The Detention Center
McKinley County Adult Detention Center (MCADC)
- Operated byMcKinley County, under the oversight of the Jail Authority Board (McKinley County and City of Gallup officials)
- Who runs itJames Lehner — Warden, McKinley County Adult Detention Center (Steve Silversmith is Deputy Warden and acting PREA Coordinator). Reports to: Jail Authority Board (joint McKinley County and City of Gallup officials)
- How this was establishedThe county lists detention as its own department separate from the Sheriff's Office; the reporting line itself is not published.
- Jail address255 South Boardman Dr., Gallup, NM 87301
- Beds328-bed long- and short-term facility
- StaffAbout 55 correctional and administrative staff
- Contract bed spaceCounty states it contracts bed space with federal, local, state and tribal agencies at negotiated prices; no rates or contracts published
- Main line505-979-7224
- Jail Authority BoardListed as its own agenda category in the county Agenda Center
Source: McKinley County Adult Detention Center · checked 2026-08-24
Transparency rating
3/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✓Beds and daily population
- ✓What it costs taxpayers
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- Beds328
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff James Maiorano III
- OfficeMcKinley County Sheriff
- How the office is filledElected countywide; listed among McKinley County elected officials
- Sheriff's Office address1000 East Aztec Ave, Gallup, NM 87301
- Runs the jailNo. The Adult Detention Center is a separate county department operating under the oversight of the Jail Authority Board
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: McKinley County Sheriff's Office · checked 2026-08-24
The Judges
New Mexico district and magistrate judges are initially appointed by the Governor to fill a vacancy, then stand in a partisan election at the next general election, and thereafter face non-partisan retention elections. They are state judicial officers, not county officials. McKinley County is served by the Eleventh Judicial District (shared with San Juan County) and the Gallup Magistrate Court. The district's own pages name its courts but publish no judge roster; the about-this-district/judges page could not be reached.
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-08-24
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners →
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Capacity is marked yes on the strength of the published 328-bed figure; the county does not publish a daily or average daily population.
- The county's Transparency Portal publishes an FY26 Final Budget and a 2025 Employee Position and Annual Salary Report. The FY26 budget PDF is a scanned image with no extractable text, so a detention-specific line item could not be read from it.
- The PREA page is a zero-tolerance policy statement with a coordinator contact; no PREA audit report is published.
- The Inmate Phone Calls page describes collect calls and a PayTel account but publishes no per-minute or per-call rates; no commissary or video-visit rate schedule was found.
- No inmate roster or in-custody search was found on the county's own site.
- New Mexico has no mandatory statewide jail inspection body. The NM Association of Counties runs a voluntary accreditation program; no accreditation status for McKinley County was found published.
- NMSA 1978 Section 33-15-3, the death-in-custody reporting statute, applies to private correctional facilities only. County jails in New Mexico have no state death-reporting requirement.
- What was tried: the county site could not be retrieved through the normal page-fetch path (robots.txt timeouts) and was read directly over HTTPS instead; pages read include /150/Adult-Detention-Center, /165/Sheriffs-Office, /178/Elected-Officials, /183, /185, /186, /203/Transparency-Portal, /304/Inmate-Phone-Calls, /308/PREA, /129/Agendas-Minutes and /agendacenter.
- Three-member Board of County Commissioners elected by district: Danielle Notah (District I), Walt Eddy (District II), Robert Baca (District III). Offices at 207 West Hill Ave, Gallup. The Agenda Center carries a separate Jail Authority Board agenda category alongside the Board of Commissioners.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in McKinley County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-08-24 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered