On any given day last October, the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center outside of Albuquerque held an average of 1,803 people, the highest figure since December 2014. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM)
Over the last five years, while local jails in the United States have been holding fewer people, New Mexico’s largest jail has been detaining nearly one-third more people while they await their day in court.
That’s according to a recent study of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), located just outside Albuquerque in Bernalillo County.
Even though MDC hasn’t been as crowded in the last 10 years as it was historically, it’s been slowly holding more and more people, said Paul Guerin, director of the Center for Applied Research and Analysis at the University of New Mexico Institute for Social Research, which has studied the jail’s population since the 1990s.
Between 2019 and 2024, jail populations in the U.S. decreased by 15.3%, while the MDC’s population has grown by 30.3%, the report states.
Police-reported crime peaked in the U.S. in the 1990s and has generally decreased since, according to the report. While trends in police-reported crime in New Mexico, Bernalillo County and Albuquerque have always exceeded national trends, they have also gone down overall, the report states.
Over the last 10 years, local and state policymakers have affected how many people are booked into MDC and how long they stay there, according to the report. State policies and laws that have reduced these figures include voters’ approval of bail reform in 2016; the state Supreme Court’s case management order in 2015; and the statewide stay-at-home order in March 2020 that slowed the spread of COVID-19, according to the report.
On the other hand, policies that have packed more people into the jail have included New Mexico State Police “surges” in Bernalillo County in 2019 and 2021, and NMSP’s “North Star” operations with the Albuquerque Police Department, the report states.
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On any given day last October, MDC held an average of 1,803 people, the highest figure since December 2014, the report states.
While the MDC was designed to hold as many as 2,236 people, it’s not allowed to exceed a cap of 1,950 people under a 2017 settlement agreement between the City of Albuquerque and people incarcerated in the jail who sued more than two decades earlier.
However, the report states that MDC “is closer to the McClendon Cap than ever in the last eight years.”
Guerin told Source NM in an interview that authorities are holding more people in MDC because they’re booking more people into the jail, and holding them there for longer periods of time under more serious charges.
Guerin said people in MDC should primarily be there under lower-level charges because those who are charged with more serious crimes are out of their communities for longer periods of time, so they have fewer chances of returning to jail.
In a given year, approximately 40% of the people held in MDC are there two or more times under less serious charges, the report states.
“The jail is consistently receiving people who are cycling in and out of jail,” Guerin said.
A prior report on pretrial detention found that more than 40% of people who are held in jail while facing felony charges stay in the jail for 120 days on average, only to have their cases dismissed, Guerin said.
The problem, Guerin said, is that these are people the system believes are the most serious offenders, and more than 40% of them don’t receive a conviction, for various reasons, good and bad.
This results in not only wasted money holding people in MDC, but also social costs like people being away from their families and losing their jobs, Guerin said.
The report suggests that policymakers consider whether people in MDC should be there or not.
“We should be more efficient in prosecuting cases if we think they’re guilty,” Guerin said. “I don’t know why we don’t.”
Guerin and co-author Senior Research Scientist Elise Ferguson published the report in June, and it has received disappointingly few reactions, he said.
“We and others who produce information that’s useful for policymakers, often that information is not used,” he said.
Guerin said he thinks what is driving policy instead are people’s impressions, anecdotal stories, politics and sensationalized media coverage.
“Information should drive policy,” he said. “My hope is that information would just inform policy, but I don’t even think we see that oftentimes.”
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