[Hickenlooper] also started to think about prison reform. A former buisness associate had a son, Evan, who was getting into trouble with the law…When Evan was a teenager, Hickenlooper’s friend, a patent attorney, Sent his son to a boot camp in Jamaica for two months. But after Evan returned he committed an armed robbery and ended up in prison. He fought with other inmates and was placed in solitary confinement- what corrections officials refer to as administrative segregation. “The kid obviously has some kind of mental illness already,” Hickenlooper said “His dad would go visit him every two weeks, and he just saw him getting worse and worse and worse.”
[Hickenlooper] maintained a strong interest in prison reform, and when he interviewed a candidate for Colorado’s top corrections officer he asked the applicant, Tom Clements, for his thoughts on administrative segregation. Clements said that it was being overused and was too expensive; he esitmated that a third to half of the prisoners in solitary shouldn’t be there. “The real harm is what it does to these people,” he told the Governor. Clements got the job, held hearings on the issue, and cut the number of inmates in solitary in half….
…The night before Hickenlooper signed the new gun laws, Clements…was shot to death at his front door, allegedly by a former inmate who had been released straight from solitary confinement of January 28[SUP]th[/SUP]. When the police finally caught up with the man, who had fled to Texas, Hickenlooper learned that the alleged killer was Evan Ebel, his friend’s troubled son.
