The Insiders In the overcrowded Colorado prison system, corrections officials face a new breed of customer: the special-needs inmate. Much as public schools are now expected to tailor programs for the diverse range of children the state educates, the Colorado Department of Corrections is under increasing pressure to accommodate the…

In one of the stranger tests of the University of Colorado’s new get-tough policy on sexual harassment, an internal committee has found “no concrete evidence” to support harassment charges against a prominent Boulder professor–even though the committee’s report raises uneasy questions about the professor’s admitted “romantic” relationships with female students…

John Deans learned a hard lesson about office politics: Be careful what you say about your boss. Particularly if you’re a federal employee investigating possibly illegal fund diversions at Denver International Airport and your boss happens to be the godfather of DIA. Last year Deans, a criminal investigator with the…

Jennifer Miller had put up with all she was going to take. An employee of the University of Colorado for almost thirty years, she’d risen from the ranks of the typing pool to a high-profile, $42,000-a-year job on the administrative support staff. But they couldn’t pay her enough to turn…

The spate of sexual-harassment controversies on the Boulder campus may have tarnished the University of Colorado’s reputation, but there’s still one area of endeavor in which CU leads the pack. When it comes to bureaucratic flimflam in response to requests for public information, nobody does it better. By state law,…

The sun refused to appear last Thursday morning at the Regional Transportation District’s light-rail station at I-25 and Broadway, but nobody seemed to mind. There were plenty of other dignitaries on hand, and this was clearly Ben Klein’s moment to shine. Klein, the chairman of RTD’s elected board of directors,…

We help injured people…that’s our job!” “I know how to handle insurance companies; I used to be their attorney!” “I will fight for your rights!” “Been in an accident? Got your check yet?” On the tube there’s the guy in the tank who runs over a car, the woman in…

When Karen Jenkins went to work for a market-research company a few years ago, she expected to spend her time talking to consumers about their lifestyles and purchasing habits. What she didn’t expect was a stream of crude comments about spanking, anal sex and other dicey topics–all issuing from a…

When Phil Burgess gets up to speak, he doesn’t just take the floor. He takes the whole room–floor, walls, ceiling, people and every last scrap of oxygen in the place. He storms the podium like Patton rolling through the Rhineland or Al Haig commandeering a press conference; there’s no question…

In the cross-wired, deeply incestuous world of communications conglomerates, nothing lasts forever. Telegiants swap partners with abandon; today’s bitter foe is tomorrow’s big-asseted object of desire, and vice versa. US West knows the drill. The Englewood-based Baby Bell is currently duking it out in a Delaware courtroom with estranged partner…

Take your pick: Either the Regional Transportation District is in the process of paying $15 million too much to buy a bunch of used buses, or the agency just blew $96,000 on a “biased” study that reaches that conclusion. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground concerning the 82-page…

All Alex Pappas wanted was a liquor store. All his neighbors wanted was for him to sell his booze somewhere else. Out of that fundamental disagreement, enormous consequences have sprung. After more than a year of gathering petitions and sitting through rounds of hearings, frustrated Congress Park residents are talking…

Ask religious broadcasters, from the elfin Pat Robertson to the funky Reverend Ike, and they’ll tell you: Doing the Lord’s work takes plenty of cash. Precious airtime that could be spent trumpeting the Gospel gets consumed in pleas for tithes, donations, prayer offerings–“the green stuff,” as Ike used to call…

Tom Keuer peers into the glass-doored storage cabinet like a television teen cruising the fridge, thirsting for a swig of Sunny D. “Any of the good stuff around here?” he asks. A blue-jeaned lab worker shrugs. “It’s back in the freezer now.” Keuer pokes around among jugs of clear solutions…

Reyel Simmons knew he was in trouble when his mother-in-law told him about the poster she’d seen at her nail salon–the one that screamed “Hardbodies Presents the Best Built Male Revue in the U.S.A.” Featured were six male strippers in various stages of dishabille, including one naughty number who looked…

Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but consulting contracts produce even odder playmates. How else to explain the current business arrangement between the Regional Transportation District and privatized-transit guru Wendell Cox? Stung by charges of inefficiency and bloat–including complaints about overstaffing leveled by members of its own elected board of…

part 2 of 2 “This one’s mine. This one’s mine. This one’s mine, too.” Richard Deem is hunched over a barrel in a back room at the Wishing Well Drop-In Center on Speer Boulevard, a kind of clubhouse for the mentally ill, where the salvaged belongings of former Highlands residents…

part 1 of 2 Ron Guerin doesn’t want to talk about the apartment. The apartment didn’t work out. Best not to talk about it. See, it was a basement apartment. On the north side of town. And it might have worked out, except for the voices on the telephone. For…

part 2 of 2 Jon Caldara lives on Arapahoe Avenue in Boulder. Every fifteen minutes or so, an RTD bus rumbles by his house. Caldara has never seen more than five people on the bus. “Usually, there’s two,” he says. “We’re talking about a bus that pollutes like a dozen…

part 1 of 2 The train pulls away from the Broadway Marketplace station with a meek oomph of acceleration, headed for downtown. It ascends above Alameda Avenue, whips through the railyards, leans into West Colfax–no rumbling, no lurching, no clacking, just that oh-so-slight push at the start, like a cat…

In the wake of a series of uprisings at federal penitentiaries across the country last month, jittery officials seem determined to crack down on troublesome felons housed in the Federal Correctional Complex just outside the high desert town of Florence. The result? At least three separate incidents of alleged civil…

Colorado doesn’t believe in mollycoddling its prisoners. Just ask officials at the Colorado State Penitentiary (CSP), the chillingly futuristic, so-called “supermax” prison outside Canon City, where the state’s most dangerous prisoners spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. Better yet, ask some of the residents. Ask Janice, Shannon, Debra,…