Mayor John Hickenlooper has approved plans to erect a tent to handle an overflow of jail inmates as new questions emerged Thursday about whether the administration – which this year won voter approval to build a $378 million justice center – has underestimated jail population growth.
Inmate population at Denver County’s two jails has ballooned 17 percent in the past year, already exceeding the planned capacity for county jails when the new justice center is complete in 2009.
To temporarily ease crowding, Hickenlooper late Wednesday approved plans to erect the tent next week in the recreation yard of the Smith Road jail.
“Even though it’s a tent, the environment will be constitutional and humane and as good as we would provide in the jail,” said William Lovingier, a chief in the Denver Sheriff Department.
Denver will use the tent to house for about 90 days 100 inmates convicted of misdemeanor charges, while the jail turns a storage facility into cells, he said. Denver is tapping $900,000 in federal grants for the renovation.
The tent will have wooden floors, bunk beds and portable showers and toilets. The tent, 66 feet square, also will be heated, Lovingier said.
On Thursday, Denver’s jails housed 2,583 inmates in facilities designed for 1,672, renewing criticism of the administration’s jail-management plans.
“As we attempted to make known during the ‘Fail the Jail’ campaign, the current situation at the Denver jails is the result of poor planning,” said Tanya Wollerman of the Colorado Progressive Coalition. “The city chose to build a new justice center at the expense of the current inmate population and a thoughtful study of the current system.”
This past summer, the National Institute of Corrections issued a report criticizing Denver for failing to – among other things – adequately review data that could help project inmate populations.
William Woodward, the principal investigator for the report, said Thursday that jail officials still don’t have answers to some crucial questions that could ease the strain at the jails.
“It would take maybe a day to do a quick, pretty valid assessment of all offenders,” said Woodward, noting that such an assessment has yet to be done.
He said jail officials also have failed to adequately determine how long a person waits in jail before they have their initial appearance before a judge, or how long before they have a trial or enter a plea.
“It may be they are running the most efficient system possible, but when I start asking these questions, they don’t have the answers,” Woodward said.
One reason the jail population has grown, Lovingier said, is a recent challenge by the district attorney’s office of how the sheriff’s department calculates time served. As a result, inmates have been spending more time in jail.
Hickenlooper said it would take city officials several weeks to figure out more specifically what is driving the sudden increase in the inmate population.
“There is obviously something going on here,” Hickenlooper said. “This hasn’t happened before. We’re investing in a jail-management data system that will allow us to eventually understand when sudden changes like this happen, why they happen.”
The 17 percent growth in the jail’s population over the past year exceeds the estimates used by city officials when they urged voters to approve the new justice center five months ago. At that time, city officials said at a modest growth of 1.3 percent, the number of inmates at Denver’s jail would fill the justice center’s extra beds by about 2034. At a growth rate of 4 percent – the national average – those extra beds would be filled by 2013, city officials said at that time.
Although the current inmate population exceeds initial limits expected when the new justice center opens in 2009, Hickenlooper said the city is able to expand capacity further and will be able to reduce the jail population through new rehabilitation and pretrial diversion programs.
Using tents to house prisoners isn’t without precedent.
Other communities have housed inmates in tents, including Boulder in 1998. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., has drawn national attention for his tent-city jail, which houses more than 3,000 inmates at a time.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-820-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
