Three Colorado inmates who should have been housed in higher-security prisons that had no room for them are suspected of killing fellow prisoners recently in separate incidents, spotlighting a systemwide logjam of violent offenders.

More than 1,300 Colorado inmates are being held in less-secure conditions than they warrant, but the state’s higher-security prisons are full, forcing a mixture of violent and lesser offenders in some facilities, said Katherine Sanguinetti, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Corrections.

The violent offenders, housed throughout the prison system, are largely responsible for double-digit increases in the rates of assaults on other inmates and staffers in 2008, Sanguinetti said.

Meantime, a possible solution for freeing the logjam has stalled.

Construction will be completed this summer on a $208 million maximum-security prison in Cañon City with 948 beds, but the state’s budget crisis will keep it closed because there is no money to hire a staff. It would cost $20.5 million to open and occupy the prison, including hiring 581 full-time staff members. The prison has no target opening date.

The assaults and murders call for immediate action, state legislators said, but given the recession and lingering budget deficit, there are no speedy solutions.

“I don’t have any magic bullets here,” said Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, chairwoman of the House Judiciary Committee. “It’s a very serious problem when we start talking about assaults on guards.”

She said she knew about the prisoner placement problems but not about the assaults and murders.

“We can talk about being frugal and tightening our belts, but what’s happening at the Department of Corrections shows us a real-world example of what happens when we aren’t able to provide services,” Levy said.

DOC officials considered emptying a medium-security prison and sending the staff over to open the new high-security prison, called CSP II. But there were myriad logistical issues, including that it takes more officers to run a higher-security prison, Levy said.

Sen. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that in the long term, Colorado needs to move nonviolent inmates out of prisons if they could be managed safely in the community.

“We have to make space for high- risk offenders,” she said.

But even a modest effort to do that proved tricky when parole board members struggled with hard decisions about which inmates could really be trusted to move into early release.

Inmate found slain in bed

In the latest prison murder, Thursday at Sterling Correctional Facility, correctional officers discovered the body of an inmate in his cell tucked into his blanket as though he was sleeping. The DOC’s inspector general’s office is investigating the murder that happened that night while he was locked inside with his cellmate.

The suspect, whose name hasn’t been released, was incarcerated on assault and menacing convictions. He probably would have been housed in Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, where inmates don’t share cells, if there had been a bed available, Sanguinetti said.

In another case, on Nov. 18, convicted double murderer Kevin Lust, 52, attacked and killed 50-year-old Ronald Ferguson at Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, a medium-security prison that mostly houses inmates with medical ailments.

A DOC risk gauge showed that Lust, who shotgunned two women in Oregon and Washington and had gotten into prison fights, belonged in a higher-security prison, Sanguinetti said.

And Walter Walker, 41, stabbed two inmates in the dining hall of Limon Correctional Facility on Jan. 2 during lunch, killing convicted murderer Daniel Duran, 33, officials said. At the time, Walker was serving a 1997 life sentence for killing Louisville volunteer firefighter and bounty hunter Melvin Gurule. He too likely would have been in CSP on Jan. 2, instead of Limon, if beds were available, Sanguinetti said.

The last time Colorado added new high-security beds to the prison system was in 1998 when Phase II of CSP opened. Since that time, the system’s population has grown from 13,200 to 22,600 with no new high-security beds that would allow more of those inmates to be watched more closely or locked down up to 23 hours a day.

Each of the state’s medium-security prisons has hundreds of misplaced inmates.

The medium-security Buena Vista Correctional Facility, for example, has 393 inmates who are, under the DOC’s classification system, technically too dangerous to be there. They represent 45 percent of the facility’s inmates, Sanguinetti said.

Recruiting for gangs

Space limitations at the state’s high- security prisons mean that gang members caught recruiting inmates to join gangs can’t be moved out of general populations for extended periods, she said. They can only be briefly placed in a few segregated cells in each prison, which are in high demand.

Since CSP was built, the number of gang members in Colorado prisons has increased 88 percent to 9,500, Sanguinetti said.

“That’s a good chunk of our prison population,” she said.

The incidence of violence in DOC prisons has been increasing at a much faster pace than the growing prison population, she said.

In 2008, the number of inmate-on-inmate assaults rose 17 percent to 446 and assaults on staffers grew 16 percent to 300 over the previous year. At the same time, the number of inmates in Colorado prisons grew less than 2 percent, according to DOC records.

Last week, a female correctional officer at a Cañon City prison received medical care after a male inmate struck her, said Gabe Hernandez, a board member of employee union Colorado WINS.

“We’re all watching each other’s back,” said Hernandez, who works at San Carlos Correctional Facility, which houses mentally ill inmates.

Currently, the only way for the most dangerous of Colorado inmates to get into the prison where they should be is to do something more heinous than prisoners already at the high-security prisons.

In the case of Lust, Walker and the unidentified Sterling inmate, murder allegations or charges have moved them to the top of the CSP waiting list.

But to get those three into maximum security where they belong, three inmates had to be moved from CSP to a medium-security prison, even though they haven’t earned the less-restrictive classification.

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