Legislators vowing to get tough on crime this legislative session will face opposition from a coalition of advocates bent on breaking the cycle of mass incarceration in New Mexico.
The day after the 60-day 2025 Legislative Session kicked off last week, advocates and statewide organizations gathered at a press conference to announce their intentions to examine all public safety bills introduced this session.
Daniel Williams, a policing policy advocate from the New Mexico chapter of the ACLU, said at the Thursday conference that the coalition’s focus for this session is to support bills that would help vulnerable domestic violence survivors get and stay housed, improve access to healthcare, improve behavioral healthcare and expand “compassionate, research-based approaches” to substance use and abuse.
“For decades, this state and this nation have received so-called tough-on-crime policies that have fueled mass incarceration and harmed our communities without making us safer,” Williams said. “This is not the solution that New Mexico needs now. Everyone in New Mexico deserves policies to come from this building that will build stability in their communities, to keep us all safe.”
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said in her State of the State address that New Mexico is in “a state of crisis,” and punctuated her message by calling on the legislature to toughen penalties and tighten sentencing for certain crimes in this year’s bill proposals. She also called for them to push for civil commitment for offenders in need of treatment and reforming criminal competency laws that “let too many dangerous people remain on the streets” in this year’s bill proposals.
“Too many of us simply don’t feel safe in our communities, and that is absolutely, frankly, completely unacceptable,” Lujan Grisham said. “These are really just common-sense solutions that will keep families safer and will reduce violent crime.”
Standing alongside the advocates last week was Santa Fean Adam John Griego, an auto shop owner, adjunct automotive professor at Santa Fe Community College and member of the ACLU’s Justice Advisory and Accountability Board.
He’s also a former inmate who served two years in prison on drug possession charges.
“It's really weird, but I never had a view of the carceral system before I went into it. I didn't know what it was. I will tell you, there is no reform that occurs in any facility,” Griego tells SFR. “We're entirely left on our own to fend for ourselves.”
Griego said in a speech at the press conference that New Mexico must shift its focus toward “real community, rehabilitation, teaching skills and removing these systemic barriers that keep returning citizens from dreaming again.”
“We can do this together if we empower all to thrive through restorative justice rather than perpetual punishment,” he added.
Griego says while he was never “in and out” of the carceral system in his younger years, having picked up his felony charge at the age of 45, he has struggled with addiction for much of his life, and grew up in an unsafe home environment.
“When I was 15 years old, my dad threatened to kill me,” he says, recalling his tendency to run away from home since the age of 13. “My mom put me on an airplane, and I flew to Vermont by myself…that was kind of the start of my high school.”
Griego was born in Seattle and moved around for much of his life—including Virginia, Vermont and Maryland in his youth. He settled in Santa Fe after graduating from college in 1998.
In the throes of his substance abuse problems, Griego said he ran cocaine from El Paso to Santa Fe for six years. His drug possession charge followed trauma: a divorce, then the illnesses and subsequent deaths of his parents. Two weeks after he was sentenced, his daughter gave birth to his grandson.
“I lost everything,” he says. “It was eight years of pure hell…and I came out, and I just really felt like it was so, so important to be super intentional about how I live.”
In 2022, he says he became involved with advocating for what would become the state’s Voting Rights Act, which would in 2023 restore the right of previously incarcerated individuals to vote upon release from custody. A woman named Nora Ranney, a voting rights advocate who founded national justice reform nonprofit Justice Impact Solutions, approached him to ask if he’d be interested in advocacy work.
“That was my beginning gene,” Griego says. “I’m now an educator, and I'm taking that role very seriously. And I want to educate people. I want to get people skills…I want to help people become successful outside of prison. There's so many barriers in place.”
In addition to his educational and entrepreneurial work in the automotive industry, Griego leads a busy life in advocacy for the ACLU. He also works with Organizers in the Land of Enchantment (OLÉ) and leads a men’s Bible study group in the early hours of the morning at the Grove Church on Santa Fe’s Southside.
“I want to be about the solution,” Griego says. “The solution really is that we need to help people get the trauma support they need.”
Other organizations aligning with the ACLU of New Mexico include the Albuquerque Health Care for the Homeless, the Center for Civic Policy, Equality New Mexico, the New Mexico Coalition to End Homelessness, the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico and more.
At the press conference, Williams did not specify support for any bills lawmakers have already introduced into the session, but told SFR the organizations are having conversations with said lawmakers.
“We expect to see some things introduced very soon, but there's nothing that we are ready to share,” Williams said, later adding the coalition has already begun looking at “a slew of bills” introduced this session they believe would fuel mass incarceration, such as those that would increase penalties and sentencing for certain crimes.
“We know that those are shown by evidence and experience not to make us safer, and so we're looking closely at all of those,” Williams said.