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One of Colorado’s oldest jails used to be a sheriff’s house

"To get inmates fresh air and exercise, we literally chain them together on the leg and walk them around."

SAGUACHE, CO – A cute main street, an old bank, a little gift shop - all things you’d expect to see in a small town.

Saguache is no different, except for one thing you may first hear on certain days, and then see. It’s like a scene out of a movie.

Captain Ken Wilson, with the Saguache County Sheriff’s Office describes it.

“To get inmates fresh air and exercise, we literally chain them together on the leg and walk them around,” Wilson said. “It’s difficult. One thing - I think it’s difficult on the inmates to be chained up walking around where everybody can see them.”

There’s no other way, Wilson said.

The county’s jail is the second oldest in Colorado, according to Wilson.

It doesn’t have an exercise yard.

“We parade them around in orange with chains on them. It makes them look guilty,” he said. “The children, the people in the community don’t need to be exposed to that as well.”

According to Wilson and Jason Anderson, the Chair of the Board of County Commissioners, the people of the county weren’t ready to finance a new jail in 2016. A bond measure increasing the sales tax by one percent failed. It would not have paid for the entire new building, but would’ve gotten Saguache County on the path to a new facility, Anderson said.

“These really big capital projects are always tricky,” Anderson said. “We’re a county of 6,000 people. A lot of counties are in this situation, especially the rural counties, Southeastern counties. Infrastructure is just wearing out.”

The Saguache County jail was built as a house for the sheriff in the 1950s, said Lyn Miles, administrative assistant to the current Sheriff and the unofficial sheriff’s office historian.

“I started out in 1979,” she said. “Forty years next year. It’s crazy long.”

“Our sheriff and his wife and three little boys lived right here,” Miles said, sitting in what looks like an office now, with the door to a narrow kitchen right behind her.

“This was their living room. On our days off, I used to come over here for Tupperware parties,” she laughed.

The sheriff’s home also had a couple of jail cells.

“It was built for a couple of drunk guys and a couple of farmers fighting over something,” Wilson described.

Miles said in the 1980s the sheriff moved out, his deputies moved in.

“We didn’t have room for typewriters and things like that back in the olden times,” Miles said. “So we moved deputies down to the three bedrooms.”

The three-bay garage for the patrol cars was transformed into more cells in 1997.

Times have changed. The jail now can hold 21 inmates, according to Wilson. It’s often overcrowded.

“We still have murders, we still have burglaries, we still have DUIs, we still have domestic violence, we have drugs, we have child molesters, we have sexual assault victims,” Miles said. “We still have the same crime that the big cities have, we do the best to serve everybody.”

Their best often means Captain Wilson is serving lunch, in between making sure the computers are working, people are being properly booked or released and dispatch, housed in the same building, has everything it needs.

“We make do with what we’ve got,” Wilson said. “No use complaining what we don’t have or drawing attention to it or whining all the time about how we don’t like it.”

The small place has the charm of the giant jail key jingle, like you see in the movies, as well as the problems of big-city facilities.

Wilson showed 9NEWS a homemade jail shank, a fairly-new collectible.

“Compared to a lot of things in the jail, it’s very recent,” he said.

The shank was just two years old.

The jail is not quite meant to be a fortress of security. Wilson said an inmate escaped recently through one of the windows and then through the fence.

“That fence is meant to keep people from coming up and passing contraband through the window,” Wilson said. “It’s not necessarily purpose-built to keep an inmate in.”

“It was tight, confined,” said Anthony Smith, who 9NEWS watched walk out of jail after serving 10 months. “It’s really not a very safe jail. Especially for the community.”

Smith’s biggest gripe – the orange-suited shackled parade around the building as exercise.

“It’s just real small. There (are) no rec activities,” he said.

Sheriff’s employees like Wilson don’t complain. Many simply say they do the best with what they’ve got.

The county commissioners hope to ask the voters again in November to approve a measure that could pay for a new sheriff’s space, including the jail.

“Oh yeah, we need a new jail, we deserve a new jail,” Miles said. “We’re not done making do, we will make do until we can’t make do anymore.”

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