Inmate Shuffle

Bernalillo County officials this week will ask the County Commission for up to $6 million to transfer several hundred inmates to other facilities by April 22. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

Deputy County Manager Tom Swisstack will ask the Bernalillo County Commission this week for up to $6 million to begin shipping a few hundred inmates from the chronically overcrowded Metropolitan Detention Center to other jails around the state, rather than have a federal judge order him to slash the jail’s population by nearly a thousand.

The move comes five months after Swisstack, other top county officials and Ted Baca, chief judge of the 2nd Judicial District Court, announced plans to take an additional 300 to 400 inmates out of the West Side jail and, while monitoring them through the county’s Community Custody Program and the court’s pretrial services program, get them help for mental health and substance abuse issues.

At the chronically overcrowded Metropolitan Detention Center, three inmates are often forced to share a cell designed for two. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

Shipping inmates to other jurisdictions, Swisstack told the Journal in November, would be a last resort to satisfy looming mandates under a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 1995 — nearly a decade before the MDC was opened on the far West Mesa.

Officials were considering several other options, including expanding the jail’s capacity by building new modular units or renovating the old county jail across from the law enforcement center Downtown. Those changes are still possible in the future, but not in the short term, county officials said.

Named after a former inmate, the McClendon case led to the federal courts overseeing efforts to address consistent overcrowding and to the appointment of three experts to evaluate the conditions of confinement, health care and mental-health services at the jail.

In recent weeks, the realities of McClendon painted the county into a corner, Swisstack told the Journal on Thursday.

Negotiations between county attorneys, plaintiffs’ attorneys and a federal judge included conversations about a mandated cap on the jail’s population of 1,800 and even 1,700, Swisstack said. The jail’s population has hovered just under 2,500 for the past seven weeks.

Instead, he said, the parties agreed to reduce the jail’s population to its design capacity of 2,236 by April 22.

Sgt. Jesse Lara inspects a bus used to transport inmates to the Metropolitan Detention Center. In the next few weeks, similar buses will be used to transport 250 to 300 inmates to jails outside Bernalillo County. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

That will require moving 250 to 300 inmates to county-run jails in Cibola and Sandoval counties, to a private prison in Estancia and possibly to a facility in Texas by bus. Most of those sent out of Bernalillo County will be inmates who have been sentenced to 364 days in jail, as opposed to people who have received shorter sentences or those who are awaiting trial.

Swisstack will ask the County Commission for up to $6 million at the commission’s meeting on Tuesday.

“This is something we have resisted doing for some time,” County Commission Chairwoman Maggie Hart Stebbins told the Journal on Thursday. “I think we’ve reached a point where we don’t have any other options. This is partly in the context of the McClendon litigation, but also just in terms of what was in the best interest of the MDC at this time … We’re seeing that we’ve just got to do this — at least in the short term. It’s up to $6 million, and we’re hoping it will be considerably less.”

Swisstack described moving inmates as a bitter pill. He said he envisions it as a temporary “Band-Aid” for the jail’s population woes.

In the long term, county officials plan to expand the 2nd Judicial District Court’s pretrial services program and the county’s Community Custody Program, known as CCP, which would cover some defendants awaiting trial and others already sentenced. Participants in the program serve their sentences or pretrial detention in the community while being monitored by corrections officers and through electronic ankle bracelets.

About 230 people are in the program now.

Inmates are pictured playing handball at the Metropolitan Detention Center last week. Bernalillo County officials are preparing to ship a few hundred inmates to jails elsewhere in New Mexico and possibly in Texas to satisfy population requirements in a federal lawsuit. (Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal)

Officials said many in both programs will be “low risk” but “high need” such as homeless people, those with substance abuse problems, mental health issues or some combination.

Broadly speaking, county officials said that, when it’s appropriate, they hope to get people the services they need to improve the quality of their lives instead of incarcerating them.

But they acknowledged that there are, for example, not enough substance abuse programs in Bernalillo County to fill the community’s need.

And after a scandal in which a high-ranking official within CCP was arrested on charges of taking bribes to get inmates out of jail and into the house-arrest-like program in 2010, the program has suffered from a lack of credibility, Swisstack said.

Those and other challenges, which county officials say they’re working to address, make reducing jail population through non-traditional means difficult.

There have been some signs of improvement, Swisstack said. For example: connecting people to the limited treatment resources available in the community has helped to reduce the jail population by more than 200 inmates on average in recent months. In November, the jail’s average population was about 2,700.

Swisstack and Hart Stebbins said the jail is only part of the criminal justice system.

“We don’t control the front door, and we don’t control the back door,” Swisstack said.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal