State officials told Lincoln County commissioners that Camp Sierra Blanca, a rehabilitation center for young offenders northeast of Ruidoso, will have to take higher-risk offenders and build a high fence to keep them in in order to stay open, the Ruidoso News reported.

The camp, built to house 48 young men, now has just nine clients, but still pays contractor CiviGenics $1 million a year to run a program geared more to rehabilitation than on a corrections-facility model, Bill Dunbar, deputy secretary of the Children, Youth and Families told commissioners.

Dunbar said that CYFD officials were able to fend off an attempt at this year's Legislature to cut the camp's $2.1 million budget by $1 million, but added: "We can't support a $2.1 million budget with nine kids," the News reported.

Debra Pritchard, director of juvenile justice facilities for CYFD, told commissioners that the camp already was taking offenders up to age 21 and where once all the residents had been on probation, now the camp was taking boys who have been convicted and committed, the News said.

Pritchard said CYFD now envisions keeping Camp Sierra Blanca open along with the Youth Diagnostic and Development Center in Albuquerque and the John Paul Taylor Center in Las Cruces as secure facilities.

"We're in dire fear the (Camp Sierra Blanca) budget will be severely cut, and we can't continue the program unless we can get the kids there," said Pritchard.

"The type of offender now no longer will be petty theft and shoplifting," Patrick Peerenboom, who runs the camp for CiviGenics, told the commissioners. "These will be chronic offenders, someone charged with burglary 10 or 15 times."

And while the new breed of offender at the camp would be more aggressive, those boys charged with murder or sexual predation would be housed at YDDC in Albuquerque, Peerenboom said.

"We don't have aggravated offenders now, but with a fence, we will be able to take them," Peerenboom told commissioners. "They will be more violent, but not the hardest of the hard."

Dunbar said he anticipated bringing 25 to 36 higher-risk offenders to the camp, the News reported.

The new fence would run about 2,100 linear feet, enough to enclose the building cluster, and while it would be about 12 feet high, it would not be topped with razor wire, the officials said. 

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