Colorado’s competency-treatment backlog faces new legal and financial pressure

Colorado has created a new task force to address delays in court-ordered competency treatment as hundreds of people remain in jail awaiting services and the state faces renewed legal and financial pressure.

Gov. Jared Polis convened the group during summer 2026 with lawmakers, state agencies, prosecutors and defense attorneys. Its work comes as Colorado’s inpatient restoration waitlist grew during fiscal year 2024-25, competency-restoration orders reached a record and Disability Law Colorado alleged that the state materially violated a federal consent decree.

The consequences reach beyond court calendars. Delays can keep people accused of crimes in jail for months, add costs for county detention systems and require the state to spend money on hospital staffing, private beds, transitional placements and consent-decree penalties.

What the numbers show

A Colorado Joint Budget Committee briefing dated December 5, 2025 said the inpatient competency-restoration waitlist rose from 208 people in October 2024 to 354 in April 2025. It fell slightly in May and June, ending fiscal year 2024-25 at 350 people.

The average wait for inpatient services was 68 days during FY 2024-25. The lowest monthly maximum wait during that fiscal year was 372 days, meaning at least one person waited more than a year for treatment.

JBC staff also reported 1,755 court orders for inpatient competency restoration in FY 2024-25, an all-time high. More recent reporting by Axios said the state health department counted 394 jail inmates awaiting treatment, including 270 who had waited more than 28 days; the longest reported wait was 289 days.

Those figures measure different things. The 350-person figure is the fiscal-year-end inpatient restoration waitlist documented in the JBC briefing, while the 394-person figure is a more recent count of jail inmates awaiting treatment. Neither should be presented as an August 2026 statewide inpatient waitlist total.

Competency restoration is narrower than general mental-health treatment. It is intended to address barriers that prevent a defendant from understanding the proceedings or assisting in their defense. State records say restoration services do not provide comprehensive, long-term mental-health care and generally continue until an evaluation finds the person competent to proceed.

Why taxpayers are exposed

Colorado’s 2019 consent decree is legally binding and judicially enforceable through December 1, 2027. It sets deadlines for competency evaluations and admissions for restoration treatment.

The decree requires daily payments when the state misses those deadlines. The schedule ranges from $100 for certain evaluation or jail-based delays to $500 for inpatient restoration delays, depending on the service and patient category.

The decree has an annual cap adjusted for inflation. The JBC briefing said the cap was reached in FY 2024-25; without the cap, accrued fines would have totaled about $32.1 million. A separate March 2026 legislative document said Colorado has paid approximately $55 million in capped penalties since 2020.

Those capped payments are not the same as the state’s total potential liability. On December 15, 2025, Disability Law Colorado sent a letter alleging that the Department of Human Services had materially violated the consent decree. The Special Master forwarded the allegation to the federal court, prompting a status conference about next steps.

The March 2026 budget record says that if a court finds a material violation, Colorado could face higher monetary fines, liquidated damages or contempt sanctions. The approved records do not establish that a court has made such a finding.

What Colorado has tried

The state has expanded services inside and outside its hospitals. JBC records say jail-based, private-hospital and state inpatient competency-restoration beds totaled 640 at the end of FY 2024-25.

Colorado has added private hospital contracts, transitional living homes, outpatient restoration and competency dockets. The state also created the Bridges wraparound-care program through House Bill 24-1355. The law requires judicial districts to develop processes for identifying and referring eligible people to community-based wraparound care as an alternative to competency proceedings, with the defendant’s consent and district-attorney participation.

Under the law, a court must set a review hearing within 182 days after appointing a care coordinator. The court generally must dismiss the charges at that hearing unless the defendant has not satisfactorily complied with the individualized care plan; in some circumstances, the case may continue for up to an additional 91 days.

But capacity remains a problem. The JBC briefing said state hospital capacity is limited by staffing as well as beds. It reported that 828 of 2,123 Office of Civil and Forensic Mental Health positions were vacant in June 2025, a vacancy rate of 39%.

Step-down placements are another constraint. Patients may need nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities or transitional living homes before leaving hospital-level care, but those placements are limited and may reject people based on criminal or other history.

What the task force must answer

The task force’s central test will be whether it produces measurable improvements rather than another broad plan. Key questions include how many additional beds can be staffed, how quickly private contracts can add capacity, whether jail-based services can reduce hospital demand and how many transitional placements are available.

It also will need to show how community programs will be funded, how wait times will be reported and whether Colorado can meet the consent-decree deadlines before the current judicial enforcement period ends on December 1, 2027.

A federal court filing in a separate case illustrates the human stakes, but its allegations remain claims by a litigant rather than judicial findings. The filing alleges that a Colorado woman spent years in custody after being found incompetent and received no competency-restoration services during that period.

For families, defendants, county jails, courts and taxpayers, the immediate issue is practical: whether the state can increase treatment capacity faster than court referrals are growing, while limiting additional fines and avoiding a court-ordered remedy.

Sources

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