Crowley inmates settle riot lawsuit for $600,000

On the eve of a 25-week trial that promised to focus on claims of poor training and worse management, the nation’s largest private prison company has reached a settlement with nearly 200 former inmates over a 2004 riot at the Crowley County Correctional Facility in southeastern Colorado. The uprising, which…

The battle against bullying begins with the Bard

The stage is a half-circle at the front of the auditorium, marked off with a snaking trail of rope; the audience sits on the floor. Dressed in dark jeans and T-shirts, the actors look like escapees from a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, circa 1958. But the way they leap into action…

Civil rights lawsuits attack excesses of Colorado’s sex offender laws

Colorado’s tough sex offender laws are supposed to keep predators under tight supervision. But a series of lawsuits claim that the system is violating even minor offenders’ rights to free speech and association, prohibiting contact with family members — and, in one particularly bizarre case, telling a 62-year-old man that…

Death penalty battle heats up at the State Capitol

In more than eight hours of emotional testimony that stretched well into the evening, activists and faith groups seeking to abolish the death penalty in Colorado squared off against prosecutors and other backers of the ultimate punishment yesterday — with family members of homicide victims speaking out on both sides,…

Auraria as it used to be: Photos from a long-gone neighborhood

This week’s cover story, “Ghosts of Auraria,” examines recent efforts, through new construction and revised master plans, to change the look and design of the Auraria campus — and looks back at a time when the area was a thriving working-class neighborhood, one that was leveled in the early 1970s…

Auraria campus expansion: See plans for new athletic fields and more

This week’s cover story, “Ghosts of Auraria,” delves into the half-buried history of the campus, which is moving rapidly forward with hefty development plans that include three new flagship student-services buildings, a hotel, and a leap across Colfax to build new athletic fields on a contaminated industrial site. The changes…

Looking to Auraria’s future while studying the lessons of its past

Few events in the life of a city are as relentlessly cheerful as a groundbreaking for a new school building. It’s a time for back-slapping congratulations and lofty, forward-looking speeches; for misty-eyed reminiscences about the eternal struggle to advance educational ideals; for bold declarations about the opportunities and challenges facing…