by Chuck Sharman

In a massive legal victory for Colorado prisoners, a state court found that the Department of Corrections (DOC) violated a 2018 constitutional amendment when it issued its most severe punishment—solitary confinement— to prisoners who refused to work. But in the injunction that she issued from the District Court for the City and County of Denver on February 13, 2026, Judge Sarah B. Wallace stopped short of striking down the DOC’s work requirement, and she also didn’t enjoin the prison system from employing less severe sanctions on prisoners who attempt to opt out of it.

“Amendment A” was the 2018 ballot initiative that added Art. II § 26 to the state constitution, eliminating an exception to the state’s ban on slavery that had previously allowed the DOC to force prisoners to work—and closing a loophole that persists in the federal constitution and the constitutions of all but six other states. Yet when asthmatic Colorado prisoner Harold Mortis recovered from COVID-19 in late 2020 and refused to go back to work—in the same crowded kitchen “dish pit” where he had contracted the disease—officials at Fremont Correctional Facility issued him a Class 2 disciplinary violation.

In punishment for the violation, Mortis was docked two days of “good time” sentence credit that he had earned, pushing back his potential release date. The suit that he filed in 2022, along with fellow prisoner Richard Lilgerose, sought an injunction to ban the practice, as PLN reported. [See: PLN, Apr. 2024, p.13.]

The district court dismissed their challenge to the relevant DOC regulations as facially unconstitutional in October 2022. But it allowed their as-applied challenge to proceed. A class of Plaintiffs was then certified in December 2024, with the two prisoners as Class Representatives, though Lilgerose was dismissed the following August when he was released.

The case proceeded to trial in October 2025, when the district court heard testimony from Mortis and several other prisoners who were issued disciplinary charges when they refused to work, either for “failure to work” (FTW) or “disobeying a lawful order” (DLO). Under DOC policy, both FTW and DLO can be sanctioned with a 15-day placement in “restrictive housing” (RH)—which both prisoners and staff refer to as “the hole” because, as the district court noted, the DOC “basically concedes that RH is the same as solitary confinement.”

Prisoner Testimony
Proves Crucial

Prisoners described what happened when they were charged with FTW: guards handcuffed them, strip-searched them and tossed them in RH—“the hole”—where the wait could stretch up to a week for a determination on the charged misconduct. The DOC calls this process “removal from population” (RFP), which it insisted at trial was not the same as RH. The district court was unpersuaded, however; “[d]espite [the DOC’s] admission [that] the reason to put an inmate in RH is to address ‘imminent safety/security issues,’” the district court said, “[DOC] policies allow and [the DOC] does use RH to address FTW,” even when there is “no evidence of ‘imminent safety/security’ issues.”

Crediting the testimony of prisoner Nadia Reed, the district court also found that another available sanction, “restricted privileges” (RP), posed the same threat because it “could potentially result in an inmate being confined to the cell for up to twenty-three hours a day.” Cutting through the prison system’s attempts to obfuscate this, the district court found that DOC policy permits a prisoner to be sanctioned for FTW with a placement in RP that is “akin” to RH—isolation for all but one hour a day.

A third available sanction for FTW, change in classification, threatened prisoners who refused to work with transfer to a higher security level, meaning more restrictions and fewer privileges. When Reed refused to work overtime in her kitchen assignment, she recalled, she was charged with FTW and found guilty of two related disciplinary charges, for which she was sanctioned with a 10-point increase in her classification score. “The testimony supports a finding [that] the fear of increased classification and custody—as a result of refusal to work, or the threat of such refusal—while not constituting involuntary servitude compels inmates to work,” the district court declared.

Even the sanction that Mortis faced, loss of “good time” credits, “is one of the many tools in [the DOC’s] toolbox that compels inmates to work,” the district court declared. Moreover, whether the credit is lost directly to a sanction or never earned because of a lost opportunity to earn it, the result for prisoners is the same: “neither their parole eligibility nor mandatory release dates move any closer.”

Evidence Found Sufficient to
Prove a Constitutional Violation

In searching for the proper legal standard to use with the as-applied constitutional challenge, the district court found much confusing precedent. Some courts held it must be shown “beyond a reasonable doubt,” while others found “a preponderance of the evidence” or “clear and convincing evidence” was sufficient. In the end, the district court rejected the higher standard, and it found that, by either of the lower standards, “the Class has met its burden.”

But “even if the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ standard were required,” the Court said, “[t]he evidence presented regarding the availability of certain punitive sanctions for refusal to work leaves the Court firmly convinced the [DOC’s] policies, as applied to the Class, constitute involuntary servitude in violation of Article II, Section 26.” Moreover, “[a]s a matter of law, in as-applied constitutional challenges involving prison conditions, isolated examples of harm combined with a formal policy that permits or facilitates coercive conduct are sufficient to establish a class-wide practice.”

However, the district court said, the testimony and evidence presented—the DOC stipulated to the fact that over 10,000 FTW incidents led to more than 1,000 disciplinary hearings in four years— “indicate the machinery of coercion is not isolated but is a pervasive and actively operationalized feature of [the DOC’s] labor management,” one that “ensures the threat of punishment remains a credible and ever-present driver of inmate labor.”

Accordingly, the district court issued an injunction requiring the DOC to (1) “cease [the] threat and use of segregation and isolation,” including RFP, RH, RP “and any other sanction that results in isolation in a cell for more than twenty-two hours a day for more than two days (three if over the weekend) for failure to work”; (2) discontinue any policy permitting “procedural stacking” or “double charging” prisoners with multiple sanctions (such as both FTW and DLO) for a single work refusal; and (3) “cease the practice of using segregation and isolation … for failure to work.”

The order was stayed for 28 days to give Defendants time to appeal, though it was unclear whether that has happened. The plaintiff Class was represented by attorneys with Towards Justice and Maxted Law LLC, both in Denver. See: Mortis v. Polis, Colo. 2d Jud. Dist. (City & Cty. of Denver), Case No. 2022CV30421.

Among prisoner advocates celebrating the ruling, Kym Ray, co-chair of End Slavery Colorado—the nonprofit that spearheaded the successful constitutional amendment in 2018—remained resolute, telling CBS News, “Amendment A was not a suggestion. It was a mandate.”

The other states that have passed similar constitutional amendments include Alabama, Nebraska, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah and Vermont. The Kentucky legislature is still considering one. A measure in Arkansas was defeated by state lawmakers in 2025.  

Additional source: CBS News

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