GRANTS, N.M. – The Northwest New Mexico Correctional Center on Sakalares Boulevard in Grants, New Mexico, will be changing hands. The State of New Mexico and Core-Civic, the company who currently runs and operates the prison, struck a deal to turn the private detention facility into a state-ran detention facility. This transition will be part of NM Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s plan to slow and eventually end for-profit incarceration in the state.
The transition is expected to be complete by November. The NWNMCC, which was built in 1989 and was the nation’s first privately operated all women’s prison before converting to a men’s facility in 2015, is currently privately owned by Core-Civic and houses medium level inmates that are already in state custody. NWNMCC is not the only facility being converted, the Guadalupe County Correctional
Facility which is owned by Correctional Properties Trust and operated by the GEO Group, this facility will also complete its transition to state-ownership in November.
The New Mexico Corrections Department offered no additional information about the acquisition, saying that it is only one of multiple prisons the department is taking over. In a statement, NMCD Public Information Officer Eric Harrison said that since taking office, Governor Lujan Grisham has reduced the state’s dependency on privately operated prison facilities by more than half, going from a 49.58 percent dependency on private prisons in 2019 to a 24.5 percent dependency (these numbers are based on the number of inmate beds in private and publicly owned facilities.
The state did not provide any details on how this transition will affect the employment status of the facility’s current employment. The Cibola Citizen will continue to follow this story as it develops.