The Colorado Attorney General’s Office soon may have the ability to inspect and investigate complaints against county jails under pending legislation that would give a state agency oversight of local detention facilities here for the first time.
In a bill set to be presented to legislators in coming weeks, the attorney general’s office would participate in regular jail audits alongside a separate group of inspectors working with the County Sheriffs of Colorado, a nonprofit organization. Officials from the office could also receive complaints, release their own reports about jails’ conditions and launch investigations into any concerning and consistent practices identified in the facilities.
The plan strengthens a compromise considered by legislators as they prepare to approve statewide jail standards for the first time in the state’s history. As those standards have neared completion, the Jail Standards Commission found no state agency was willing to ensure the standards were followed by sheriffs, nearly all of whom are elected in Colorado.
With state agencies out, legislators and the commission settled on empowering a group of peer inspectors — essentially other jail and sheriff personnel, plus outside experts — to conduct regular audits on each other, without the ability to levy penalties.
The Denver Post reported on concerns about the oversight plan last month. While the peer-review model is used in four other states, it sparked concerns among advocates and some lawmakers who worried about sheriffs policing themselves and raised questions about how the state could ensure a resistant jail was brought into compliance.
One national expert told The Post that sheriffs auditing each other was her “least favorite” form of jail oversight.
Rep. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who’s helped lead the jail oversight work, said the attorney general’s office called her last month and agreed to participate in inspections alongside the peer auditing teams.
The office will attend the peer group’s regular jail audits and can release its own reports if its findings differ from those of the peer audit groups. Amabile said the peer auditing framework initially considered by legislators helped lay the groundwork for the state office to feel comfortable getting involved.
Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesman for Attorney General Phil Weiser, said in an email that the office had “consistently told legislators that the attorney general’s legal authority to bring investigations for patterns and practices of civil rights violations would cover the type of conduct being discussed and could be used as an enforcement mechanism for jail oversight.”
Pacheco said the office was working with legislators “to state this even more specifically in state law.”
Meghan Baker, the chair of the commission drafting the jail standards, said she was pleased that the attorney general’s office was getting involved. She said she had been concerned about how the state would address jails that routinely violated standards.
“If we start getting multiple reports that there is a practice that is not in line with the standards or that is concerning, then somebody should be able to look into that in a meaningful way,” she said.
Lawmakers soon will vote to send the new plan to the full legislature. Amabile and Baker said that, if legislation passes early next year, it would mark the first time a state agency has taken on a direct role of authority over jails in Colorado and the first time that jails here have had a uniform set of standards.
Though the legislature has in recent years enacted new laws aimed at improving practices in the facilities, those laws have not included any oversight to ensure that sheriffs were following the rules — or an enforcement mechanism if they weren’t.
“I do think that it’s essential that we have outside oversight, and that’s not to say anything specific about any of the sheriffs,” Baker said. “Just the reality is that in systems this big, it is too easy for things to fall through the cracks, for the right hand not to know what the left hand is doing.”
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