Colorado Limited Solitary for People with Mental Illness. But Judges Still Routinely Approve It. 

This story is part of a two-part series produced by Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts investigating how Colorado jails continue to put people with serious mental illness in solitary confinement. Read more about how Colorado’s strained mental health care network cycles people through local jails in order to access treatment.

In the summer of 2024, Tanya Unger was sitting alone in a cell in the Boulder County Jail when she began hearing voices again.

Unger, 50, who lives in the foothills near Boulder, is a former reporter for The Mountain-Ear and past lecturer at CU Boulder who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.

That August, she was arrested on a felony burglary charge and related misdemeanors after entering a neighbor’s apartment and breaking a television, according to an arrest report that described her as having a mental health issue. What happened next, Unger said, made things worse. 

While waiting for a court-ordered competency evaluation to determine whether she understood the charges against her and could participate in her defense, Unger says officers placed her alone in a cell and covered the window on her door with a shade. The shade, sometimes used to help people sleep, blocked light from outside her door. Unger says the darkness was disorienting and made it hard for her to tell what was real and where sounds were coming from. 

“That is when I get horrified,” she said. “You don’t know where the sound is coming from. And then all of a sudden, because of the PTSD, I’ll hear a male voice right behind my ear.” 

She says she spent more than two weeks in the cell, which had just a toilet, sink and bed. She says she was cold after being forced to wear nothing but a “turtle suit,” a tear-resistant gown used for people on suicide watch. She says she didn’t understand why officers denied her soap and toothpaste. She could not see a clock and did not know the day or the time. She did not know when, or if, she would be let outside her roughly eight-by-ten-foot cell each day. 

Unger says her time in isolation induced an episode of psychosis that worsened her mental health. She said she saw a therapist for post-traumatic stress disorder related to her time in jail. 

Her experience is just one example of how a state law designed to limit solitary confinement has failed to stop local jails from using it.

“It breaks my heart how many women have lived through these experiences, and that I’ve seen them,” she said. 

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Colorado lawmakers first moved to curb solitary confinement after the 2013 murder of Tom Clements, the state’s corrections director. His suspected killer had spent most of his roughly seven years in prison in isolation and had been released directly from solitary before shooting the prison chief on his doorstep. (The man died in a police shootout two days after allegedly killing Clements.)

The law that followed restricted the use of solitary confinement in state prisons for people with serious mental illness. But it did not apply to county jails. Those jails continued to put people with untreated mental illness in solitary confinement, including people awaiting trial or a court-ordered hospital bed. 

A second law, passed in 2021, was meant to close that gap by expanding protections to county jails. Under the law, solitary confinement—defined as holding someone alone in a cell for 22 hours a day—is limited to 15 days in any 30-day period for people with mental illness.

To exceed that limit, jails must petition a judge and show that “no alternative less-restrictive placement is available” and that jail staff have “exhausted all other placement alternatives.” 

The law applies only to the largest jails, those with 400 beds or more. The limits also apply to other vulnerable groups, including those with developmental or cognitive impairments, significant sensory impairments, those who are pregnant or postpartum, and minors. For everyone else, Colorado law sets no limit on isolation.

Lawmakers who passed the 2021 law say they wanted judges to act as a backstop that would force jailers to find alternatives, ideally a hospital or other treatment setting. 

“If somebody is that sick, then what they need is to be in a hospital setting and not in a carceral setting,” said state Senator Judy Amabile, who represents Boulder and helped write the 2021 law. “That was the intention.”  

But in practice, that safeguard has been undermined by Colorado’s strained mental health system and a judicial process that rarely rejects requests for extended isolation. 

Court records obtained by Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts under Colorado’s open records law show that counties have filed at least 61 petitions seeking permissions to hold people in solitary confinement for more than 15 days since the law took effect. Those records indicate that judges almost always grant the requests. Of the petitions, Boulder County filed 42, and every one was ultimately approved.

State data suggest those petitions represent only a fraction of the practice. 

According to the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, jails put mentally ill and other vulnerable people in solitary for more than 15 days on at least 315 occasions between July 2023, when the reforms took effect, and March 2025, the most recent period for which statewide data was available.   

Since jails only need court approval once they exceed 15 days within a 30-day period, shorter periods of isolation or repeated stays separated by brief breaks may not appear in court records. 

Emma Mclean-Riggs, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Colorado who researches mental illness in the state’s jails, says local jails can cycle people in and out of isolation, offering out-of-cell time in the middle of the night, or structure conditions in ways that avoid the legal definition of solitary confinement.

Jail officials and mental health advocates have blamed hospitals for routinely refusing to accept people from jails, or discharging them within hours of their arrival without providing adequate treatment.

In that vacuum, jails remain the default holding places for people in mental health crises. The petitions for extending solitary conditions are often framed as a necessity for keeping them or others safe behind bars, even as research shows prolonged isolation can worsen psychiatric symptoms, induce psychosis and increase the risk of self-harm.

Boulder County Jail Division Chief Jeff Goetz says the jail uses isolation primarily for safety and that some people cannot safely be housed with others. 

Space constraints further limit the jail’s options, Goetz says. The Boulder County Jail, which opened in 1988, has 543 beds and held 358 people as of June 2026. Many cells contain bunk beds, meaning that housing someone alone removes a bed from circulation. The facility is among the smallest jails required to obtain judicial approval for extended isolation. 

Jail officials estimate that roughly 60 percent of women and 62 percent of men in custody have a diagnosed mental illness, among the highest rates reported by Colorado jails.

Some people the Boulder County jail puts in restrictive housing, Goetz says, are waiting for hospital beds or have already been rejected by hospitals. 

“What’s my choice?” he asked.

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The circuitous process for obtaining records on the use of solitary confinement suggests that we still don’t fully understand the scope of the practice inside Colorado’s jails.

Requests filed under Colorado’s open records law for this story frequently bounced between sheriff’s offices, county attorneys and courts. In one case, a county official referred us to the Colorado Judicial Branch, which said its systems do not allow it to extract the data related to petitions for restrictive housing. 

State reporting requirements are also incomplete. Jails are required to report quarterly to the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice how many times they sought a written order to hold someone beyond 15 days in restrictive housing. 

But the state’s dataset was missing figures from several jails that sought such orders, including Denver and Douglas counties, according to records those counties provided to Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts. A state official said the data includes only what local officials report to the state.

The records that are available show only two instances in which a judge denied a jail’s petition for extended isolation. 

In one Boulder County case, a judge initially ruled that the jail had not demonstrated it exhausted all alternatives. After the county filed a second petition the next day, the same judge approved it.

Records also show how jails seek repeated extensions. In one case, the Boulder County Jail filed for approval to hold someone in solitary confinement for at least 105 days over roughly six months. 

The affidavits jails submit to justify extended solitary confinement are not public, leaving no accounting for why people are isolated for potentially weeks at a time or how often jails and judges attempt to find alternatives. Every county that has sought such orders either denied or did not respond to requests for the records. 

In a small number that officials appear to have mistakenly released, the justifications varied.

In one Boulder County case, jail officials asked to isolate a man they said “routinely threatens staff” and attempted to grab a deputy through a food port of his cell door. In Pueblo County, officials sought to isolate a woman after claiming she punched and elbowed them. In another affidavit, officers placed a woman in isolation after she allegedly spat at her cellmate and hit her with a blanket. She denied the allegations.  

The affidavits also reveal the barriers jails face in finding alternatives.

In the Pueblo case, officials said at least two local hospitals do not accept detainees with a serious mental illness. In the Boulder County cases, officials said both people were unable to post bond and that one person was waiting for a bed at a state hospital. 

Goetz, the Boulder jail chief, said his mental health team will call a local hospital before putting someone with mental illness in restrictive housing. He said they often start by calling the Della Cava Family Medical Pavilion at Boulder Community Health, which has 32 inpatient beds, according to a hospital spokesperson. If the hospital is full, he said, staff call other Boulder County hospitals. 

“Oftentimes, they will tell us ‘we’re on divert, you’re going to have to go to a different hospital.’ So now the phone tree begins,” he said. “It’s on the phone, calling, calling, calling. And it can take days.” 

Meghan Baker, a senior staff attorney at Disability Justice, formerly Disability Law Colorado, who monitors jails, said the system can leave jail staff with few options. Some medical providers also refuse to accept detainees altogether.

“I know of jail staff sitting all day, calling every hospital within six hours and just being told ‘no,’” Baker said. 

Boulder County hospitals contacted for this story did not respond or referred a reporter to the Colorado Hospital Association, which did not make a representative available for an interview. Boulder Community Health also did not make anyone available for an interview, but said in a statement that it doesn’t discriminate based on incarceration status and that “decisions about admission are based on clinical need and facility capacity, including bed availability and whether a patient requires a level of care beyond what BCH can provide.”

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Personal accounts from inside the jail offer a glimpse into the harm that can result from isolating someone with mental illness inside their cell for weeks on end.

In 2016, before the reforms took effect, Ryan Partridge, a Boulder resident diagnosed with schizophrenia, was serving a six-month sentence in the Boulder County Jail for violating probation. He said he was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement, including one stretch where he spent 33 days alone in an approximately 8-by-10-foot cell, denied even an hour outside his cell some days. According to a lawsuit he later filed, the isolation worsened his symptoms dramatically until he smashed his face on a toilet seat, breaking several teeth. In another episode, he said he was delusional from a stretch in solitary confinement when he jumped off a second-floor railing inside the jail, fracturing his spine and ribs.

Back in restrictive housing, a deputy later noticed blood on Partridge’s cheeks. More than two hours later, officers discovered more blood was coming from his eyes, which he had ruptured in an attempt to remove them, causing permanent blindness.

“I felt I had been abused. I felt trapped,” he later told Boulder Reporting Lab, saying he was delusional at the time. “I was agitated. I had been abused.”

Partridge later reached a $2.5 million settlement with the county after alleging jail workers violated his civil rights by failing to provide adequate medical care and using excessive force. In 2021, he and his parents testified on the bill to restrict the use of solitary confinement in Colorado jails.

“Our son Ryan is blind today as a direct result of repeated mistreatment at the Boulder County Jail while experiencing serious mental illness,” Shelley Partridge, Ryan’s mother, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 6, 2021. “This bill can prevent another family from suffering a similar avoidable tragedy.” 

Even though that law took effect, detainees with mental illness still describe destabilizing harms from jails putting them in near total isolation for weeks. 

Jennifer, 56, said she does not remember why she was placed in solitary confinement inside the Boulder County Jail, where she says she spent about two months alone in her cell. Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be published to protect her privacy, says she doesn’t recall if jailers refused to give her time outside of her cell or whether she simply refused.

“We’re not going to take it out if we’re paranoid and we’re scared,” she said. “We don’t have clothes and we don’t even know what time out is.”

When people in isolation get an hour or two outside of their cells, then they can access phones, showers, headphones to listen to TV, and the commissary to buy hygiene items and snacks, according to a jail official. 

When Jennifer got out of her cell, she called her mom. But most of the time she was allowed out was spent alone in a sectioned-off area in the jail known as “the bubble.” She said she was allowed to shower but guards forced her to wear handcuffs and ankle shackles. She was never allowed to go outside. 

“It’s kind of strange how they put you in isolation when you need people the most,” she said. “At the same time, I wouldn’t have gotten along with anybody else.”

Jennifer described a mixed relationship with officers, some of whom were helpful and compassionate, as well as others who she said were tormenting and seemed to lack training for dealing with mental illness. While in psychosis in isolation, she stopped eating because she thought the officers were trying to poison her, leading to coughing, uncontrollable vomiting, and ultimately a trip to the hospital—where she says she was treated for kidney failure and a heart attack.

Jennifer says she wasn’t given toilet paper, soap or menstrual products while in isolation, which she said led to infections that eventually required antibiotics. She says one officer required detainees to show an empty cardboard roll before receiving a new one, but that she didn’t get a new roll because she didn’t have an empty cardboard roll in her cell to show them. 

Goetz, the jail chief, told Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts that items like toothbrushes may be withheld from people in isolation because they can be sharpened into weapons, and said guards don’t restrict toilet paper or hygiene items for people in isolation. The 2021 law that restricts solitary confinement requires jails to provide people in isolation “basic hygiene necessities.” 

Jennifer later moved to a sober living home in Aurora, where she said she talked to other residents about her experience in the Boulder County Jail. She said she was taking medication, which has led to weight gain. 

“I would rather be heavy and happy than, you know, naked in a jail cell without toilet paper and thinking you’re having a heart attack and being in kidney failure and going through hell,” she said.  

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Civil rights advocates say experiences like Jennifer’s show how little practical protection the 2021 reforms have provided. Though designed to limit solitary confinement, it can still leave people with serious mental illness isolated for weeks, with few meaningful safeguards.  

Additionally, Mclean-Riggs, of the ACLU of Colorado, said time people spend outside their cells does not always mitigate the harm of solitary confinement. 

“Is time out in a smaller room, still under fluorescent light, still with no fresh air, still with no meaningful interaction with other human beings—is that psychiatrically protective?” Mclean-Riggs said. “It is not.”

Lawmakers who wrote the state reforms initially wanted to ban solitary confinement outright. States like New York have sought to ban solitary confinement in jails for more than 15 days. In New York’s case, the 15-day limit has been routinely violated, and the governor later suspended the rules requiring therapeutic programming for isolated people, following an illegal walkout by officers. Similarly, advocates in New Jersey have decried routine violations to a 2019 law that was meant to restrict solitary confinement. 

Amabile, the state senator who helped write Colorado’s law, said it was the result of a compromise with sheriffs that she hoped would “push on the system to get people to a hospital setting. That’s where they belong.” She conceded that it has not worked. 

“Anybody who’s so mentally ill that they cannot get out of their cell for even two hours a day needs to be in a care setting, a place where they can actually get treatment,” Amabile said. “We’re not doing that.”

After about two weeks in isolation, Unger said an officer handed her blue scrubs. She was being moved into the general population section of jail.

Her first memory was sitting in a plastic chair at a small desk in her new cell. Her previous cell had only a metal bunk bed, which she said made her hips feel like they were going to explode. The chair, a blanket, and the ability to journal and listen to music felt like a relief.

“It was so magical. The first time I got to go out to rec, oh my god, and breathe the air and see the sky,” Unger said. “Just to be able to touch the grass and walk around with some of the other people.”

She said she’s planning to spend the summer living partially in a tent in the foothills with an electric bike while she finishes probation and pays off her legal fees.

“You never know how much you love that sky until you can’t see it,” she said. “If I did nothing at all for the rest of my life but stare at the sky, I think I would have done myself justice after all of this.”