Ledes from the Land of Enchantment

Newly announced inmate addresses show 30% in Albuquerque. Proponents want to exclude them from political maps.

While nearly a third of New Mexico state prisoners who disclosed their whereabouts prior to incarceration gave Albuquerque addresses, the country’s once-a-decade census counts them as living in smaller towns and rural areas.

About a quarter of the population of New Mexico lives in Albuquerque, so it’s no surprise that the correction system has a prevalence of residents from New Mexico’s largest city.

But correction data received from New Mexico In Depth suggests that the city’s voting rights are dispersed in smaller towns and rural areas where New Mexico’s prisons are located, a practice that proponents of criminal law reform refer to as “gerrymandering.” Prison communities – often rural and nationally rather white – benefit here, as prisoners from other countries increase their population without being able to vote.

Proponents urge New Mexico to end the practice in the coming months as the state’s new Citizen Redistribution Committee and state lawmakers participate in a decade-long redistribution that will shape the New Mexico political landscape for years to come.

And at least it is said that the last addresses the inmates give the officers when they enter the prison could achieve this goal.

The ideal solution would be for the Corrections Department to give the same records that New Mexico gave to the Citizen Redistricting Committee, said Mario Jimenez, campaign leader for Common Cause New Mexico.

If the committee requested these records, the law enforcement department would “be sure to share them with you,” spokesman Eric Harrison wrote in an email.

Samantha Osaki, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, said ending the census of prisoners in the areas where they are held would create a fairer redistribution process.

“Bernalillo County residents who are already suffering from the loss of parents, friends and neighbors from mass incarceration will suffer doubly from the loss of political representation,” Osaki said.

New Mexico In Depth obtained the final addresses of 5,082 inmates after making a file request. The correctional department initially refused to disclose the information, but handed over the records after the New Mexico attorney general’s office found the department wrongly denied the application.

The department created the address list in mid-July. As of Monday, the state’s inmate population was 5,670. Harrison attributed the gap to fluctuations in the prison population and to the fact that the addresses were self-disclosed at the time of admission, meaning that some prisoners did not offer their place of residence prior to incarceration.

The addresses include half and transitional houses as well as 37 “homeless” entries. And 6% are international addresses from Arizona, Texas, and a few other states.

The data provided by the agency have been given a reservation. A disclosure attached to the records stated that “careful care was taken to ensure the accuracy of the report data” but “due to inconsistencies and errors over decades of data entry … it is virtually impossible to conclude that all of this data is completely correct are”. . “

Data collection has long been an issue in New Mexico. For example, it is unclear what the exact racial ramifications of New Mexico prison sentences have because the state does not adequately track the race or ethnicity of prisoners. Proponents say that nationally a significant proportion of the prisoners from urban areas who add to the population of smaller, more rural areas during the census are colored.

The data shows that the vast majority of New Mexico prisoner addresses – 84% – are from outside the state’s jail cities; 31% are in Albuquerque, which has no prison.

All New Mexico prison cities grew out of an influx of prisoners. In some New Mexico jailed communities, detainees constitute a significant portion of the local population. In one, more than two in ten people are behind bars; and in another more than every tenth inhabitant. But only a handful of people in state prisons announced that they had lived in these cities prior to their imprisonment.

Santa Rosa, host of the Guadalupe County Correctional Center, has a total population of 2,850 and an incarcerated population of 585 at the 2020 census, which means the city is 20.5% incarcerated. According to the law enforcement agency, there are five inmates in the state prison with Santa Rosa addresses.

Clayton, host of the Northeast New Mexico Correctional Facility, has a total population of 2,643, of whom 15.5% are incarcerated. There are six inmates in state prisons with Clayton addresses.

Grants, which houses both the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility and the Northwest New Mexico Correctional Center, is approximately 7.7% incarcerated, with 871 inmates between the two prisons. There are 28 inmates held in state prisons with grant addresses.

In Hobbs, home to the largest prison in the state, prisoners make up 3% of the population. There are 101 prisoners who have Hobbs addresses listed, which is a little less than 10% of the total prison population.

A number of other prisons are located just outside the city or city limits in unincorporated areas of the counties.

In addition to shifting political power out of non-prison cities, prison inmates can distort political power within communities if city guides fail to ensure that political maps are drawn in a way that takes into account those prisoners who are not eligible to vote. If prisoners are included in the local population when drawing municipal political district maps, a smaller circle of residents can elect local officials in the prison district than in other districts.

The ideal solution, proponents say, would be for the Census Bureau to count inmates as residents of their home parishes. Without this change, states can legislate to end the practice, as some have done in recent years.

New Mexico has no law on how to avoid the greater political power of the prison districts. Proponents say, however, that the state could avoid concentrating prison inmates in a few districts by either counting prisoners at their last known address, distributing the prison population evenly across the districts, or not using prisoners for political representation at all in the censuses.

The newly formed Citizen Redistribution Committee is in the process of drafting district map proposals that will go to the legislature by October 30th and will hold several public sessions over the next month and a half. The state legislators will accept one of the committee’s proposals or develop new ones.

“The CRC has raised concerns about gerrymandering in prisons during a number of meetings,” Committee Chairman Edward Chavez wrote in an email. “We acknowledge the problem and believe that it is a legitimate concern … We do not have the last known addresses of people before they were arrested on the day of the census. We have not asked any of the prisons or prisons for the data and do not know whether they have the data or would pass it on. “

Common Cause New Mexico’s Jimenez called for an end to prison sentences at the Legislature’s Judicial, Corrective and Judicial Committee meeting on Aug. 10, at which the Citizen Redistribution Committee gave an update.

Jail time, Jimenez told the Legislative Committee, was “an injustice not just for people in prison, but for all New Mexicans.”

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