NM PRISONS GOING PUBLIC
State taking back control of lockups from private firms
SANTA FE — Privatization was once touted as a cure for what ailed New Mexico’s long-troubled prison system. But after more than 20 years of housing inmates in corporate-run prisons at a higher rate than nearly any other state, New Mexico is swerving back toward state control.
Amid chronic understaffing issues, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s administration has announced plans to take over management of three prisons — in Clayton, Santa Rosa and Grants — over the past two years.
Once the transition is complete, it will mean roughly one-quarter of state prison beds are located in privately run facilities, down from nearly half — or 49.6% — at the start of 2019, according to state Corrections Department data.
Corrections Secretary Alicia Tafoya Lucero said Lujan Grisham, who appointed her to the job in 2019, has made clear her concern over the state’s reliance on private prison managers.
“New Mexico certainly is looking at things differently,” Tafoya Lucero said in a recent interview. “There’s no doubt about that.”
As of 2019, New Mexico had the nation’s secondhighest percentage of inmates in privately run prisons, behind only Montana, according to the Washington D.C.-based Sentencing Project.
New Mexico’s move away from private prisons has been prompted by a mix of changing political dynamics and fading profits for corporations due to a decline in the state’s inmate population. But it won’t be cheap. The state’s takeover of the three prisons is projected to cost the state $9.9 million in additional funding over the coming years, according to Legislative Finance Committee analysts. Higher pay levels for corrections officers, whom the state has struggled to retain, would make up a big part of that increase.
Tafoya Lucero said she disagrees with the legislative cost estimate of the shift in management, saying it’s too early to provide definitive numbers.
But she acknowledged that expenses will be higher.
“Is it worth it? Yeah, it’s absolutely worth it,” Tafoya Lucero said. “We will provide people training, we will focus on inmate programing and expansion of vocational training, education courses and so forth.”
“And I believe we will be able to staff it,” she added. “We pay better, and I believe, hopefully, we’ll be able to stabilize that (workforce).”
Meanwhile, the labor union that represents many New Mexico corrections officers say the state’s shift away from private prisons is good for taxpayers, employees, inmates and communities.
“Even when officers or inmates have problems in public prisons, there is recourse because there’s more transparency and worker rights,” said Carter Bundy, the political director for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union in New Mexico.
“Private prisons are all about cutting corners, increasing inmate populations, and making as much money as possible by underpaying workers and giving them no real retirement and poorer health care,” he said.
How we got here
The push to privatize New Mexico’s prison system began in the 1990s under former Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republicanturned-Libertarian who said private prisons would help alleviate chronic mismanagement and crowding in state-run prisons.
In a recent interview, Johnson said he inherited an untenable situation upon taking office in which hundreds of inmates were being housed out of state.
He said private prisons offered a solution to the problem with a feasible price tag.
“You’re getting the same products and services for about two-thirds of the cost,” Johnson said.
The ex-governor said that he has not been closely following New Mexico’s shift away from private prisons but that he has no regrets about his administration’s crafting of a revamped prison system that was largely left untouched by the state’s next two governors, Democrat Bill Richardson and Republican Susana Martinez.
“If the numbers of prisoners going in is less, (it’s no surprise) they’re going to close private prisons first,” Johnson said.
However, Senate Majority Whip Linda Lopez, D-Albuquerque, who has been a member of the Legislature since 1997, said she and other lawmakers raised concerns over the years about the state’s reliance on a for-profit private system.
Those concerns included reports from some inmates about the frequent use of solitary confinement, she said.
“I was pleasantly surprised to hear we’re moving as fast as we are to reclaim our prison system,” Lopez said, describing the shift as the “right thing to do.”
She also said increased expenses associated with the state’s takeover of the private prison facilities represent a worthwhile investment, arguing they could lead to a more stable and better-compensated workforce.
Recent takeovers
The state’s recent move away from private prisons has been an “intentional shift,” said Tafoya Lucero, who nevertheless described each takeover as having different reasons.
It started in 2019 with the state takeover of Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility in Clayton that has a capacity of about 625 inmates.
Tafoya Lucero said the change was prompted by low staffing levels at the nearly 180,000-square-foot prison just east of Clayton that opened in 2008 and houses medium-security male inmates.
That had prompted the state to levy fines on GEO Group, the private prison operator that previously ran the facility.
More recently, the Corrections Department announced in June it would take over operations of the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility in Santa Rosa. The agency announced in July its plans for a similar transition of the mediumsecurity Northwest New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants.
The takeover of the Santa Rosa prison was also prompted by a drop in staffing levels — the vacancy rate for corrections officers reached 72% at one point — that led to inmates being transferred to other facilities for safety reasons.
The GEO Group announced it was
terminating its contract after the state resisted proposed changes that would have included reduced programming for inmates, Tafoya Lucero said.
“We felt that it was a good thing, safe thing, the right thing to do to take over the operations at this facility,” Tafoya Lucero said.
As for the Northwest New Mexico Correctional Facility in Grants run by Tennessee-based CoreCivic, Tafoya Lucero said state takeover of the prison was less circumstantial.
Rather, she said state officials had long been planning taking over the prison’s operations to make a prison campus of sorts with the nearby Western New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility.
Both private prison companies have been guarded about the transitions.
A spokesman for the Florida-based GEO Group referred Journal questions to the state Corrections Department.
Meanwhile, a CoreCivic spokesman said the company was committed to ensuring a “safe and seamless” transition of the Grants prison to statelevel management.
“While contracts can and sometimes do end for a variety of reasons ... by and large, we see continuity in the use of our facilities, whether it’s government partners continuing with existing contracts, new partnerships developing to meet emerging needs, or previous partnerships starting anew,” CoreCivic spokesman Ryan Gustin said.
Staffing concerns
Former correctional officer Ernie Garcia spent 20 years with the Department of Corrections. He said the difference between private and public correctional officer pay in his experience was typically $2 to $3 an hour.
However, he said officers at state-run prisons were equally overworked and understaffed despite the higher pay and more generous retirement benefits.
“I just hope that somebody steps in to kind of monitor this transition that we’re going through —meaning the Department of Justice,” Garcia said. “It really needs to be highly monitored because inmates lives are going to be at risk.”
Currently, New Mexico has a 27.1% vacancy rate for correctional officers statewide, a Corrections Department spokesman said.
And Garcia pointed out that while private prison companies have faced fines when they couldn’t fully staff their facilities, the state faces no penalties for its own understaffing.
Meanwhile, another current correctional officer said that over his 17-year career prisons have become increasingly understaffed.
He said the chronic understaffing is endangering people’s lives, and the officers are just “warehousing” people instead of giving them the entitlements they deserve, such as recreation time.
The officer said public prisons typically have more guidelines and vocational programs than private prisons, but said the state will need to dedicate ample funding and staffing to run these prisons.
As for addressing high vacancy rates among corrections officers, Tafoya Lucero said the state will pay qualified employees a starting rate of $20 an hour — up from a $15.75 an hour starting wage currently at some private prison facilities.
In addition to higher salaries, corrections officers at state-run prisons also typically get more generous retirement benefits than guards employed at private prisons.
Population decline
The transition to public prisons also comes amid a decline in prison populations. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the state’s male inmate population had dropped over 10% and the female population almost 25%, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission.
The prison population was already declining before the pandemic but at a much slower rate, said Linda Freeman, the commission’s executive director.
Freeman said the commission is expecting an inmate population increase as “normal activities” begin again after the pandemic, and the courts have a chance to work through the backlog that’s piled up from suspended jury trials and other court delays.
However, the populations aren’t expected to ever reach pre-pandemic numbers. In the population forecast, which spans to fiscal year 2030, the population is still about 1,200 less than pre-pandemic numbers for men and women.
“I think one of the positive aspects of the pandemic is, if we’ve gotten this population down I think many policy makers would prefer to keep the population reduced,” Freeman said. “It’s my hope that through preventative measures, and improving the services that are available to individuals as they release — and hopefully, you know, breaking that cycle — that we would not go back to those prepandemic highs.”
She also down played the link between private prisons and prison populations. She said male prisoners are often shuffled back and forth between private and public prisons during their sentences.
“I think one of the strengths of perhaps bringing these prisons under public service is that you’ll get greater efficiency in programming and staffing, and things like that,” she said.
Douglas Carver, the commission’s deputy director, said private prisons have typically housed medium security prison inmates, and sometimes dangerousness classifications change which result in prisoners being shifted around.
The shifts between state-run and private prisons have sometimes made it difficult for prison release programming to remain consistent for inmates, he said.
Not a fix-all
Prison rights advocates say the shift from private prisons is a good thing, but caution it isn’t a fixall for the chronic issues facing New Mexico’s prison system.
Steven Robert Allen, director of the New Mexico Prison and Jail Project, said prison corporations are “bad things” due to their human rights records and lower staffing levels, but said the declining prison population trend is much more significant.
For instance, he said he has still heard reports from inmates at the Clayton prison about excessive force and inadequate medical care even after the state’s 2019 takeover of the facility.
“Some people think it’s worse than under the private prison company,” he said.
And even at New Mexico’s state-run prisons, health care and food services are provided by private contractors.
“You can get rid of the private facility, but you still have these corporations making a ton of money off of punishing people and incarcerating them,” Allen said.
Lalita Moskowitz, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, said other companies will also still profit off incarceration under a public prison model, such as the companies who make the GPS ankle monitors.
“Many of the conditions in the prisons don’t necessarily improve dramatically with the state taking over,” Moskowitz said. “But often, the problems have to do with low staffing, lack of access to medical care, and lack of access to other kinds of programming that have often to do with the location of the prison itself, or just the nature of running a prison.”
What happens next
Once the two announced takeovers occur, the shift back toward state-run prisons will leave just two privately run prisons in New Mexico — the Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs and the Otero County Prison Facility in Chaparral.
Tafoya Lucero did not rule out the possibility of a state takeover for those prisons, but said it’s premature to speculate.
She also suggested the Chaparral prison, in particular, would pose complications since it also houses federal immigration detainees.
Even as is, New Mexico’s recent shift has turned heads among prison experts nationwide, she added.
“It’s not common for state entities to take over private facilities in other states,” Tafoya Lucero said.
For now, a huge projected state revenue windfall could provide ample dollars to cover higher costs posed by state-run prisons.
But increased control will likely come with increased scrutiny and, as New Mexico’s recent prison history has shown, even fixes can come with their own set of problems.