I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Some of New Mexico’s prisons are woefully understaffed as they struggle to recruit and keep correctional officers, according to state data and interviews.
Take, for example, the Roswell Correctional Center, a Level II facility with an average daily population of about 330 inmates. A quarter of all correctional officer jobs are vacant — or 27 percent — nearly double the 14 percent of openings for correctional officer jobs across the entire prison system, numbers show.
That staffing shortage recently led the New Mexico Corrections Department to send its highly trained Special Operations Response Team to search for contraband and to avert possible violence among that facility’s inmates, an agency spokeswoman confirmed.
“They needed more manpower than what the employees could do,” spokeswoman Rosie Sais told The Independent. “There was reason to suspect that there were inmates causing trouble.”
The special team interviewed inmates over a two-day period and ultimately 12 prisoners were transferred to the Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs, Sais said.
The staffing problem doesn’t affect only smaller facilities like Roswell, however. At the Hobbs facility, one the state’s largest correctional facilities with a daily population of more than 1,200, one in every five correctional officer jobs is unfilled, state numbers show.
The staffing shortages at Roswell and Hobbs is emblematic of a larger challenge confronting the state’s corrections system.
Some prisons, particularly smaller ones in Grants and Springer, whose vacancy rates for July hover near Roswell’s, struggle to recruit job candidates, Sais told The Independent on Thursday.
“The vacancy rate tends to be higher at the smaller prisons because there are greater recruiting challenges in the smaller communities,” Sais wrote.
There is a large disparity from one facility to another in vacancy rates, numbers show.
The state penitentiary in Santa Fe struggles with a 14 percent vacancy rate. Meanwhile, the number of officer openings at the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility in Los Lunas is only at 9 percent, agency numbers show.
Sais made sure to point out that Roswell’s high vacancy rate isn’t related to recent state budget cuts.
“The higher vacancy rate at RCC is not related to funding, as there is not a freeze on hiring correctional staff,” she told The Independent.
Like most of state government, the state’s corrections agency has been hard hit by New Mexico’s budget troubles, with spending trimmed by more than $10 million over the last two budget years.
Here are the vacancy rates at each of the state’s facilities for the month of July:
Penitentiary of New Mexico,, Santa Fe -14 percent
Central New Mexico Correctional Facility, Los Lunas – 9 percent
Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility, Las Cruces – 7 percent
Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, Grants- 25 percent
Springer Correctional Center, Springer – 22 percent
Roswell Correctional Center, Roswell – 27 percent
Guadalupe Correctional Facility, Santa Rosa – 14 percent
New Mexico Women’s Correctional Facility, Grants – 17 percent
Lea County Correctional Facility, Hobbs- 22 percent
Northeast New Mexico Detention Facility, Clayton – 13 percent
