Colorado doesn’t believe in mollycoddling its prisoners. Just ask officials at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), the chillingly futuristic, so-called “supermax” prison outside Canon City, where the state’s most dangerous prisoners spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. Better yet, ask some of the residents. Ask Janice, Shannon, Debra,…

When Anne McGill Gorsuch married Robert Burford back in 1983, it seemed like a match made in Republican heaven: the Ice Queen and the Marlboro Man, the steely-eyed darling of corporate polluters and the squinty-eyed sagebrush rebel. Burford, a Western Slope rancher and former speaker of the Colorado House of…

part 1 of 2 Dan Frantz remembers The Gaze–that piercing, dark-eyed stare that made prodigies tremble and old tenors sing their lungs out. The Gaze is as vivid to him now as it was three decades ago, the first time he saw Antonia Brico. Frantz was twelve or thirteen years…

part 2 of 2 Operating on a shoestring, the Brico Symphony could afford to give only four to six performances a year. Most of its members were housewives or professionals who had full lives apart from the orchestra, and the quality of their work varied greatly. Yet in Brico’s hands,…

In the wake of mounting criticism over a state policy of keeping hospital death records secret, Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton recently proposed changes in the law that would make information about suspicious hospital deaths more accessible. But don’t count on any similar outpouring of candor concerning the medical care…

The growing popularity of the Internet has spawned discussion groups that offer something for just about everyone, from lovers of Jean-Luc Picard (try alt.sexy.bald.captains) to haters of a certain children’s television program (alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die) to obsessives consumed by politics, computer lore, comic books or the hidden messages embedded in a single…

Lawrence Wollersheim’s hands shake as he reads his notes, ticking off the damage done to his computers. Surrounding the 46-year-old Boulder resident is a cluster of reporters and, beyond that, a ring of glowering, dark-suited men (and one woman wearing a clerical collar), all packed into a hallway of the…

The letters arrived in the third week of May. They came in the mail, dozens of them, addressed to city council members, county commissioners, ministers, teachers, parents–anybody who was anybody in Las Animas, a town of 2,500 on the eastern plains, where everybody seems to know everybody else’s business. First…

Bill Loeffler first stepped into an airport information booth in 1986. He’s stayed there for one reason: public contact. “I see everybody I’ve ever known in my life at least once a year,” Loeffler says. “I’m 65 years old, and I still see people I knew in high school. There…

part 1 of 2 Raymond Luc Levasseur arrived at his new Colorado home in February. Shackled and under heavy guard, accompanied by one other prisoner, he stepped off a government plane and was whisked to America’s high-tech version of a gulag archipelago: the Federal Correctional Complex, two miles outside the…

part 2 of 2 Oscar Lopez Rivera arrived at ADX in January. He says his first two months there were the hardest time he’s ever done. At first he was aware of only three other prisoners on his tier; two of them he recognized from Marion. Both had histories of…

part 1 of 2 Are tattoos a problem? Maybe not for Drew Barrymore or some teenage goof scooping frozen yogurt down at the mall. But they haven’t spent nine and a half years in the joint, in a sea of tattoos, like Roy has. “It’s hard not to feel funny…

part 2 of 2 It’s the noon hour at a nearby restaurant, and Bob Sylvester is trying to nab a bite or two of his chicken sandwich while offering an ex-con’s appraisal of Bruce Benson’s crime plan. The sandwich can’t compete; it sits there, cold and forlorn, while Sylvester expounds…

part 2 of 2 Sitting in his law office 36 floors above downtown Denver, Ken Salazar uncorks a speech he’s aired frequently in the past few months. The Taylor Ranch, he says, is “a monument to the history of the Southwest and the coming together of two cultures.” There is…

part 1 of 2 Maria Mondragon-Valdez paces back and forth before her kitchen window, cursing the helicopter outside. The copter glides over the humps of sagebrush behind her house, up the flanks of the thickly forested mountains above, then back to the town of San Luis, oblivious to the damnation…

“I reckon being ill is one of the great pleasures of life,” Samuel Butler declared, “provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.” Yes, but Sam never had to contend with the modern hospital–or the hospital bill. Although car dealers talk about…

part 2 of 2 For two of the past three years, the Conference on World Affairs has been the target of protests by a small group of women calling themselves, among other things, Women in Support of Castration. The women are deeply offended by the CWA program, which lists the…

part 1 of 2 He enters the room slowly, gripping his gnarled cane and a colleague’s arm for support. But don’t be fooled. He may be 78, with bad knees in the bargain, but Howard Higman–University of Colorado professor emeritus, chairman of the Conference on World Affairs and living legend–doesn’t…