Buses to Jail A Good Idea

Reasonably, Santa Fe-area judges are concerned about efforts to move the county electronic monitoring program out to the county jail, which is not served by public transportation.

The judges’ concern: prisoners charged with crimes and released to the program in lieu of jail pending trial — as well as convicts sentenced to electronic monitoring — might not be able to make the journey six miles out of town to fulfill the program’s conditions. These latter include mandatory check-ins with program administrators as well as drug and alcohol screening.

Many in the criminal justice system favor of electronic monitoring as an alternative to incarceration. It’s cheaper than housing people in jails; it also allows non-violent or minor offenders to continue with their regular lives, including going to work, while awaiting trial or serving a sentence.

But the judges note that by putting the program office out of reach for people without reliable private transportation, the county may be setting up some of these same folks for failure, meaning they’ll end up in jail after all, at more expense to taxpayers.

At last report, county public safety officials were talking about arranging with the city for bus service to the jail off N.M. 14. That service could help solve another and equally serious problem: getting prisoners newly released from the jail back into town, where their homes may be or where, if they’re homeless, they can find shelter.

As both city and county officials have already noted, this is a serious problem in winter particularly, when attempting to walk the six miles to the edge of Santa Fe and its bus service can be deadly. Bus service also might help families and others visit friends and relatives doing time in the jail.

City officials weren’t prepared to comment on the proposal for bus service last week. But a jail route doesn’t need the kind of every-15-minutes bus service that heavily used routes in town require. And city bus service may not be the only option — North Central Regional Transit District buses also could be used.

In any case, some kind of regularly scheduled public transportation to the jail is a good idea.