What We Have Here...Is a Failure to Rehabilitate

But Toribio says he was lucky to get even an hour out of the cell each day during his four months of lockdown last spring. "You just sit there and look at the wall," he says. "Some of us were going crazy, just talking to ourselves and looking at the wall. You laugh at dumb things. Try to picture things. Hope that something will happen."

The image of damaged adolescents confined to their cells -- locked down 23 hours a day, festering, just marking time until their next go at the streets -- probably wasn't what lawmakers had in mind when they created the Youthful Offender System. Yet a few months ago, despite a very critical audit and behind-the-scenes lobbying by former administrators, the legislature renewed the program for another five years, with Senator Dottie Wham, a longtime supporter of YOS, leading the charge. (Wham did not respond to requests for comment.)

To many former staffers, the program now seems like an opportunity betrayed, a success story gone sour. "There were so many people who couldn't break that DOC mentality to give this program a chance," says Jennie Kinsfather. "It breaks my heart that people are so set on having a youth prison. These kids are going to get out, and they're going to be worse."

Regis Groff says he still runs into YOS graduates on the streets of Denver, kids who are now successfully employed or going to school -- a bittersweet reminder of the way things were before the move to Pueblo. "The program was working, man," he says. "YOS got a raw deal. Nobody benefits if that program doesn't work."

One staff member who still works in YOS has his own theory about the way things went down. "We were showing them that you can do rehabilitation and be successful," he says. "Something like that, well, that's going to destroy the Department of Corrections. They don't like to hear that."