The State Line
Before you click a county, here are the rules that county is playing by. Three questions, asked the same way of every state.
New Mexico counties largely run their own jails through elected sheriffs, with Bernalillo County's Metropolitan Detention Center as a genuine exception run by a separate, appointed county department. Legislative attempts to mandate statewide adult jail standards have repeatedly failed in the New Mexico legislature, leaving only a voluntary accreditation program run by the New Mexico Association of Counties. Several smaller counties do not operate their own jail and rely on other counties' or regional/private facilities instead. No state agency publishes county-jail deaths. An independent journalism project, nmhomicide.com, tracks jail and in-custody deaths; that is a newsroom's work, not a state disclosure.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
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. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and New Mexico’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
New Mexico — all 33 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in New Mexico was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-08-24. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Two state agencies do what these counties don't. The State Department of Health inspects every county jail each year under state law and publishes the report — Wyoming has no such agency at all — and the State Auditor and Inspector audits every county's books. Both are the state's disclosure, not the county's. Not one Oklahoma county posts its own inspection result, so every county page here links the state report instead. And on the number that matters most, no state agency stands in: not one of the 77 publishes a death in custody.