,000 in medical bills he cannot pay. Thanks to his mother and siblings, he's not on the street. "I'll tell you how it goes," Sena says. "You lose your job, then your possessions, then your money, then your clothes. As you see, I'm on the last chapter."
What I see is a thin man, neatly dressed and clearly desperate. In our first telephone conversation, he told me he was thinking of committing a nonviolent crime to go back to prison. His voice was shaking. Bad idea, I said.
Bad idea, says Hassan Latif. Latif is a Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition board member and a case manager for Turnabout Inc., which helps ex-offenders find work. He's also an ex-con, on his seventh year out. He says Turnabout has been averaging 950 visits a month from ex-offenders, most of them living in halfway houses or still on probation or parole.
"There's actually a term to describe this situation," he says. " 'Collateral consequences.' It's the impact a criminal history has on people seeking employment. . . . What you are hearing from (Sena) is something we hear frequently. 'Just take me back.' But that's not a solution. They have to come back out eventually, and it's not like the situation will be that much different."
The Denver Post
More than 500 people were wrongly imprisoned in Denver's jails over seven years, with some spending weeks incarcerated or pleading guilty to crimes they did not commit before authorities realized they nabbed the wrong person, a federal court filing shows.
Civil-rights lawyers suing the city and county of Denver assert the documented mistaken-identity arrests "are the tip of the iceberg" and are an undercount of the true magnitude of the problem.
In one case a black man spent nine days in jail after he was arrested on a warrant for a white man wanted on a sex-crimes arrest warrant.
In another, authorities arrested an 18- year-old when they were searching for a man 30 years older.
A white man was hauled in even when the suspect actually was an American Indian who was nearly a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier. He wasn't released until almost a month had passed and not until the victim of the crime alerted authorities at a court hearing that they had the wrong suspect.
Another man was jailed twice on a warrant for second-degree burglary and sexual assault even though his tattoos didn't match the real suspect's, described in the arrest warrant.
"I missed five full days of work and lost five days of wages due to my first mistaken- identity arrest," Carlos Alberto Hernandez, now 34, stated in a declaration filed with the court.
"I also lived in fear that I was going to be terminated from my employer due to the missed work and the accusations about the sexual assault charges. I had problems and numerous arguments with my girlfriend because of the accusation that I was guilty of sexual assault and a sex offender."
City officials say the documented mistakes make up a fraction of the more than 33,000 inmates incarcerated at the Van Cise-Simonet Detention Facility last year. They say they strive to avoid detaining the wrong suspects but concede that mistakes do happen.
"The best we can do is set up processes so these get addressed immediately, and that's what we've done," said Denver police Lt. Matt Murray.
The mistaken-identity arrests are detailed in a 216-page motion filed at the U.S. District Court in Denver by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.
Motion blasts lax tracking system
The wrongful arrests in Denver occurred for a variety of reasons. Often those wrongly held had the same names as criminals, but authorities failed to check their dates of birth. Some were wrongly arrested because their identities had been stolen. In other cases, the last name matched but not the first or middle.
The Denver Post
LAS ANIMAS — What if the most dire predictions prove true? What if closing the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility prompts 10 percent of Bent County's workforce to move, triggering an economic tsunami in the Arkansas River Valley?
Cindy Miller, a corrections officer at the prison facing $1,000-a-month gasoline bills for her and her husband to transfer to new jobs at a different prison, ponders the questions for a minute, then reluctantly answers.
"Go on welfare, I guess."
Moving people from jobs to handouts does not seem like a rational way to balance the budget, and it is not what the Department of Corrections and Gov. John Hickenlooper had in mind when they chose to save a projected $6 million a year by closing the prison.
But by picking Fort Lyon, here in the southeastern corner of the state, rather than further cutting costs in a more-populated area better able to handle the job losses, that may be the result.
"If we were to lose 200 jobs from the Denver area, or even Cañon City area, they could absorb those losses much better than we can," said Sgt. Chris Newman, a 12-year DOC employee whose 12-minute commute is becoming an hour each way as he transfers to the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway.
The loss of roughly 200 good jobs here equates to erasing as much as 25 percent of the take-home pay in a county where about 35 percent of the 6,500 residents already live in poverty.
5280
At first glance, his home looks like your typical high-tech bachelor pad. In the living room he’s got a huge, flat-screen Sony TV with Bose surround-sound speakers and a bookcase of DVDs, including the entire set of Police Academy movies. He can’t get enough of the farcical cop flicks. His home-office desk features a massive computer monitor with an icon for the video game Call of Duty: Black Ops. But then you look around and see that next to the desk there’s another monitor, this one featuring a multiscreen display of real-time surveillance from 11 cameras strategically positioned on the roof and around the perimeter of the property. Then there’s that six-foot-high white fence—a steel, electric gate—and his two rottweilers, Ike and Tina. The place is more like a fortress that helps keep the world at a distance.
Tim Masters, who seems closer to 30 years old than his chronological age of 40, is wearing faded jeans, a blue T-shirt, and well-worn, white running shoes. He has a reddish-brown mustache and a carefully groomed beard. His blue eyes convey an intense attention to detail as he talks about the treachery and turning points that have shaped his life since that morning nearly 25 years ago when he stumbled upon a corpse and became a suspect. The stigma hovered over him during high school and through an eight-year stint in the Navy. It peaked with his arrest in 1998 and his conviction for first-degree murder. It took everything he had to keep his spirit from folding into itself during the decade-long legal battle that ultimately won his release from prison. The events surrounding the case tore apart a town and challenged people’s perceptions of right and wrong, truth and justice, and who, really, were the good guys and the bad guys.
Now, on a clear, late winter morning in 2011, Masters sits with his shoulders pressed against the high back of a worn beige couch in the old farmhouse he bought in rural Greeley, Colorado. With the millions he received in the settlement from the people who locked him away, he could afford a more modern place in a fancier part of town, but he feels comfortable here. It is out of the way. The neighbors don’t pry. He can work on his cars in the driveway. “I don’t really have a routine these days,” Masters says. “I’ve been doing a lot of work on the house, renovating the bathrooms and the utility room, sanding drywall, retiling floors, putting in new cabinets and counters, and doing trim work. Fixing up the house is therapeutic.” He sips at a cup of coffee and glances toward the security feeds. READ MORE
