BOULDER — A toilet shared by three women, in a jail cell meant for one, is affixed to a wall just a couple of feet from where Stephanie Wellington sleeps.
The 19-year-old Longmont woman is an inmate at the Boulder County Jail, and her bunk is called a boat in the jail’s parlance.
It is a person-sized plastic container with a mattress tucked into it to make a bed for inmates. It sits on the floor, often tucked partially under the lower bunk in cells.
Boats are added to cells to squeeze in three bodies into double-bunked cells that were originally designed for only one inmate, and they are the last option jail officials have before shipping inmates to other counties.
So many women currently are booked in the Boulder County Jail that administrators have housed between three and five female inmates in Washington County in northeast Colorado for the past three weeks.
Boulder County pays Washington County $47.50 per day per inmate.
“We’ve gone several years without having to do any prisoner boarding because of jail overcrowding,” said Boulder County Jail Division Chief Bruce Haas.
The women’s unit at the Boulder County Jail has 16 beds. Two cells are isolation rooms. Two work-release dorms have been converted to handle low-risk female inmates, taking the jail’s absolute capacity for women to 75.
However, Haas said because of security classifications and requirements to keep some inmates away from one another — like case co-defendants — it is rare that every bed and boat can be used.
“We don’t turn them away,” Haas said of female inmates. “We just have to manage them. The numbers are high, the female numbers are high.”
It isn’t clear whether the recent spike is an anomaly or whether lots of women in jail is a new reality, Haas said.
