Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center

An internet outage that began Thursday afternoon was resolved Friday evening at the Bernalillo County jail. The Metropolitan Detention Center had stopped releasing people from the jail during the outage.

Bernalillo County announced the death of two inmates this week at the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been over 20 inmate deaths at the center since 2020, but these are the first since University of New Mexico Hospital took over as its health care provider earlier this summer.

Peter Cubra has been advocating for the rights of incarcerated people in New Mexico since the 1980s. Now the retired Albuquerque attorney is sounding a note of optimism as University of New Mexico hospital takes over the medical services contract at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

State prisons are required under the U.S. Constitution to provide “adequate medical care” to those they incarcerate. However, prisons in New Mexico and 16 other states do not provide inmates with medication for opioid addiction, and neither do most of its county jails. Advocates are calling on lawmakers to expand this treatment in New Mexico lockups in the upcoming legislative session.

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Bernalillo County does not have sufficient medical staff for the 1,200 incarcerated people inside, according to attorneys representing inmates. This has been a long-term issue at the jail. Austin Fisher from Source New Mexico is continuing his investigation about this lack of medical staff, which is the second of a two-part series on security and healthcare issues at the detention center.

The Metropolitan Detention Center in Bernalillo County has been on lockdown after a county-wide ransomware attack knocked out the jail’s internet, most of its data systems and all of its security cameras last week. The attack also created barriers to inmates contacting their attorneys, which is a constitutional right.

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