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Editor’s note: This is a follow-up to “How Did a Local From a Prominent American Indian Tribe Get Stuck in a Sex Offender System That Could Keep Him Behind Bars for Life?” which ran in 5280’s June 2024 issue.
John Red Cloud walked toward the wire gate at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City early this past Wednesday morning, in a prison-issued black hoodie and ill-fitting denim jeans that hung off his wiry body. A correction’s sergeant accompanied him down the long prison driveway.
Dawn was breaking over the hill behind the men. Red Cloud carried an oversize plastic trash bag filled with books and towels. The prison gate slowly slid open in front of them.
The men turned and faced each other.
“Good luck out there,” the sergeant said to Red Cloud.
“Thank you,” Red Cloud said.
And, with that, Inmate 151976 was free.
I’d last seen Red Cloud in January, as the now 46-year-old was waiting to be transported from the Boulder County Jail to a Colorado prison after an alleged parole violation. My conversation with him that night became the basis for my June 2024 story “How Did a Local From a Prominent American Indian Tribe Get Stuck in a Sex Offender System That Could Keep Him Behind Bars for Life?” which detailed Colorado’s little-known indeterminate-sentencing mandates for sexual offenders—a legal web that had entangled Red Cloud for more than a decade.
After reading the story, Colorado state Representatives Judy Amabile and Mike Weissman submitted a joint letter to a parole review board in August that supported Red Cloud’s release. “The state is moving in the wrong direction, in terms of reform,” Amabile, a Democrat whose district includes Boulder County, says. “5280 brought a bright light to this.”
The particulars of Red Cloud’s story are compelling and complex: After growing up on the impoverished Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he earned a bachelor’s degree, became a teacher, and was eventually hired to raise money for the American Indian College Fund, a Denver-based nonprofit. In 2010, however, his trajectory was derailed by an eight-years-to-life indeterminate sentence resulting from a Class 4 assault and Class 3 sexual assault that took place at his house in Lafayette, which you can read about in my original feature.
As he served nearly a dozen years in Colorado prisons, Red Cloud was a model inmate. He attended therapy sessions, got treatment for alcohol dependency, and took responsibility for his crimes. “I will always remember my arrest, and I’m thankful for what I got in therapy,” Red Cloud told me in January. “To understand triggers in my life and what I did and how I can prevent that from happening. I’m sober, and I’ve worked hard at that. It’s important to who I am.”
Red Cloud also did something extraordinary: During his incarceration, he became the managing director of Red Cloud Renewable, a nonprofit energy and workforce development company his father, Henry Red Cloud, had founded on their reservation nearly a quarter-century earlier. From a prison cell in Colorado, Red Cloud helped brainstorm and create workforce programs for Indigenous people that would become a model within the U.S. Department of Energy. Red Cloud was finally paroled in 2022, after six attempts, and later returned to South Dakota, where he lived on the reservation, reunited with his children, joined a drum circle, got a girlfriend, and worked toward becoming the best-known Native American in the U.S. renewables business.
That’s when Red Cloud’s life took another unexpected turn. As part of his parole, he submitted to regular polygraph examinations. He failed a series of them in South Dakota in 2023, which you can read about in the first story. The tests and their results were debatable, and Red Cloud’s parole officer fought them, writing to a parole agent that Red Cloud “has not shown any high-risk behaviors, is on time, attends groups, and seems to have everything in line.” He added: “John has been extremely compliant and careful and this does not fit his risk profile or offending history.”
Still, in October of last year, Red Cloud underwent another polygraph and was immediately arrested for a disclosure. He spent two months in a Rapid City, South Dakota, jail before being transferred to Boulder County.
In the original feature, I reported that nearly 1,700 sex offenders in Colorado fall under the indeterminate-sentencing umbrella of Colorado’s Sex Offender Treatment and Monitoring Program (SOTMP). SOTMP requires that inmates admit to details of their crimes, undergo years of in-prison therapy sessions, and submit to polygraphs as a way to determine their sexual histories. If sexual offenders meet the program’s criteria, they will, in theory, ultimately be paroled and transferred to lifetime supervision in a community.
But SOTMP can only complete treatment of 160 people per year. That discrepancy has created a backlog that forces inmates to languish past their minimum sentences before receiving therapy. State officials have said low wages and remote prison locations make it difficult to recruit and retain certified therapists; critics complain the program misunderstands sexual offenders and uses a one-size-fits-all treatment method that oftentimes does more harm than good.
The issue has been discussed during multiple legislative sessions but has failed to garner support for a system overhaul. “It’s the third rail of politics,” Amabile says of tackling issues that involve sexual offenders like Red Cloud, who was sent to prison in early February to serve the remainder of his indeterminate sentence in Colorado. In March, as I was writing my story, Red Cloud’s parole revocation appeal was denied. A new parole meeting was scheduled for August.
Several people close to Red Cloud attended his mid-August hearing, which was at the Buena Vista Correctional Complex. Among them was Stephen Kane, a solar energy consultant who’d worked with Henry Red Cloud and had allowed John Red Cloud to live in a house on his property in Larimer County after Red Cloud’s first parole.
“The state has gone too far [with indeterminate sentencing], and this case definitely showed that,” Amabile said. “Having [Red Cloud] in prison doesn’t make our community safer; it’s only devastating for him. The magazine story showed that there was a very minor step out of line after his first parole, but then he had the full force of the judicial system thrown at him. To me, that’s not justice.”
Following the August hearing and Amabile and Weissman’s joint letter, in late September, Red Cloud was awarded parole. He was moved to Cañon City, where he was processed and, eventually, released on the morning of Wednesday, October 16.
Kane and his wife were waiting outside the Cañon City prison. The back of their truck was filled with bags of Red Cloud’s belongings, including his clothes and his phone.
Red Cloud saw the couple and wrapped them in hugs.
“Welcome back, buddy,” Kane told a smiling Red Cloud.
“I can’t believe I’m here,” Red Cloud said. “Ten minutes ago, I was in my bed.”
“The view’s a lot better on this side of the gates, huh?” Kane said.
“Sure is.”
Kane opened the truck gate and Red Cloud zipped open duffel bags containing his clothes. “I’ve gotta get these off of me,” he said and tugged at his hoodie. “I’m leaving this past behind me.”
He put on a polo-style golf shirt and a gray pullover on top of that. He changed his pants and his socks. He took off his black shoes and put on a pair of Jordan high-top sneakers he’d purchased before his arrest in South Dakota. “Man, these feel great,” he said.
From within his plastic bag, Red Cloud grabbed a small cardboard envelope. He pulled out a black-and-white eagle feather—with red thread wrapped around the tip—that one of his tribal friends had given to him as a sign of strength and hope. He held it up and stared at it.
“I might have lost a little weight, but I’m still the same person,” he told me. “I have the same hopes and dreams. I have the same desires, the same connections with people that I had before. All my friends, my family, people that care and love me and vice versa. They’re all intact. And I think that speaks volumes for the experience that I went through and the fact that I haven’t been forsaken by anybody. There’s a lot of people on the inside of those walls who are forsaken by family. The people who love me never gave up on me.”
We went to breakfast at a small internet cafe afterward. Red Cloud planned to call his girlfriend, but his phone service hadn’t yet been restored. His father was headed to Nevada for an event to speak about renewables and would call later. “I can’t wait to talk to him,” Red Cloud said.
He was anxious to get back to work. While Red Cloud was in prison, he learned that a program he’d initiated to teach Native American women the intricacies of solar energy system installation did far better than expected: 15 Native women signed up for the first cohort. About five of them took advantage of the program’s childcare stipend. “We showed we could give these women a way to pursue their dreams, to train for jobs that will provide for their families,” he said. The program now has a capacity of 72 trainees. Eighty-two have already signed up.
Red Cloud ordered hot cakes and bacon. He asked the server for a large orange juice. When it was delivered to him, he took a sip and held the glass to his face. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here, drinking this, right here, with all these people,” he said. “I mean, it’s like….” He mimed his mind being blown.
Kane smiled as he watched Red Cloud finish his breakfast. “We probably should get on the road,” he said. Red Cloud needed to go get his parole-officer assignment, in Longmont. Red Cloud also wanted to stop at Walmart and pick up new toothpaste and deodorant. He wanted to order contact lenses. He wanted to make a dentist appointment. He would move into the same tiny house on Kane’s property where he’d previously lived. “I get to sleep in a real bed tonight,” Red Cloud said.
He didn’t know how much his initial travel would be limited—Red Cloud is eventually expected to give a report in Washington, D.C., on the solar installation program—or whether he’d someday be allowed to transfer his parole home to South Dakota and work at the Red Cloud Renewable compound in Pine Ridge. “I want to redefine what it looks like to have agency as a parolee,” he said. “Maybe the system isn’t used to guys coming out, getting back in the thick of things, having some sort of career trajectory. I do, though, and I’m going to show that.”
Before he left, Red Cloud scrolled through his inoperable phone. There were dozens of missed calls and voicemails, dating back to his arrest in South Dakota in early October 2023. He wondered how many unanswered emails had piled up in his work inbox. Red Cloud would get his computer fired up when he made it to Larimer County. “I’m about to get buried in work,” he said, laughing.
He couldn’t have been more excited.
