After paying a $70,000 settlement for failing to protect a burglar from a known prison rapist, the Colorado Department of Corrections has now transferred that burglar to a new home — surrounded by sex offenders.

James Mervin says he has nightmares and sleeps only a few hours at a time at Fremont Correctional Facility, where 76 percent of the population are sex offenders.

“I try not to get in a deep sleep,” Mervin said in a recent interview at the Cañon City facility. “I have these night terrors, flashbacks. It’s horrible. It’s like I’m being raped again. It’s like someone is overpowering you. You feel worthless, degraded.”

Mervin, who agreed to allow publication of his name, was raped in 1993 by serial killer Marvin Gray, just days after Gray had raped another inmate.

In 2000, the DOC paid Mervin $70,000 to settle his claims over that incident.

Now, DOC officials have told Mervin he has his own bad behavior to blame for his placement at Fremont in May.

Mervin has gotten into trouble so often that he created his “own crisis,” said a July 30 letter to Mervin from Paul Hollenbeck, DOC’s classification chief. Because of the inmate’s security level he can only be held in 11 of the system’s 23 prisons, and many of the eligible ones are off-limits to him because of conflicts he’d had with inmates at those prisons.

“If you chose to behave differently, there would be more options open for your placement,” Hollenbeck said.

Now Mervin, who is serving a life sentence for breaking into hundreds of homes, has written 28 complaint letters. He said he dreads the next assault and vows a new lawsuit.

“I feel like I am suffocating,” Mervin said in a June 12 grievance letter.

It may appear on the surface that sending a rape victim to Fremont is a bad decision, but there are many factors that determine placements in a system with more than 20,000 male prisoners, DOC spokeswoman Alison Morgan said.

DOC keeps inmates apart for myriad reasons, including fighting and gang conflicts, Morgan said. Mervin has been transferred to nine prisons since 1993 in part because of getting into fights. Within DOC, every prison houses some sex offenders, although not as many as Fremont, she said.

“If (Fremont) is the safest place for him to be, that’s where we are going to send him,” Morgan said. She added that three other institutional rape victims are also housed at Fremont.

Mervin said his fights or conflicts with other inmates were directly related to his rape. Inmates aligned with his original attacker, Marvin Gray, a leader of a white supremacist gang at the Colorado State Penitentiary, have repeatedly attacked him, he said, calling him a snitch and taunting him for being raped.

“They haven’t protected me,” he said of DOC. “I’ve had to protect myself.”

In 1993, Mervin had words with a corrections officer, and was reassigned to share a cell with Gray, a 300-pound man capable of bench-pressing 500 pounds. That was just days after another inmate had reported being raped by Gray and was removed from the cell.

Mervin was beaten and raped that night.

The way the prison culture works, prison rape victims keep quiet and keep getting raped, Mervin said.

“They are supposed to go to their corner to lick their wounds,” he said.

Mervin bucked the system and sought an attorney.

The decision has haunted him ever since, he said.

He said Limon correctional officers told other inmates that he was a snitch and to retaliate against him for filing a lawsuit. Thereafter, he was often confronted by members of the “211 Gang,” and the “Aryan Syndicate Gang,” both white supremacist gangs.

He extended his arms out over a table in the Fremont prison visitor’s room to show where inmates had slashed him with a shank, or prison knife. In an inventory of his injuries, he recounted a broken thumb, a broken ankle, a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw and burns when an inmate threw boiling water on him.

“What am I supposed to do, keep fighting?”

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com