When Colorado lawmakers overhauled the state’s system of sentencing and monitoring sex offenders in 1998, supporters described the lifetime supervision policy as a comprehensive way to protect the public and stop further crimes.
The new system required many sex offenders to receive treatment in prison before they could be released — and then to continue receiving supervision once they got out. The new sentences would be open-ended, or “indeterminate,” lasting perhaps from two years at a minimum to a maximum of life — either in prison, for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t complete treatment, or on parole, for those who did.
Then-Adams County District Attorney Bob Grant praised the approach during the bill’s first committee hearing, saying it would provide treatment to sex offenders while ensuring that “the problem is going to be addressed and that that offender is not going to recidivate.”
Nearly 30 years later, as prison officials strain to hire staff and Colorado’s prisons are filling to their breaking point, the system has struggled to provide the treatment that it is, in principle, at its core.
Hundreds of inmates languish on a prison list, waiting for their turn to receive the treatment they must complete before they can be released. More than 160 of them are past their parole dates but remain incarcerated because of a yearslong shortage of therapists and resistance by state officials to allowing alternative methods of treatment. Some inmates have filed lawsuits challenging the delays, which in turn has seemingly become a tactic to move up the list.
“To me, this is a more fundamental fairness issue of, how on earth can we require people to do a program and then not deliver it — and then it’s their problem and not ours?” said Laurie Rose Kepros, the director of sexual litigation for the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender and a longtime advocate for sex offender sentencing reform.
Even as scores of inmates sit on a waitlist, nearly 2,000 people convicted of similar crimes have been released from state prisons over the last five years without having ever completed or received treatment, according to data provided by the Colorado Department of Corrections in response to a June records request.
Though they committed similar crimes as inmates who must be treated and are generally considered to be at higher risk of returning to prison, those offenders received a determinate sentence. That means their release date was certain and is not dependent upon receiving or completing treatment.
The result is a seemingly contradictory system: Treatment is effective and important enough to indefinitely stall some inmates’ release, while hundreds of others convicted of similar crimes are paroled, whether or not they’ve been seen by a therapist. The difference depends on what type of sentence is agreed to or levied by a judge. That, in turn, can depend on the experience of a defendant’s lawyer.
So chronically uncertain are some inmates’ release dates that several defense attorneys said they wouldn’t allow clients to plead guilty to indeterminate sentences.
“I wouldn’t disagree that the system does function to keep people who’ve committed sex offenses in (prison) for as long as possible. Whether it was intentionally designed that way or not — it doesn’t matter, it’s what it does,” said Sarah Croog, a defense attorney and member of the state Sex Offender Management Board, which oversees standards for the prison-based treatment system.
“What it’s intended to do is to lock up the most dangerous sexual offenders until they are safe to rejoin society, and to prevent them from being on the streets because they’re on some level too dangerous to be free,” she said. “That is not how it works in practicality.”
The Denver Post interviewed nearly two dozen defense lawyers, treatment experts, current and former prosecutors, victims and advocates, former inmates, and state officials for this story. The Post also reviewed more than 20 lawsuits filed by inmates challenging the treatment system, alongside hundreds of pages of reports filed by state officials about the system and attempts to address its shortcomings. Several current and former inmates who’ve struggled to access treatment declined to comment through their attorneys or would not speak on the record.
The Corrections Department declined interview requests by The Post, as did the management board’s leaders. In response to a list of written questions, Corrections spokeswoman Alondra Gonzalez-Garcia said the agency was charged with carrying out laws passed by the legislature and that people released without treatment would still be required to receive it “while under supervision in the community.”
Inmates sue, victims want clarity
In a class-action lawsuit filed last year, several inmates awaiting treatment alleged that the treatment waitlist would change suddenly and without explanation. One man told the inmates’ legal team that he’d moved from 678th on the list to 71st in the span of three weeks.
At times, an inmate’s ability to draft a competent lawsuit appeared to make the difference between receiving treatment and waiting, according to the class-action complaint and other legal challenges viewed by The Post. (In legal filings, Corrections officials have denied that lawsuits affected the waitlist.)
In a statement, the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault said victims wanted transparency and clarity, and to know when offenders would be released and under what conditions.
Determinate sentences — the ones with a certain release date — have frustrated some victims, too. In an interview, one victim told The Post that she was left “sick to my stomach” after the man who sexually assaulted her was released from prison last year without having received treatment.
He pleaded guilty in 2012 in Arapahoe County to kidnapping and sexual assault and received a determinate sentence, for which treatment wasn’t a prerequisite for release, though he was still likely referred to treatment.
“You can’t very well affect change in somebody if you don’t give them resources to try and change,” said the victim, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her identity. The Post is also not identifying the offender to protect the victim’s privacy.
“So clearly you just let a monster back out on the street with no recourse for his behavior,” she said, “except for having sat in a box for 10 years.”
Despite the treatment bottleneck, prosecutors and state officials have largely defended the system. It’s not perfect, but treatment is effective, most supporters and critics alike acknowledge.
“We’re certainly supportive of it and defend it and its existence as a policy in Colorado,” said Jessica Dotter, a legislative policy chief for the Colorado District Attorneys Council who focuses on special victims prosecution.
She said the backlog has improved and that most of the delays are among offenders serving short sentences because they’re immediately eligible for treatment; offenders enter the waitlist when they get within four years of their first parole date. Successful treatment lowers recidivism, research has shown, and Dotter said district attorneys have supported hiring more staff.
At the core of the problem is a shortage of those sex offender treatment professionals, Corrections Department data shows. More than 43% of jobs in the state’s treatment program — 26 out of 60 — were vacant as of early December. That significant shortage was still an improvement from early 2024, when more than half of the jobs were unfilled.
The department has also resisted efforts to provide treatment virtually, citing staffing and privacy concerns. Some inmates have sought to hire their own therapists, but the department has rejected those requests.
“The CDOC is committed to providing constitutionally adequate care and evidence-based treatment to the entire population,” Gonzalez-Garcia wrote. “We are actively working to mitigate our clinical staffing shortages so we can provide this treatment to all individuals as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
Is state ‘unwilling to change’?
Research has shown that treatment — which includes months of therapy — is effective, and so has Michael Dougherty’s experience, the Boulder district attorney said. Colorado’s system “would and should be working,” he said, were it not for the treatment backlog.
Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty speaks during a press conference at the Colorado Capitol building in Denver on Jan. 22, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)“We just can’t accept that,” he said. “People won’t have a whole lot of sympathy for sex offenders, but everybody wants to see fairness in our justice system.”
The problems in this corner of Colorado’s justice system are not new. A 2016 audit found that Colorado’s sex offender treatment system spent as much as $44 million a year on more than 1,200 inmates who’d passed their parole dates but were still waiting on treatment. The analysis also found that, in 2013, inmates who did enter treatment were then fearful of being kicked out and restarting the process, causing some offenders to ” ‘appease the treatment provider’ instead of genuinely engaging in treatment.”
In 2024, another report said corrections officials were resistant to telehealth options because of privacy and staffing concerns. The parole board has long interpreted an ambiguous term in state law — that an inmate should “successfully progress” in treatment before release — to mean that in-prison treatment must be completely concluded.
Colorado’s approach to sex offender treatment is “notorious,” said Michael Miner, a Minnesota expert who has researched and provided treatment for sexual offenders. He has also worked in senior leadership positions with national treatment provider organizations. Treatment involves using psychotherapy to discern why offenders committed their crimes, while making “major” life changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again, he said.
It’s generally effective, Miner said, and has been shown to reduce recidivism.
But he questioned whether Colorado was providing the proper levels of treatment to lower-risk offenders. The 2016 audit report also criticized the department’s referrals, and the pending class-action lawsuit alleges that state officials have referred every inmate with a history of a sexual offense — amounting to 25% of the prison population — to sex offender treatment.
“The prison-based program has been a problem for a very long time,” Miner said. “It just doesn’t have the capacity that’s necessary, given the laws that Colorado has passed about what you need to do to get out of prison. They’re unable, in some respects, to fix it because the capacity issue is related to the ability to staff, and the state seems unwilling to change the way they choose who needs to be treated and who doesn’t.”
Efforts to increase staffing have shown some success, as the department has offered hiring incentives and undertaken more national recruiting efforts.
But the backlog continues: As of June, 744 people were on the prison department’s “global referral list” awaiting treatment, according to data obtained in a public records request. Of those, 275 were serving indeterminate sentences, for which completing treatment was the only way to be paroled. One hundred sixty-nine of those inmates were past their parole eligibility dates, by an average of nearly a year and a half.
In other words, they’d served 18 months more than they otherwise would have, had they been given access to treatment sooner.
Dotter, from the Colorado District Attorneys Council, said those statistics have improved over the past decade and that officials have worked to improve staffing to reduce the backlog. But she said providers are difficult to hire. There are shortages of mental health practitioners across the country, and that shortage becomes more acute for therapists willing to treat sex offenders in rural prisons.
Recent hiring efforts have not solved the problem, to the frustration of budget-minded legislators.
Colorado Sen. Jeff Bridges listens to a presentation during a Joint Budget Committee hearing at the Legislative Services Building in Denver on Dec. 19, 2024. (Photo by AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)“What do we do? It’s either something where we haven’t thrown enough money at it — or no matter how much money we throw at it, there’s no solution here,” Sen. Jeff Bridges, a Greenwood Village Democrat on the Joint Budget Committee, said earlier this month about overall staff vacancies within prisons, including within sexual offender treatment.
Budget analyst Justin Brakke replied that the Corrections Department had provided no “roadmap” to fix sex offender treatment in the past.
“People have to want to fix it in order to give you a roadmap,” he said.
Agency spokeswoman Gonzalez-Garcia said the Corrections Department does not “create laws.”
“Our department is committed to working with the legislature, the (Sex Offender Management Board), and our public safety partners to provide data and operational expertise on any proposed reforms,” she wrote.
Calls for reform, judicial intervention
Attorneys and advocates critical of the system have argued that the state needs to look at the underlying sentencing laws, not building out the stable of providers that implements them.
Stan Garnett, a defense attorney and former Boulder district attorney, said the legislature should “roll up its sleeves” and find a solution. When someone is sentenced to an indeterminate term, he said, no one — not the offender, not their victim, not the prison system — knows exactly when they’ll get released.
“The fact that we have hundreds of these people that are just freaking lingering in prisons is just horrific in a civilized society,” Garnett said.
Lawmakers have been hesitant to take on the issue.
A 2024 bill that would have eliminated indeterminate sentences and replaced them with firm, determinate prison terms was killed in its first committee. (Miner testified in favor of it.) Quieter discussions about launching a fiscal study of the system were also shelved earlier this year.
The issue is politically toxic: Few lawmakers want to weigh in on sex offender treatment or reforming those offenders’ sentencing terms. Dougherty called it a political “third rail.”
State Sen. Judy Amabile listens as a fellow senator addresses the Senate during a special legislative session at the Colorado Capitol in Denver on Aug. 26, 2025. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)“Nobody wants to touch it,” said Sen. Judy Amabile, a Boulder Democrat who tried to build support for the study bill earlier this year.
In the absence of legislative action, three factors now threaten to exacerbate the backlog.
First, a conservative group is weighing a ballot measure that would require that indeterminate sentences be given to people who sexually abuse children. Legislators have defeated efforts to enact similar penalties in recent years, in part over concerns about the treatment backlog.
Second, the state’s prisons are nearly full. Brakke told lawmakers earlier this month that the male prison population was expected to exceed the state’s capacity in the next fiscal year.
Colorado men’s prisons will run out of space in next fiscal year, state warns
The final factor is the class-action lawsuit, brought by more than a dozen inmates, to challenge the sentencing system. It has progressed for nearly 18 months, despite the state’s attempt to dismiss it. While other smaller lawsuits have failed or been dismissed because the inmate involved was moved into treatment, the class-action case presents a more concrete challenge to the sentencing system.
George Brauchler, the district attorney for the Castle Rock-based 23rd Judicial District and a supporter of the system, said he was not excited by the idea of judicial intervention.
George Brauchler, district attorney for the 23rd Judicial District, speaks during a press conference at the Douglas County government office in Castle Rock on March 25, 2025. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)“I’m a big fan of judges never, ever — never — making law or policy,” he said.
A prominent conservative critic of Colorado’s Democratic leaders, Brauchler said he was equally disinclined to trust the legislature to fix the problem; he alleged that lawmakers would just be more lenient. He and Danielle Jaramillo, his deputy district attorney who prosecutes sex offenses, both called for longer sentences and questioned whether treatment was effective at all.
In the absence of sentences that are “10 times” as long as current guidelines, Jaramillo said, the option of an indeterminate sentence is still preferable.
“An indeterminate sentence at least puts someone in front of a parole board,” she said.
Kepros, the public defender, said calls for reform wouldn’t necessarily mean lighter sentences. But reform would bring clarity and fairness, she and others argued.
“I understand people who don’t care that someone who’s committed a sex offense is in prison longer, just because of the nature of the crime,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s a position that is constitutional or is fair.
“It flies in the face of how our entire court system is supposed to work, where a judge imposes a sentence, and you’re not supposed to serve a much longer sentence (just) because nobody bothers to give you the tools to serve the sentence you were given.”
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