Posted November 21, 2024
Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman — one of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s top advisors on criminal justice issues — wants New México to focus much of its deterrence efforts on young people.
His plans, if approved, would lead to harsher punishment for children and young adults.
As the lead prosecutor for New México’s population center of Albuquerque, Bregman has outsized influence on the statewide crime agenda. But it’s not clear that fellow Democrats in the Legislature will sign off during the 2025 session on everything he proposed.
“Too many people, too many victims, are killed by juveniles in our community,” Bregman said last week to the House and Senate’s Courts Corrections and Justice Committee. “We need all the treatment we can get for these young people and their families, but at the same time, there has to be a little bit of an ounce of consequence.”
Acts committed by New México children that would be designated as a crime under the law, called “delinquent referrals,” increased slightly between 2021 and 2023 but are down since 2019, according to data published by the Children Youth and Families Department’s Juvenile Justice Services division.
A broad look at crime
In the upcoming session, lawmakers will consider a broader crime package that would create a new trust fund to pay for more drug treatment programs, and revisit previous attempts to rewrite the state’s criminal competency laws, Senate President Pro Tem Mimi Stewart (D-Albuquerque) told the Albuquerque Journal.
The crime package is supported by legislative leaders in the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, said Sen. Joseph Cervantes (D-Las Cruces).
We have this backwards system where the youth have to commit an offense to receive resources and alternatives, while others are overlooked until they do something that makes you see them, and they really feel cared for. That’s a failure of the state, not our youth.”
Xiuy Soto, La Plazita Institute
Bregman said he supports the idea of getting more money into behavioral health treatment but urged lawmakers to go further.
Bregman is proposing an overhaul of New México’s Delinquency Act, which governs how the state can hold children accountable for behavior that would be considered criminal if they were over 18. He gave lawmakers a document outlining 35 changes he wants.
Taken together, his proposals would make it significantly easier to hold children in juvenile detention centers and to prosecute them as adults.
Bregman said his top priority is to expand the list of conduct for which the state can charge a young person as an adult. The law allows the state to prosecute a child as an adult only if they’re accused of first-degree murder.
His second priority is to allow the state to incarcerate a child who is convicted of some violent crimes until they are 25 years old. The law requires they be let go on their 21st birthday.
Beyond proposals focused on youth, Bregman also wants to increase the penalty for unlawful possession of a gun from a misdemeanor to a felony. He also wants to make it illegal under New México law to convert a semi-automatic firearm into an automatic one using a device usually called a “switch” – something already illegal under federal law.
What do lawmakers think?
Rep. Christine Chandler (D-Los Alamos) told Source New México she can get behind Bregman’s gun violence proposals, but that she needs more time to digest the sprawling pitch on crime committed by young people.
Cervantes questioned what it would accomplish to prohibit switches under state law and suggested a better solution would be to go after the businesses making the devices.
He and Chandler have tried to open up gun manufacturers to liability claims in civil court, and Cervantes said he will probably introduce something similar next year.
“We’re trying to find a way to hold manufacturers of unlawful weapons accountable, and do so civilly,” Cervantes said.
Xiuy Soto, a youth organizer with La Plazita Institute, which advocates for reducing youth incarceration in the South Valley in Bernalillo County, said lawmakers should take a more holistic approach to preventing crime committed by young people in the first place.
If more money was put into employing youth, he said, they wouldn’t get caught up in criminal activity.
“We have this backwards system where the youth has to commit an offense to receive resources and alternatives, while others are overlooked until they do something that makes you see them, and they really feel cared for,” Soto said. “That’s a failure of the state, not our youth.”
Austin Fisher is a Senior Reporter for Source New Mexico. This
article is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.
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