Little to no data about how many homeless people held in New Mexico jails

Homeless people in the U.S. are more likely to get booked into jail multiple times a year and, when they do get locked up, they’re held longer than average despite being charged with violent crimes less often than others, according to a new report.

According to the nonprofit thinktank Prison Policy Initiative’s Feb. 11 report, homeless people are more likely to end up jailed for crimes such as trespassing, possession of amphetamines, disorderly conduct or drunkenness and petty theft.

The data suggest that cities and counties are turning to their jails to address behaviors that homeless people often engage in because they are homeless or poor, Senior Research Analyst Leah Wang wrote.

However, basic information about the housing status of people being held in New Mexico’s jails is hard to come by.

Data from jail rosters show homeless people make up approximately 4.5% of all jail bookings in the United States, the report found. Wang wrote that this suggests cities and counties are unnecessarily and excessively jailing homeless people.

The data translate to approximately 205,000 different homeless people going to jails each year, making up nearly a third of all people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2023, Wang wrote.

Still, the figure significantly underestimates the population, Wang wrote, because many more homeless people may have listed the address of a shelter, a relative or another location when they were booked. Only 20% of the jail rosters in the data had one or more entries indicating a homeless person was booked in an entire year, the report noted.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in 2024 allowing local governments to ban outdoor camping even if there is no homeless shelter space available, the cities of Española and Albuquerque are among the approximately 150 cities in 32 states that have passed or strengthened such ordinances, Stateline reports.

PPI used jail roster data collected by the Jail Data Initiative at the New York University Public Safety Lab. Only four of New Mexico’s 33 counties are included in the data: San Juan, Curry, Socorro and Lea. None of them indicate someone’s housing status.

Spokespersons for the Legislative Finance Committee, the Administrative Office of the Courts and the Law Offices of the Public Defender all told Source NM on Tuesday that they don’t track the housing status of people being booked into jails in New Mexico.

Representatives for New Mexico Counties and the Institute for Social Research at the University of New Mexico were not immediately available for comment on Tuesday.