In Colorado prisons, the number of men and women serving life sentences for sex offenses today is 41 times greater than that of just 14 years ago.

On the roster of lifers, sex offenders now outnumber everyone else — killers, kidnappers, armed robbers, arsonists, habitual offenders, adults who fatally abuse children. Sixty-three percent of all Colorado prisoners sentenced to life are sex offenders, a figure that is more than four times the national average.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The sponsor of a 1998 law providing lifetime supervision of sex offenders assured her colleagues that its passage would not change prison time.

Those assurances proved untrue. Sex offenders sentenced to new indeterminate sentences — two years to life, for example — discovered their sentences looked more like life than two years.

In the first six years after the new law passed, the Colorado Parole Board did not release a single sex offender imprisoned by the law. It required treatment before release, and waiting lists grew as hundreds of new lifers were put behind bars.

The Colorado prison system now faces a crisis generated by one law.

An audit this year of the sex-offender treatment program criticized the long waiting lists, a shortage of clinicians and the quality of treatment. It also warned that high-risk sex offenders serving fixed sentences handed down under different statutes could be released without treatment because it’s unavailable.

Last year, the Colorado Department of Corrections classified 26 percent of all inmates as sex offenders and 8 percent as lifetime-supervision sex offenders.

The department has responded to the audit in dramatic fashion, classifying sex offenders for the first time from low to high risk — and giving low-risk offenders a chance to be paroled much sooner.

“For the first time ever, we’re actually going to be treating offenders by their risk needs,” said Kellie Wasko, the department’s deputy executive director. “We will no longer have one-size-fits-all treatment.”

Wasko said a new curriculum for low-risk offenders in treatment can be completed in four to eight months “if they’re low risk and they stay low risk.”

Nevertheless, she acknowledged that prisons are likely to have a backlog of sex offenders awaiting treatment for the next four to five years. “The honest-to-goodness truth is we don’t have clinicians beating down our doors to help,” she said.

Changes are overdue

Advocates for sexual-assault victims fear hundreds of sex offenders will be freed with inadequate treatment. Defense lawyers say these changes are overdue.

“No one knew how spectacularly the Lifetime Supervision Act would fail,” said lawyer Alison Ruttenberg, whose client Eric Marmon has been in prison 11 years on an indeterminate sentence.

Marmon was 16 when he was accused of two sexual assaults, including forcing himself on an 11-year-old girl. He was tried as an adult, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to spend five years to life in prison.

Marmon entered prison as a skinny kid, 5-foot-5 and 110 pounds, with the nickname Q-Tip. There, he was deemed ineligible for sex-offender treatment until adulthood because the men in treatment groups could not be around children.

In his first years in prison, “the sexual advances were bad,” Marmon said. So he deliberately violated rules prohibiting things such as verbal abuse, earning repeated trips to solitary confinement. Now 27, he fears those past infractions still haunt him.

“I believe they’ll eventually release me,” he said. “I just don’t know when.”

He was terminated from sex-offender treatment for violating a prison rule, and he has been on a waiting list to return for 32 months. Because he was terminated, he now waits behind those who have not had a chance at treatment.

In Adams County, where Marmon was convicted, Ruttenberg argued that his sentence was cruel and unusual punishment — and that many fellow offenders are suffering the same fate, “without treatment and without hope of ever having a life.”

The issue provoked a judge in Colorado Springs to berate the corrections department in 2011. Inmate Thomas Spitz got a hearing before Judge David Gilbert

after waiting five years for treatment.

A corrections official testified that Spitz had failed to complete his treatment application form correctly. The judge angrily rejected that explanation.

After years of ordering sex offenders to serve a two-to-life or five-to-life sentence and expecting they would be treated, “I’m disturbed to learn that there’s at least one example where it’s clear that DOC made a liar out of me,” Gilbert said.

He ordered Spitz into immediate treatment.

The corrections department’s behavior “borders on outrageous conduct,” Gilbert said. “I see what looks like a crisis of inaction, and a crisis of failure to follow just general rules of human decency.”

In a budget request later that year, then-corrections chief Tom Clements warned legislators of “a mounting backlog of offenders awaiting required and needed treatment.”

“Public safety will be compromised by the ongoing backlog of treatment at DOC,” he said. “Some judges are currently stating on record that they will not sentence sex offenders to DOC since they will not get treatment and will be in prison for life.”

Defense lawyers, including Ruttenberg, are preparing a federal lawsuit on behalf of 1,700 lifetime-supervision sex offenders in Colorado, naming dozens eligible for parole but imprisoned by a lack of access to treatment.

John Pineau, a Boulder lawyer involved in the suit, held up a sheaf of letters from prisoners losing hope for treatment and parole.

One came from an inmate who was offered a choice in 2004: eight years or two-to-life with a chance of parole after treatment. He wrote that he was terminated from treatment in 2007 for failing a polygraph test and is now — nine years after turning down an eight-year sentence — on a waiting list.

“If only I knew,” he wrote.

“There is no cure”?

Colorado’s Lifetime Supervision Act began with the then-popular belief that sex offenders are incurable. More-recent research suggests that many sex offenders are treatable and can learn how to avoid new sex crimes.

“There is no cure. There is containment only,” Rep. Norma Anderson, its Republican sponsor, said in 1998. “We cannot afford to keep them in jail or in prison for the rest of their life, and that’s not fair. So what this bill does, it does not change the sentencing requirements as already in law but it does establish lifetime probation and lifetime parole.”

In fact, the law that Colorado legislators approved that year did change sentencing requirements. It created maximum life sentences for more than 20 sex crimes, from rape and incest to inducing someone under 18 to expose his or her private parts. Importantly, it also required treatment before parole.

By 2004, 626 sex offenders had been sent to prison under the lifetime-supervision law. Not one had been paroled.

In 2008, 18 sex offenders sentenced under the law had died in prison. Just 15 had been paroled. Of the 1,351 people sentenced under the law — 99 percent men — 457 had passed their parole-eligibility dates, and 416 were either on waiting lists for treatment or still in treatment.

Last year, 107 lifetime-supervision sex offenders who had completed treatment were paroled, or more than the total number of parolees over the previous 14 years.

Yet the crisis behind Colorado’s prison walls remained, as highlighted by the

audit that found most sex offenders were “unable to participate in treatment” and that criticized the quality of treatment.

Wasko said the department has changed its therapy groups in response, hiring a mentor-coach who observes them, offering ample training, reducing group sizes and giving inmates a chance to comment on group sessions.

What corrections officials can’t change is the law. In 1999, the year after it passed, 42 Colorado inmates were serving life sentences for sex offenses. This past September, there were 1,719 — 41 times as many.

Kimberly Weeks was a victim of one of those inmates.

She was a college sophomore eight years ago when a stranger broke into her apartment at 5 a.m., covered her face and raped her, holding her captive for two hours.

Although she never saw his face, Ronnie Pieros was caught trespassing in another apartment complex, and “I listened to his voice,” she told The Denver Post. “It was definitely his voice that will forever stick with me. It’s just burned into the back of my mind.”

As he awaited trial, she began suffering from post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. She had panic attacks that developed into seizures. Eight years later, “I have to worry about still having some. It’s been over a year since my last one,” she said.

Weeks now works at the Weld County district attorney’s office, helping people arrested for minor crimes into counseling or other alternative sentences. She tries to balance her knowledge that sex offenders deserve rehabilitative treatment with her dread of seeing her attacker released.

Pieros will be eligible for parole in eight years. “I do hope he stays in prison for a long time,” she said. “I’m scared he will create more victims.”

Kayla Hokanson, 21, was a child victim in two separate sexual-assault cases. One defendant was her father, now serving four years to life in prison. The other was a friend of her mother’s who was sentenced to six years and could be released without treatment.

She supports the lifetime-supervision law, even though it keeps her father in prison and will require him to be supervised on parole.

“Is there a cure?” she asked. “I don’t think there’s a cure.”

Progress encouraging

Erin Jemison, executive director of the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, worries what will happen if hundreds of sex offenders get released to that system after passing condensed treatment programs.

“It really concerns me how many offenders are being called low risk, and that for these offenders, they could be eligible for parole in four to eight months,” she said. “That’s a short amount of time.”

Laurie Kepros, director of sexual litigation for the state public defender’s office, said she finds it encouraging that the corrections department is taking the auditors’ recommendations to heart.

With better treatment, low-risk offenders “can be hopefully far less expensively supervised in the community than just warehousing them,” she said.

At the corrections department, Wasko said treatment programs maintain dynamic assessments of offenders who have been classified as low risk to look continuously for signs of trouble.

“(But) it’s a common fear,” she said, “that we would let someone out who would do harm.”

David Olinger: 303-954-1498, dolinger@denverpost.com or twitter.com/dolingerdp