As lawmakers debate banning shower cameras in children's lockups, Bernalillo County removes theirs

Yahoo

15-03-2025

Christopher Herrera speaks about his experience in the juvenile legal system during a gathering in the New Mexico Legislature on Feb. 24, 2025. (Photo by Austin Fisher / Source NM)
When Christopher Herrera was 15, he was incarcerated in the Bernalillo County Youth Services Center, a juvenile detention center in Albuquerque that holds young people aged 12 to 17 from across the state.
Every time Herrera received a visit from anyone like his mother or his lawyer, and any time he left to see a doctor, the guards afterward forced him to strip naked and searched him, even though he had been in handcuffs and in two guards' direct line of sight the entire time.
In an interview with Source NM on Wednesday, Herrera described the strip searches' emotional and psychological toll.
'In my head, it was really weird, it messed me up as a person even to this day,' he said. 'It made me feel really uncomfortable. It wasn't private or nothing like that. You would even hear staff sometimes making jokes.'
Herrera said he was held at YSC for 10 months. What he and other young people held there didn't know was that the county had installed cameras in the bathrooms, where the children shower.
Herrera said he only learned about the cameras in February because of discussions around Senate Bill 322, which would regulate strip searches in juvenile detention facilities, and ban cameras from their shower and toilet areas.
The Senate Health and Human Services Committee unanimously passed SB322 on March 3. It awaits a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sponsor Sen. Linda Lopez (D-Albuquerque) told the committee she and others toured YSC last summer and learned of the strip searches and discovered the cameras in the shower area.
'They're recorded. What happens with that recording? Who's watching? If that recording is stored, well, who goes back to look at it?' she asked the committee.
In a written statement to Source NM on Friday, Youth Services Center Director Tamera Marcantel said detention center officials disabled the cameras' video capabilities on May 15, 2024. On Friday, she said, a purchase order to remove them was approved and 'the deactivated cameras will be taken down.'
YSC 'is committed to serving public safety by providing a safe and secure environment for all residents and staff,' she added.
Deputy County Manager of Public Safety Greg Perez told Source NM in a written statement that he discussed removing the cameras in the showers with some of the incarcerated children's mothers.
'Based on those conversations, as well as operational changes within the facility, increased staffing, and remodeling, the decision was made to remove the cameras,' Perez said.
Kristen Ferguson, a spokesperson for the Bernalillo County Public Safety Division that runs the YSC, did not answer Source NM's other questions about the county government's position on SB322.
But even with the cameras removed, a future detention center administrator could reinstall them, Rodrigo Rodriguez, director of Community Organizing at La Plazita Institute, told Source NM on Friday.
Rodriguez did not join the tour of YSC but has testified in support of SB322 in committee. When Source NM informed him the county is removing the cameras, he said, 'That's great news and pretty convenient timing.'
'Thus the need for legislation to ban the practice altogether,' he said.
As for the strip searches, SB322 doesn't ban them, New Day Youth and Family Services Chief Program Officer Gerri Bachicha said, but requires the detention center administrator to sign off on each one, and for staff to document when they occur.
She said the bill would raise the standard for conducting strip searches in juvenile detention from reasonable suspicion to probable cause, which would prevent arbitrary and unjustified searches, reducing the risk of violating children's constitutional due process protections in the Fourth Amendment.
It would also enhance trust between young people and staff, which makes young people more likely to engage in rehabilitative programming, she said.
In the March 3 committee hearing, Lopez cited YSC data showing nearly 700 strip searches were conducted between June and October 2024.
Bachicha, Lopez's expert, also detailed to the committee the results of those searches: guards found no contraband in July, two pens and a pencil in August, a handwritten note in September, and a pen in October.
Those items can usually be found through a pat search, she said, but an arbitrary, blanket policy defaults to a strip search, rather than starting with a pat search.
Indeed, Herrera told Source NM, contraband didn't necessarily mean drugs. 'Contraband — to them — is us having pencils or coloring books or an extra book in our cell.'
Now as a 21-year-old adult having regained his freedom, Herrera said he regularly takes drug tests and is desensitized to urinating in front of another person.
Herrera said it made him feel less valued as a person knowing that there may be footage of him being strip searched.
'We never knew this, they didn't tell us none of this,' Herrera said. 'At the time, we were all kids. Everyone in there was under the age of 18. We would try to make jokes out of this, try to convince ourselves that it was normal, what we were going through.'
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