By Phaedra Haywood
The Santa Fe New Mexican
SANTA FE, N.M. — A public employee union that represents more than 800 corrections officers in New Mexico alleges the state Corrections Department is refusing to negotiate staffing levels in good faith, instead running lockups with too few people to allow safe conditions for workers and inmates.
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees filed a complaint last week with the New Mexico Public Employee Labor Relations Board, accusing the department of “prohibited practices” and seeking a restraining order preventing officials from making changes to staffing rosters without union approval.
Union officials said this week the agency unilaterally makes staffing changes without their input.
“They know they have a responsibility to bargain, so they call us into a room and they say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’ And we say, ‘No, let’s, let’s do this. This is our counter proposal.’ And they don’t entertain a counter proposal, and they just leave,” AFSCME attorney Shane Youtz said in an interview.
“It really comes down to safety,” he said.
He added, " The Department of Corrections is trying to reduce the number of posts so that they lower their payroll. And from the correctional officer’s perspective, the reductions have gotten so dramatic ... there are not enough correctional officers to safely guard the prisoners at this point.”
A spokesperson for the Corrections Department declined to comment directly on the complaint but said safety remains the agency’s “top priority.”
“We recognize that adequate staffing is essential to both safety and the long-term success of our correctional system,” spokesperson Brittany Roembach wrote in an email.
“Like many correctional agencies across the country, we continue to face staffing challenges, but our focus remains firmly on recruitment, retention, and workplace support,” she added.
The Public Employee Labor Relations Board is set to consider the union’s complaint in a daylong hearing Thursday.
Short staffing has long been an issue in the state’s prison system. However, AFSCME Council 18 Executive Director Connie Derr said the problem has been exacerbated by the recent closure of the privately run Lea County Correctional Facility in Hobbs .
“Now you’ve got 1,000 new inmates pouring into the state system, but yet we don’t have any new additional officers to take care of them,” Derr said in an interview.
Roembach said the department “continues to take proactive steps to ensure the responsible transition of inmates” from the private facility to public ones and pointed to a recent job fair and reopening of a lower-level facility in Los Lunas and a housing unit at a state prison in Santa Rosa as actions “designed to maximize capacity, while preserving safety and operational continuity.”
“Although the Penitentiary of New Mexico is experiencing a higher vacancy rate, we are mitigating operational impacts by transferring lower-custody inmates to that facility; inmates who require fewer staff resources to safely manage,” Roembach wrote.
“Regardless of vacancy levels, we remain agile and responsive, making operational adjustments as necessary,” she added.
According to the department, “most facilities are operating with correctional security staff vacancy rates below 20%.”
Derr said, however, the department continues to chip away at staffing levels in a way that skews the data.
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“As they eliminate positions, those no longer count to the vacancy rate,” she said.
“I would say the vacancy rate right now is between 30% and 40%, and that’s vacant yet funded positions,” she added.
The department also routinely underreports inmate-on-officer assaults, which masks the dangers created by running facilities with too few guards, according to Derr.
“There’s a lot of inmate-on-officer assault, but it’s how they’re reporting it out,” she said, adding, “If a person doesn’t go to the hospital, the department doesn’t even count that; you just get bandaged up at the facility.”
Many of the corrections officers are young men and women who are just doing their jobs and facing assaults, Derr said. “They they know it’s a hard job. They know they’re going to get get hit, but it’s hard to put a price tag on that.”
Youtz said the department ignored an order the labor board handed down late last year directing it to bargain in good faith, and he expects that to happen again because the board and has few tools for enforcing its orders. He also noted state labor laws prohibit public employee union members from striking.
However, Youtz said, if the board again orders the department to bargain in good faith and the department fails to do so, the union will have laid the groundwork for bringing its concerns to the court, which can do something about it.
“Only a state District Court judge would have that authority,” he said. “So we’re moving it to that level so that we can be in front of an authority that has the ability to issue consequences that would deter their behavior.”
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