In October 2013, the number of people held at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center had reached a crisis point. The jail was operating well beyond its 2,236-bed capacity, and the county was spending more than $30,000 a day—totaling more than $1.2 million by that point in the year—to transport and house people at other county jails.
State lawmakers soon took notice and demanded that local officials take immediate action to reduce the jail population.
And so began a years-long effort by Bernalillo County officials that brought forth systemic changes to its justice system. These changes were guided by a data-driven approach that ultimately detailed the problem and provided a roadmap for how to fix it.
“The data showed this wasn’t a jail problem; this was a system problem, and we need[ed] to start understanding our system better,” said Kelly Bradford, former Bernalillo County detention reform coordinator, now statewide pretrial program manager, New Mexico’s Administrative Office of the Courts (NMAOC).
Part of the state lawmakers’ stipulations to Bernalillo was to create a criminal justice court committee that included various system stakeholders to address the issue. That meant a committee with judges and local court officials, as well as representatives from the district attorney’s office, public defender’s office, and pretrial services.
The committee embarked on a larger effort to compile data and build datasets to provide a more detailed look at not just the jail population, but the legal system as a whole. Bradford and her colleague Gilbert Jaramillo, then the Second Judicial District Court pretrial lead officer and now a New Mexico AOC pretrial data analyst, were part of the committee that began merging data and providing it to the University of New Mexico’s Institute for Social Research (UMN). UNM assisted in filling in the missing data from thousands of cases.
Up until that point, the county largely relied on paper records, which, according to Jaramillo, made it “difficult to get any type of data.”
Once the missing data was inputted and analyzed by UNM, it was presented to the committee.
While it was clear there were too many people in the local jail, the committee examined who was being admitted to the jail and why they were detained. Data showed that more than 86 percent of people jailed were detained pretrial—that is, they were not yet convicted of any crimes. At the time, local judges in Bernalillo County relied heavily on money as a condition of release.
Data also showed that nearly 70 percent of the jail’s population consisted of people of color and who spent, on average, more than 30 days incarcerated.
Finally, the data showed a deeper layer that wasn’t as obvious: how slowly the courts were processing cases. Longer case processing times result in longer periods of pretrial detention and, in turn, an increase in the average daily jail population.
It soon became clear to the various stakeholders that the size of the jail population wasn’t just a jail issue but a larger systemic issue. As Bradford said, “Our data systems didn’t talk to each other, like the courts and the jail, so judges would set what they viewed as small financial conditions and not realize these people were getting stuck in jail.”
By working collaboratively with the cross-agency committee, Bernalillo County was able to agree to a series of reforms that would address lawmakers’ demands to reduce the jail population. Those reforms included reducing the reliance on financial conditions of release, limiting the length of stay in jail for people charged with a probation violation, and creating time-specific standards to keep cases moving forward through the courts. Without the data, Jaramillo said, people would not have understood the problem and therefore would not have been able to identify these targeted solutions or implement reforms.
Today, there are roughly 1,000 people housed in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center, well below its 2,236-bed capacity. More people are being released pretrial without financial conditions, and data shows that nearly 80 percent of those released are having successful outcomes, including appearing for court and not facing new charges during release.
With the data systems now in place, both Bradford and Jaramillo agree the Bernalillo County justice system is better suited to help all people involved.
“When you start pulling back the layers of your system, your data is going to tell your story—how your system is working, what’s clicking, what’s working really well,” Bradford said. “When you find out where you want to go, your data is going to help you figure out how to get there.”
