The high-security prison where Colorado keeps gang-shot callers and inmates who kill correctional officers may soon be marked obsolete in federal court because it offers no outdoor recreation.

Rick Raemisch, executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections, declined to name three specific options he says are now under consideration to solve the recreation dilemma at Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, citing pending litigation.

When asked if reopening Colorado State Penitentiary II, the high-security prison opened in 2010 and closed two years later, was one of the possible solutions, Raemisch said his staff is looking at virtually all options.

“I have kind of the old Marine Corps philosophy that everything we have gets used,” he said.

However, reopening the $208 million prison may not address the recreation issue for solitary confinement inmates because it, like Colorado State Penitentiary, was built without outdoor recreation facilities, according to a DOC official in a recent deposition, said attorney Amy Robertson of the University of Denver’s law school clinic.

The gravity of the problem DOC faces is underlined by a 2012 decision by U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson. He ruled that Colorado State Penitentiary violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment by not providing outdoor recreation. His decision came in a case filed by DU’s law clinic on behalf of former inmate Troy Anderson.

The Corrections Department addressed the issue by transferring Anderson to Sterling Correctional Facility, Robertson said. But she added shuffling one or a few inmates from prison to prison won’t solve the problem because all inmates at the penitentiary system are in the same position.

That is why student and faculty attorneys at the clinic filed a second lawsuit against Department of Corrections last week, seeking class-action status, she said.

If certified as a class-action, the lawsuit naming three inmates as plaintiffs will represent the interests of all 630 administrative segregation inmates at Colorado State Penitentiary. The lawsuit says inmates are given an hour of exercise per day in a cell with a barred window only 6 inches wide.

“The design is the problem,” Robertson said. “It was unconstitutional when built.”

Raemisch said he hopes proactive moves by his staff will make the Colorado State Penitentiary lawsuit a moot point.

In the four months he has been in office, Corrections Department has revamped its administrative segregation program with the goal of removing all mentally ill inmates from Colorado State Penitentiary. The number of mentally ill inmates has been reduced from 140 to eight already since 2011, he said.

His staff is revamping the entire solitary confinement criteria in ways that will dramatically reduce the total number of inmates in solitary and how long they stay, he said; inmates will be told how long they will remain in solitary confinement when they are first sent.

Putting inmates in solitary confinement for long spans of time “multiplies or manufactures mental illness,” he said. “It’s really time that we take a whole new look at this.”

Both he and Robertson said they would prefer to resolve disputes about outdoor recreation at the penitentiary through negotiation rather than in court.