According to Durango Herald staff reporter Jonathan Romeo, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe has announced it will close its 57-bed detention center at the end of this month. The jail has been costing the tribe about $2 million a year to operate, even while the number of inmates has been declining. This past year, the facility had an average daily inmate count of about 13, most of whom were not tribal members.
In a news release late Wednesday, the tribe said it has been attempting for the past two years to reduce the cost of its operating budget. In 2019, for instance, the tribe’s budget was cut by more than $14 million.
Looking for areas to cut in the upcoming 2020 budget, the tribe said council members decided this week to shut down the detention center, which it said “serves very few Southern Ute tribal members but costs millions of dollars to operate…”
…In light of the closure, inmates will instead be sent either to the La Plata County Jail or the Archuleta County Jail when that facility opens in 2020.
Archuleta County, for its part, has been housing an average of about 22 inmates at the La Plata County jail since April 2015, when a roof leak during a heavy rainstorm gave the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners reason to shut down and abandon the community detention center in the downtown County Courthouse. Two failed tax-increase ballot measures later, the BOCC decided to put the community taxpayers deeply in debt, without any voter approval, to build a 56-bed facility in the midst of the mostly-vacant Harman Park subdivision.
The abandoned Archuleta facility had opened its doors in 1990 and had a capacity of about 36 inmates, but had experienced several years of overcrowding during the tenure of former Sheriff Tom Richards. It was, however, below capacity when the roof leak occurred in 2015 — partly due, no doubt, to Colorado’s legalization of recreational cannabis in 2012. The roof had been leaking, off and on, for the entire time, according to a former Sheriff’s Office employee.
During the two tax increase campaigns for a new Archuleta County jail, in 2017 and 2018, proponents were unable to convince a majority of the voters that a one-percent sales tax increase and a new 56-bed jail were a good idea. Subsequently, the BOCC arranged for ‘Certificates of Participation’ (COPs) to fund the new $15 million facility, without getting voter approval. Past County budgets suggest that the facility will cost the community more than $1 million a year in operational costs. The COPs payments will cost the County an additional $820,000 per year for the next 15 years, according to recent estimates.
According to Romeo, the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office is working with the Southern Ute tribe to house the inmates that have been detained at the Southern Ute jail. The Sheriff is reportedly not concerned about relatively small number of inmates who might have been housed in the Ignacio facility — now that Archuleta County is planning to open its facility in 2020.
Inmate overcrowding, staff shortages and budget issues at the La Plata County Jail have been well-documented.
Back in March, 2016, numerous media sources began reporting a fascinating quote from a Harper’s Magazine op-ed. The article was written by Dan Baum, who’d interviewed President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman in 1994, twenty years after Nixon had resigned as President.
From that op-ed:
In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “war on drugs” and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues. I’d tracked Ehrlichman, who had been Nixon’s domestic-policy adviser, to an engineering firm in Atlanta, where he was working on minority recruitment. I barely recognized him. He was much heavier than he’d been at the time of the Watergate scandal two decades earlier, and he wore a mountain-man beard that extended to the middle of his chest.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, ‘The Company,’ and led me to the door.
Ehrlichman passed away in 1999, so he is not able to verify, or deny, Baum’s alleged quotation.
Other people close to Ehrlichman and the Nixon Administration, including Ehrlichman’s five children, have claimed that Ehrlichman would never have made such a bold statement.
There are reasons to believe the quotation might have been an exaggeration, or retold inaccurately.