Over the last five years, while local jails in the United States have been holding fewer people, New Mexico’s largest jail has been detaining nearly one-third more people while they await their day in court.
That’s according to a recent study of the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), located just outside Albuquerque in Bernalillo County.
Even though MDC hasn’t been as crowded in the last 10 years as it was historically, it’s been slowly holding more and more people, said Paul Guerin, director of the Center for Applied Research and Analysis at the University of New Mexico Institute for Social Research, which has studied the jail’s population since the 1990s…