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 our investigation showing how judges almost always approve jails’ requests to isolate people with serious mental illness.
E.M. lived alone in a condo, held a steady job as a chef and attended community college to study art and holistic health. She also had schizoaffective disorder, and her mother, Barbara Vassis, says she kept running into the same problem: Every time E.M. needed help, the system meant to provide it fell short.
One time when E.M. began to spiral, Vassis called Longmont’s crisis response co-responder program, which pairs officers with a clinician and paramedic on 911 calls. The call back came a day later. It was too late. E.M. had already left home and was arrested on misdemeanor charges.
Over the next several months, Vassis sought help wherever she could: emergency rooms, detox facilities, crisis centers. Each time, Vassis said, the care was brief. Insurance limits often meant E.M. was discharged before she had stabilized.
One of the most consequential lapses came in 2022. Mental Health Partners, now called Clinica Family Health & Wellness, unenrolled E.M. after she missed appointments, cutting off access to her medication, according to a complaint Vassis filed with the state’s Behavioral Health Administration. She made an appointment to get reinstated, but it was weeks away.
Before she could be seen, E.M. had what Vassis described as a psychiatric break. She was arrested on burglary charges and booked into the Boulder County Jail, where she was evaluated and found incompetent to stand trial.
She was ordered into limited treatment at a state hospital to regain competency. After a short stay, she was sent back to the jail, where she stopped taking her medication and deteriorated again. (Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts are not naming E.M. for privacy reasons).
Vassis said her daughter needed sustained mental health care. Instead, E.M. spent nearly two years in jail. Some of that time was spent in restrictive housing, alone in a cell nearly all day. Research has shown solitary confinement can worsen mental illness.
“You just can’t take people that are struggling, shove them in a box, and hope they get better,” Vassis said.
E.M.’s story reflects a pattern across Boulder County and Colorado: Gaps in care lead to crisis, crisis leads to arrest, and arrest pushes people into a legal process that cycles them through jails not designed to treat serious mental illness.
Over time, that pattern has helped transform the Boulder County Jail into the county’s largest de facto mental health facility.
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Roughly 60 percent of women and 62 percent of men in the jail have a diagnosed mental illness, according to recent data provided by jail officials. Many arrive in crisis. Some remain there for weeks or months awaiting mental health evaluations, hospital beds or treatment services that are in short supply. Some are placed in isolation, despite state laws meant to limit the practice for people with mental illness.
As part of a monthslong investigation, Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts examined how the Boulder County Jail and jails across Colorado continue to rely on solitary confinement, even as research shows it can intensify mental illness and set off a cascade of consequences that keep people confined. The investigation also found deep gaps in mental health care that leave jails handling responsibilities they were never designed to take on.
Vassis, a member of Colorado Mad Moms, describes mental illness as a “brain illness” to underscore how differently the health care system treats psychiatric crises compared with physical ones.
“If you show up in a hospital having a heart attack, they don’t give you a ticket to a homeless shelter and refuse you a bed,” Vassis said. “But if you show up having a brain attack, that is what can happen to you.”
The revolving door
Once someone with serious mental illness enters the criminal justice system, the process of restoring someone to competency to stand trial can become a revolving door of treatment, stabilization and return to jail.
After E.M. was found incompetent to stand trial, a judge ordered competency restoration, meant to help defendants understand the charges against them and participate in their own defense. At the state hospital, Vassis said, her daughter got medication, stabilized and was deemed competent. Then back in jail, she deteriorated again.
The pattern is common. About 31 percent of people restored to competency since 2019 have ended up back on the waitlist for a state hospital bed after returning to jail, according to state officials.
Jeff Goetz, division chief at the Boulder County Jail, described the revolving door this way: “They get placed on medications while they’re down there, they’re deemed competent to proceed, they come back, they don’t like the side effects for the meds, the court hearings take too long to follow up, and now we rinse and repeat and we do it again.”
Colorado is required under a federal consent decree to provide timely competency restoration services. It does not.
As of early June, more than 360 people across the state are waiting for a state hospital bed, according to state data. On average, they spend more than 60 days in jail. Some wait more than a year. All are presumed innocent.
After Disability Justice, formerly Disability Law Colorado, sued the state over delays in competency services, a 2019 consent decree imposed strict timelines for getting people into treatment. The state has consistently missed them.
The most acutely mentally ill, classified as “Tier 1,” are supposed to be admitted within seven days. As of April 2026, they were waiting around 30 days on average, according to state officials. At one point last year, the wait stretched to 78 days.
Colorado has paid more than $50 million in fines as a result.
In recent court filings, Disability Justice called the delays “egregious constitutional violations” and said it plans to seek higher penalties.
State officials point to a surge in court orders for competency evaluations, which nearly doubled since 2019, according to court records, as a major cause of the delays.
A 2025 report by a court-appointed monitor identified another factor: Judges, prosecutors and public defenders have increasingly used the competency system to get people access to mental health care they could not get on their own through Colorado’s community mental health system.
“We built this lane,” said Meghan Baker, a senior staff attorney at Disability Justice. “Unintentionally, we’ve incentivized raising competency as the only way to get resources.”
Fines tied to the state’s delays are now helping fund alternatives to jail-based competency restoration, programs that pair treatment and housing support while allowing people to remain in the community. State officials say there is currently no waitlist for outpatient restoration services, which now cover about 40 percent of all restoration orders in Colorado—the highest level of outpatient competency restoration of any state.
Even so, many remain jailed not because they pose a danger, but because they cannot afford bond, Baker said. About 10 percent of the people on the waitlist for a hospital bed face only misdemeanor charges, such as trespass, according to state officials.
In 2026, Colorado lawmakers passed SB26-149, creating a legal pathway to civilly commit people deemed permanently incompetent to stand trial. Gov. Jared Polis pushed for the change after several high-profile cases involving people released from jail after being found unrestorable.
A special master overseeing the Disability Justice case warned the change could further strain an already overwhelmed inpatient system, driving a potential “surge” in demand for beds.
Alone in a cell
For some people waiting in jail, the conditions include solitary confinement.
Colorado lawmakers moved to limit the practice in 2021, requiring jails to get a court order to isolate anyone with serious mental illness for more than 15 days. But dozens of court orders reviewed by Boulder Reporting Lab and Bolts indicate that in practice, judges almost always approve those requests.
E.M.’s case followed a slightly different path. Jail officials did not seek a court order for extended isolation. But Vassis said her daughter was repeatedly placed in restrictive housing after returning from the state hospital.
She saw the changes during video visits. E.M.’s gaze would drift. She would stop talking mid-sentence, get up and walk away. Then she stopped showing up at all.
“You could just tell that she just wasn’t there,” she said. “Physically, she was there. But trying to talk to her, there was nothing to bring her back to reality.”
E.M. said she did not know why they placed her in isolation.
“Not even sleep is deep enough of a point of relaxation to take you out of the moment. It’s extremely painful,” E.M. said.
Emma Mclean-Riggs, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Colorado who researches mental illness in jails, said prolonged isolation can worsen a person’s mental health, increasing the likelihood that someone will fail a competency evaluation and start over again.
“When we put people in solitary confinement, we create mental illness and we exacerbate mental illness,” Mclean-Riggs said. She added, “What is happening to folks in the jail right now is an acute emergency. And of course, long term, what needs to happen is these folks need to not end up there.”
How the system thinned out
Colorado has added mental health care beds in recent years, but the system remains a fraction of what it once was.
In 1961, the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo had space for about 6,000 patients. Today, it has about 400 beds. The state operates a handful more elsewhere and contracts with private hospitals, but capacity has never recovered.
Much of this decline traces to the 1960s deinstitutionalization movement, the shift away from inhumane hospitals toward community-based care. The promise was treatment closer to home, with more dignity and independence. The reality is that the funding and infrastructure never caught up.
In Boulder County, that gap was once offset by a network of small group homes that bridged the space between crisis care and permanent housing.
From the 1970s through the 1990s, people could stay for months at a time with on-site clinical support, said Phoebe Norton, former executive director of the Mental Health Center of Boulder County, now part of Clinica Family Health & Wellness.
Over time, as funding declined and costs rose, those homes were sold off. The system shifted toward housing vouchers and less structured support. The homes disappeared.
Funding was only part of the problem. Colorado’s community mental health centers also went decades without meaningful state oversight, according to a 2021 investigation by the Colorado News Collaborative, which found the state’s Medicaid payment system incentivized mental health centers to serve people at higher cost.
In 2022, the state overhauled its mental health care system, ending longstanding no-bid contracts in an effort to introduce more accountability. But the underlying shortage—of beds, of housing, of sustained care—remains.
What happens after jail
Those gaps in the mental health care system persist even after people leave jail.
In 2024, prosecutors dropped the charges against E.M. She was sent to Centennial Peaks, a mental health hospital in Louisville.
Vassis feared the cycle would repeat. She said staff planned to discharge E.M. to a homeless shelter, without a recovery plan. After another complaint to the state, her daughter was allowed to stay longer, and was later transferred to the state hospital at Fort Logan.
Colorado recently opened 164 beds in transitional living group homes designed to help people “step down” from hospital care. The homes offer structure, treatment and support as people transition back into the community.
Even so, supply falls short. E.M. was placed instead in an assisted living home in Littleton, where she received medication, meals and transportation to appointments.
Vassis wanted her daughter to take classes or work, but there was no programming. E.M. is a trained chef, but residents were only allowed to use the microwave. There was also no curfew. Vassis worried the unstructured environment would set the cycle in motion again.
“I want [E.M.] to have every possible best chance that she can have for her return to society,” Vassis said. “I didn’t feel like they were giving her the best chance.”
After E.M. moved into the assisted living home, Vassis would pick her up to go out to eat and to the movies. She was grateful her daughter had moved from a jail cell to a house and was making friends. She thought she was doing relatively well.
But in early May, E.M. left the home and never came back. Vassis began calling hospitals, searching for any sign of her daughter.
Vassis said E.M was found about two weeks later outside in Denver with a sleeping bag, sunburned and sick with the flu. She was taken to Saint Joseph Hospital and later to West Pines Behavioral Health. Vassis said E.M. was discharged from the assisted living facility and that she is now looking for her daughter’s next place to live.
Vassis said E.M. was lucky she wasn’t arrested and taken to jail. The system that kept E.M. cycling between crisis, jail and treatment for nearly two years remains largely intact. It still relies on incarceration to fill the gaps in mental health care, housing and treatment.
“People don’t fall through the cracks,” Vassis said. “It’s a chasm out there.”
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