State officials are investigating whether a consulting firm set up by former Colorado prisons director Nolin Renfrow while still in office helped a company land a state contract for a private prison.
That disclosure came Tuesday as the current corrections chief said Colorado’s prisons are “at a breaking point” and state auditors warned that Colorado faces a shortage of 8,500 prison beds over the next five years.
In a report to the state Legislative Audit Committee, the Office of the State Auditor said Tuesday that a “former senior- level official” launched a prison consulting business in August 2005, five months before he retired from the Department of Corrections on Jan. 31, 2006.
That official was unnamed in the report but was identified as Renfrow by state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, who had requested the audit.
Renfrow began working on behalf of the consulting firm in November 2005, and between November and January 2006 was on paid leave from his state job, the audit said.
During that time, he used a combination of annual, sick and holiday leave, said the auditors. They called into question his use of $14,000 in paid sick leave, given state rules that bar employees on sick leave from outside work without consent from a doctor and a supervisor.
The auditors said Renfrow, while still employed by the Department of Corrections, began working to assist prospective bidders in developing proposals to the DOC for a private prison.
With Renfrow’s assistance, a company identified as the GEO Group by McFadyen was awarded the contract for a 1,500-bed private prison to be built at Ault, auditors said.
Auditors quoted Renfrow as saying that if GEO actually builds the new prison, his business could receive a fee of $1 million.
Renfrow could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.
Gary Golder, the current prisons director, said that the DOC’s inspector general is investigating the situation.
“We found that prior to this employee’s retirement in January 2006, the former employee (Renfrow) may have violated state statutes, personnel rules, and department regulations regarding employment and failed to observe rules for state employees,” the audit said.
The audit said state laws bar public employees from engaging “in any employment or activity which creates a conflict of interest” without permission, and forbid them from “assisting any person for a fee” in landing a contract from the employee’s agency.
“It is a clear conflict of interest,” McFadyen said.
McFadyen said the contracts with GEO should be re-bid. “At the very least, Renfrow may have given his client, GEO, an unfair bidding advantage,” she said.
During Tuesday’s hearing, auditors told of severe crowding at the state’s prisons.
The auditors said that since the 1980s, Colorado’s inmate population has exceeded the capacity of state prisons, and as a result, the department has housed inmates in county jails, prisons operated by other states and private prisons.
Golder said that at the beginning of the summer, 800 prisoners were being kept in county jails, a number that is now down to 300 because some inmates have been sent to other states.
“We are at a breaking point,” Golder said after the hearing. “We are kind of at that crux.”
He said that if Colorado doesn’t boost funding for prison construction and expansion, the state will have to use other means to house inmates, such as sending more prisoners out of state, double-bunking, funneling more into the community corrections system and relying on private prisons.
The state auditors said it will cost the state as much as $510 million over the next five years to build enough state-operated prisons to safely house the growing inmate population.
Colorado’s state inmate population has risen from 5,100 in June 1988 to 22,300 in October 2006, auditors found.
The state auditor’s report said that although the Department of Corrections expects it will need to place some inmates in private prisons in other states until at least 2009, this is not a preferred method of imprisonment because of higher costs, reduced opportunities for family visits, limited ability for the DOC to monitor the private prisons, and their “poor past performance.”
The state auditor said that historically there also have been problems with private prisons within Colorado.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz can be reached at 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
