Jail company has had past troubles

Otero County contracts with Management and Training Inc. to run what it calls the Otero County prison just north of Chaparral, N.M., near the Texas border.

The company runs an adjacent facility, the Otero County Processing Center, which is for immigration detainees facing both civil and criminal proceedings. The prison where state inmates would be sent has a capacity of 1,358 but the population has been averaging around 850.

Built in 2003 and expanded in 2005, it has contracts to house inmates for federal agencies like the U.S. Marshals Service, Bureau of Prisons, Fort Bliss, Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It also houses inmates brought in by Otero County and the Alamogordo Department of Public Safety.

The company has run other facilities in New Mexico, most notably the Santa Fe and McKinley county jails, which were the subject of numerous successful civil lawsuits by inmates and their families.

A class action lawsuit filed against the Santa Fe jail over a policy that required strip searches for all detainees booked into the jail ended in a $8.5 million settlement against the company and Santa Fe County.

MTC terminated its contract to run the Santa Fe jail in the spring of 2005 before that settlement was reached.

The company claimed lower-than-expected inmate occupancy made it impossible to keep running the jail. The county then took over.

In 2003, MTC stopped running the McKinley County jail after four inmates charged with violent felonies escaped.

A police investigation, according to the Journal, found the jail to be inadequately staffed and other security problems that allowed the inmates to escape through an unsecured fence.

— Mike Gallagher / Journal Investigative Reporter

— This article appeared on page A4 of the Albuquerque Journal