By Dan Schwartz
The Santa Fe New Mexican
SANTA FE, N.M. — New Mexico this year will lock up almost as many people as its prisons can hold, but its salaries are too low to hire and keep a full complement of guards, the state says.
A handful of new laws to lengthen sentences, the focus of Republican House members in this year’s legislative session, could add inmates to a prison system that will reach 98 percent capacity by July, according to the New Mexico Sentencing Commission. It’s part of a trend that has seen prison populations grow during the last five years.
The state in 2011 had a daily average of about 6,650 inmates. The daily average this year is about 7,040 prisoners, nearly a 6 percent increase.
More than a third of the jobs for corrections officers are vacant at several state prisons, meaning the guards on staff have more inmates to watch and must work longer hours. For instance, prison officers in Los Lunas work mandatory overtime that keeps them on the job 72 hours a week.
That schedule takes a toll. Nearly every new guard leaves after three years, according to statistics from the Department of Corrections.
The combination of a growing inmate population and an understaffed prison workforce bothers many state lawmakers and prison employees. They remember the 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico in which inmates killed 33 fellow prisoners and beat and raped guards. They say sending more defendants into the system without adequate staffing creates additional danger behind prison walls.
“It’s rough,” said Lee Ortega, an officer at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe. “I’m all for getting tough on crime, but we need a place to put them. We’re almost full now.”
Corrections Secretary Gregg Marcantel said bills from this year’s legislative session that Gov. Susana Martinez signed into law probably won’t worsen financial or operational problems for prisons. Two high-profile, tough-on-crime measures will increase prison time for people convicted of drunken driving or owning, distributing or creating child pornography.
But legislators narrowed the number of offenders who will be affected by the drunken-driving bill because of worries about prison costs. The law will apply to drivers convicted of eight or more drunken-driving offenses. The original bill would have increased penalties for fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh offenses in a state where chronic drunken drivers are a scourge.
Under the measure that lawmakers approved and Martinez signed last week, an eighth drunken-driving offense is a second-degree felony with a sentence of 12 years, 10 of which are mandatory. The previous law carried a mandatory sentence of only two years.
The other bill will increase the base sentence for those who possess child pornography from 18 months to 10 years in prison.
At the penitentiary where Ortega works, nearly a quarter of the guard positions are unfilled. Even so, it has far fewer vacancies than other state prisons. Forty-two percent of the jobs at a prison in Grants are unfilled. The prison in Springer has a vacancy rate of 49 percent, and fewer than half of the positions of correctional officer are filled at the Roswell prison.
Officers are tense, Ortega said. Because there are so few of them, one might watch 100 inmates in a prison with a lower security level. At prisons where more dangerous inmates are housed, one guard might supervise 48 inmates.
The average officer works 64 hours a week. Some work 72. Union leaders say many guards are sleep-deprived, walking their rounds in a state of mind that makes it easy to miss details and hard to think critically.
“The inmates know you’re tired. They obviously know we’re outnumbered,” Ortega said.
An average officer’s wages are between $13 and $14 an hour, said Connie Derr, an executive with a union representing prison employees, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Low wages are the reason many of them leave, she said.
The pay is among the bottom five for corrections officers nationally, Marcantel wrote in a report about the state of the prison system.
Legislators authorized another $4.5 million in this year’s budget to improve their pay. But nearly three times as much — $13 million — was allocated to treat state inmates with Hepatitis C. More than 3,000 prisoners in the state have been diagnosed with the disease.
Rick Tedrow, president of the New Mexico District Attorneys Association, said the drunken-driving bill is likely to increase inmate populations because it requires mandatory sentencing. But, he said, it doesn’t target many offenders. Few people are convicted of more than three DWIs, said Tedrow, a district attorney in San Juan County.
Marcantel said he knows New Mexicans have asked state officials to crack down on repeat offenders. “That being said, everything in life is a balancing act,” he said in a statement. “While I will stand in support of making an eighth DWI a second-degree felony, or allowing judges access to juvenile records, or strengthening our child pornography laws, I will just as passionately argue for funding to cover our needs, provide programming to rehabilitate, and pay our officers a competitive and fair wage that they have too long been denied.”
One bill that certain lawmakers worried would add to prison populations by using a formula, not the wisdom of judges, died in the state Senate, controlled by Democrats. The so-called “three strikes” bill also was opposed by former Republican Gov. Gary Johnson, now a Libertarian candidate for president. Johnson said bills that impose mandatory sentences crowd prisons and drive costs higher.
Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, said the former governor is right. About 15 years ago, the Legislature approved a bill that toughened drunken-driving laws. One year later, the state had to convert the New Mexico Boys’ School in Springer into a prison to hold about 500 inmates.
“The rhetoric was that the cost wasn’t going to be significant,” Smith said.
When one drunken-driving bill reached the Senate floor, lawmakers restored its sharpest teeth. They put back a homicide-by-vehicle-clause that had been removed by Smith’s Finance Committee. The change means those convicted of homicide by vehicle face a stiffer charge, that of a second-degree felony that carries more time.
“Will it increase the prison population? Yes, by one,” said Sen. Bill Sharer, R-Farmington. “And then it will make the roads safer.”
Sharer before the session testified against a prison sentence for former Secretary of State Dianna Duran, a fellow Republican and a friend of his, who pleaded guilty to two felonies and four misdemeanors in a corruption case. But he took a different stand for other defendants during the legislative session.
“The reason our prison population goes up is because first we train people that it’s no big deal and then, at some point, we go, ‘Oh, oh, now you’ve crossed the line,’ ” Sharer said. “Whether it’s breaking a window or driving drunk, we should train people early on.”
Copyright 2016 The Santa Fe New Mexican