Editorial: Shipping out inmates symptom of jail problem

It would be heartening if Deputy County Manager Tom Swisstack’s assurance that spending up to $6 million in taxpayer dollars this year to ship jail inmates to other lockups and reduce crowding had any realistic chance of being a temporary “Band-Aid.”

But the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center has been too full almost since the day it opened in 2002 and has been paying other lockups to house some of its overflow since at least 2006. That’s when then-County Manager Thaddeus Lucero said this of paying a contractor $50 per inmate per day to house inmates in the old Downtown lockup: “We hope it’s not long term. My thinking is that we have to get some cooperation from everybody on the issue of overcrowding — the city, the sheriff, (prosecutors) and judges. We all have to work together.”

Back in August 2005, the 2,236-bunk MDC was over capacity, and officials were blaming parole violators who were serving 364-day sentences. Seven years later, the average population was around 2,700. At times it has ballooned to above 2,900, though the jail has housed around 2,500 inmates for the past seven weeks. It remains in violation of a federal court order on population.

So unfortunately, Swisstack is simply singing the circa-2013 verse, same as the first.

County officials say they want to expand the state District Court’s pretrial services program and the county’s Community Custody Program. They say inmates they will release into those programs will be “low risk” but “high need,” including those struggling with homelessness, addiction and mental health issues. And they hope they can connect those inmates with the services they need in the community.

Unfortunately, save for free 12-step meetings here and there, those same county officials admit there are few affordable services in the Metro area for those inmates.

Until that changes — until, as Lucero said in 2006, “we all work together” to create viable alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders — Bernalillo County taxpayers will be stuck paying for $6 million Band-Aids to bus inmates to other lockups.

This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers.