Officials in Santa Fe, N.M., are considering changes to how inmates are released from the county jail after several were fatally struck by cars while walking back to town after being released, often at night.
At a hearing before Santa Fe County commissioners on Tuesday, jail officials listed several policy changes that they were considering in the wake of a New York Times article that revealed that more people had died after being released from the jail than previously known. The proposals include entering into a partnership with Uber or Lyft, providing vouchers for public transit and giving inmates reflective gear to make them more visible on the remote highway that leads into town.
All five county commissioners said something should be done to make the situation safer, and several said they would consider urging the New Mexico Department of Transportation to extend an existing pedestrian trail several miles farther toward the jail.
“It’s definitely necessary, and I think that we could probably get behind that pretty quickly,” Commissioner Justin S. Greene said of the request to the state.
One commissioner suggested temporarily reducing the speed limit of the highway until more could be done.
The Times report revealed that five people in the past decade had been fatally struck by cars on the highway, N.M. 14, shortly after being released from the Santa Fe County Adult Correctional Facility, four of them since March 2020. Some of the people had not made it a mile before they were killed. Several others were injured.
“Anything that we can do to even stop those five — even just one — we’re open to ideas,” said Wade Ellis, the deputy warden of the jail.
Jail officials, responding to judges’ release orders, often release inmates after buses have stopped running for the day. They said that they offered people the option of waiting for a ride to a bus stop near the city’s Police Department, but that there were often delays in freeing an officer to drive them, and that most released inmates declined the ride.
So far this year, 259 people have been released after 6 p.m., or about 17 percent of all those released, according to a presentation at the meeting on Tuesday. Less than 5 percent of all released inmates have opted to wait for the jail to give them a ride to the bus stop, according to the data.
Local leaders have noted the danger of the walk almost since the jail was moved to its current location in 1998, but little has been done. Nearly every day, people released from the jail can be seen walking along the shoulder of the highway as cars and trucks pass by at 55 miles per hour or faster.
The jail is in a remote area south of the City of Santa Fe, two miles from the closest gas station and about three miles from where a sidewalk begins.
Annabelle Romero, who oversaw the jail from 2005 to 2012, said she had always worried about the danger of people walking along the highway, particularly at night.
During her term, she said, she went so far as to refuse to release inmates at night unless they had someone to pick them up. She would keep them jailed until the morning, even if it meant defying a judge’s release order.
“I thought I’d get complaints about that, but I didn’t,” Ms. Romero said.
At the hearing on Tuesday, jail officials noted that they were legally obligated to release an inmate once they received a judge’s orders to do so, and said they were looking into speeding up the process to reduce the number of nighttime releases.
Lisa Cacari Stone, one of the county commissioners, said at the hearing that she felt accountable to the families of people who have been killed and that the commission must address the problem quickly.
If the commissioners and jail officials do not take action, she said, “that would be a true failure of all of us.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice. He is from upstate New York.
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