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.
If one were to read a newly released survey of state-by-state spending on corrections, you’d get the mistaken impression that New Mexico is throwing more money at prisons these days.
The report, completed by the Vera Institute of Justice and profiled by Stateline.org this morning, shows that spending on New Mexico’s prisons was up by less than 1 percent from last year to this year. While technically true — the Legislature increased by $1 million the amount of state money for corrections this past session — the report doesn’t present the larger picture. And that’s that dollars earmarked for incarcerating offenders in New Mexico has dropped over the past two state budget cycles.
Here’s why: In a special legislative session last year New Mexico state lawmakers cut the corrections’ budget by $11.4 million in the middle of the fiscal 2010 budget year. That means the corrections’ department ended the year with a much smaller budget than it started with. That’s why the Vera Institute of Justice found a slight increase when comparing this year’s corrections spending in New Mexico to last year’s. In effect, the $1 million added by New Mexico state lawmakers amounted to a small increase, but only when one leaves out last year’s mid-year cut of more than $11 million.
