Albuquerque jails are in a crisis, and this time it isn't the prisoners who are causing the problem.
Staff shortages have led to two states of emergency being declared, which threaten to put corrections officers and the general public in danger, according to KOB4 News.
“It is not a good situation on some of these days,” Joseph Trujeque, president of the jail’s union, Local 2499, told KOB4 News. “I’m just scared something bad is going to happen or an officer is going to get killed, and it’s going to take something horrific for the county to act.”
Staffing shortages at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) forced the facility to call for a state of emergency last weekend when only 18 officers were available to watch over 1,400 inmates. Normally it takes 62 officers to be fully staffed, according to the KOB4 News.
Trujeque said county officials could help the rampant staff shortages by reducing the qualifications required to be hired. Of the 500 people who applied to work at MDC last year, only 70 were hired.
“The county manager and the county commissioners could make this happen tomorrow if they wanted to,” Trujeque told KOB4 News. “So why don’t they? They really could, and they are not. Why? They are sitting on their hands and letting the jail sink into a hole, and I do not know why.”
There are 411 positions that need to be filled in order to fully staff the jail, and right now MDC has only about 200 employees.
“We didn’t have enough staff to staff the critical positions at the jail,” Trujeque told KOB4 News. “Basically, the jail is declaring a staffing emergency, so that they can make people work more. It’s not safe for the officers, it’s not safe for the inmates, it’s not safe for the public.”
KOB4 News has reported on a deadly jailhouse beating, a suicide and "a growing number of lawsuits that cite a mountain of inadequacies -- all centered around not having enough staff."
