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Fall 2008 ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION ORDER BUNDLES ----- Green Pages Board Business |
Special to Green Pages
Susan Cava
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| Frances Gallegos |
| Frances Gallegos |
"I am a politician by necessity," Gallegos said, "and in order to shake things up, I aligned with the Green Party."
Gallegos is a dynamo from New Mexico who joined the military at age 17 in order, she says, to prove she was as good as a man. As one of eight children, she observed, "Boys are taught to be leaders; women are taught not to aspire as high." She served in both the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars as a communications specialist.
In 1993, a roommate suggested that she run for one of the three magistrate judge positions in Santa Fe. Despite New Mexico being predominantly Democratic, Gallegos felt that in order to shake politics up, she needed to run as a Green.
"The Republicans didnât have a platform and the Democratsâ platform was based on history," Gallegos said. "The Green Party had a platform that any logical person would agree with. It was easy to embrace."
Gallegos lost that first election and felt she was politically blackballed by her Green Party affiliation. However, the loss proved to be a mixed blessing, because in 1996, Gallegos won the municipal judgeship of Santa Fe.
Instead of being one magistrate that had to work with two other judges, she was the sole municipal judge and could move forward with the Green principles that she had embraced.
One reason Gallegos won that first election and then two more--including a landslide victory this spring--is the community's approval and support of her strict and creative DUI sentencing.
Gallegos once met with Joe Arpaio, whose method of color-coding crimes influenced her when she was trying to determine a way to have criminals take ownership of their crimes.
Offenders sentenced in Gallegosâ court literally wear their crime on their hats. When doing community work, those who have committed DUI or any substance-related crime wear pink, as in the "pink elephants our grandmas talked about." Those who have committed some type of thievery or embezzlement wear green for the color of money, and those who have been violent wear blue in correlation to the bruises their crimes have caused.
It is Gallegosâ innovative way of not only having criminals take responsibility for their crimes but also to put a face to DUI, domestic abuse and larceny. Showing that the people committing these crimes are white, black, Latino and Asian helps break the stereotypes of what criminals look like.
Keeping in line with her philosophy that a government should prevent crimes and not just punish them, Gallegos also sentences violent criminals to take part in meditation, Tai Chi and the Japanese tea ceremony. Her goal is for criminals to learn from meditation how to stop and think about what they are doing before they do it. Jail is Gallegos' last resort. She saves Santa Fe $500,000 a year by using home arrest programs, which provide rehabilitation instead of punishment and have proven to be highly successful in reducing crime.
This is the type of progressive thinking that the Green Party is known for and why Gallegos feels so at home within the party.
"The Green Party has always been completely supportive of me and without expectations," Gallegos notes. "No favors asked for, no job expectations. The Greens do the right thing out of principle."
While Gallegos could very easily grab a "token job," as she calls it, she wants to focus on the next two years of her term and on fine-tuning some of her programs. Her biggest challenge will be implementing the mental health court she envisions.
One out of five inmates is mentally ill, and currently, they are sent into jails where they are beaten and/or raped and then released back into society.
Gallegos hopes to build a system where people who have mental illness can be housed, medicated, seen by a psychiatrist and then reintegrated back into society. As she sees it, this is the only logical way to truly help them.
As a single mother, Gallegos has had a difficult time balancing not only her professional and personal life but also her checkbook. This past election is the first time she has not lost money while running for office.
However, she has no regrets. She loves going to work each day and said, "I want to make a difference, I want to have an effect. I want somebody to know I was here."
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