DENVER – Gov. John Hickenlooper said he is “closely attuned” to the debate over a bill that would prohibit putting committed and detained youth in solitary confinement for long periods of time, but the governor isn’t ready to take a side yet.

“I want to look at the details of the bill and hear both sides, which I haven’t done yet,” Hickenlooper said Thursday in a press conference about the legislative session to date. “It’s something that I have been aware of, and all of us have been, for a number of years, and we are going to continue to move as aggressively as we can to dramatically diminish the use of solitary confinement.”

Reducing time spent in solitary confinement – what the Division of Youth Corrections calls “administrative seclusion” – is something the head of the agency says they are already doing at 10 state-operated detention and commitment centers.

“Since October, we’ve only had four youth go over four hours and the longest being six hours,” said Robert Werthwein, director of the Office of Children, Youth and Families which oversees the Division of Youth Corrections inside the Department of Human Services.

Werthwein said he’s proud of the progress DYC has made on reducing the use and duration of solitary confinement since a new policy was adopted in October 2015.

That policy was written with input from the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, after attorneys with the ACLU had launched a joint investigation with other groups into the use of isolation at DYC facilities.

“Prolonged solitary confinement is inhumane and extremely damaging to children,” said Rebecca T. Wallace, staff attorney and policy counsel for ACLU Colorado. “We are concerned that the department now appears to be taking a resistant position against making those protections permanent and against transparency and oversight measures that, if they had been in place previously, could have shined light on the abusive and illegal practices so they could have been addressed much sooner.”

After a year-long battle for access to incident reports from DYC facilities, The Gazette reported in October 2015 that from January 2014 to May 2015 juveniles were routinely placed in solitary confinement for extended periods of time and often as a form of long-term behavioral management plans that used isolation as punishment.

Some of those incidents occurred even after the division had said publicly that they had stopped the use of solitary confinement as punishment.

One juvenile spoke out from a youth corrections facility about the toll spending nearly 22 days straight in solitary confinement took on his mental state.

Werthwein says since the new policy was implemented the average stay in solitary confinement was down to 1.5 hours in February, while the national average is 15 hours.

But that’s not enough for Rep. Pete Lee, D-Colorado Springs, who introduced a bill that would take much of the new policy and make it state law.

Lee has said there is so much leadership turnover in youth corrections that this policy needs the weight of state-law.

“I think the governor’s office is really working diligently and scrupulously to try to bridge the gap between the sponsor of the bill and the division,” Lee said. “There could be policy changes with in the department that contradict the direction the division is headed.”

The division opposes House Bill 1328 for a number of reasons, but is still working with the Lee and Rep. Beth McCann, D-Denver, on proposed changes.

“The current bill goes beyond our current policies,” Werthwein said. “It’s very prescriptive on documentation.”

Werthwein said he is also concerned by a requirement in the bill that a physician be consulted after a juvenile has been in seclusion for more than four hours.

“Our staff and facilities are responsible for assessing the safety risk of youth and the risk he or she posses to themselves or others and this bill goes beyond that and it would require a behavioral health specialist and a consultation with a physician,” he continued.

Ironically, in 1999 the director of the Division of Youth Corrections asked to be included in a law that prohibited the use of seclusion to emergencies and only when less restive efforts have failed or are impossible.

The Gazette found that some uses of seclusion, including as part of long-term behavioral management plans that kept one juvenile in solitary confinement for 22 days, violated that 1999 law.

“If the department is following its policies now, then there should be no issue in solidifying them in law and adding transparency and oversight measures so that the department, either under its current or future leadership, does not backslide into using harmful seclusion practices again,” Wallace said.

Werthwein said it’s a matter of resources. The division asked for additional funding in the 2016-17 fiscal year to reduce the juvenile to guard staffing ratio to be in line with federal guidelines aimed at reducing rape and sexual assault in facilities.

The books were closed on the budget Thursday but it hasn’t been made public yet. Hickenlooper also requested additional funding in his budget to help the division hire additional staff.

“The costs to be attributed to the bill need to be driven by the policies of this bill not the other resource needs of the department,” Lee said.

Hickenlooper said the details in the bill are important, and if juveniles are being placed in solitary confinement during emergencies it could be for good reason.

“There might be certain circumstances where it’s necessary and a benefit even to the youth, but we’ve got to make sure that, that’s … the details in these bills can have dramatic differences,” he said.

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Contact Megan Schrader

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Twitter: @CapitolSchrader

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper. File photo.