Timesuck with Dan Cummins - 283 - A Descent Into Madness: The 1980 New Mexico Prison Riot

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

At 1:40AM on February 2nd, 1980, a group of inmates at the New Mexico State Penitentiary attacked three guards doing their nightly count. What followed was one of the deadliest prison riots in US history.  Drunk and angry inmates seized the prison, and 36 hours of Hell on Earth followed. 12 guards were taken hostage, 33 inmates were killed, and over 200 people were raped.Inmates were lit on fire, beheaded, and brutally tortured. When it was all over everyone wanted to know- what led to such carnage? What created such extreme feelings of rage and frustration within some of the inmates at the New Mexico State Penitentiary? Find out in another insane episode of Timesuck. The Bad Magic Charity of the month is SEO: Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. SEO's mission is to create a more equitable society by closing the opportunity gap for young people from historically excluded communities. To find out more, go to seo-use.orgWe're donating $13,680 to this great charity, which is 90% of the Patreon donation for this month.The other 10% - $1520 is going to the Cummins Family Foundation’s Scholarship Fund. (Will Probably Change Its Name) By the end of the year, hoping 10% of all of 2022's charitable contributions adds up to several great Bad Magician scholarships for 2023.Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-fYAJW9fC0IMerch - https://badmagicmerch.com/  Discord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: [e-mail] (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard?  Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

I, in the public, know what all school children learn, those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. It's a poem titled September 1st, 1939 by WHO Auden. At 1.40am, on February 2nd, 1980, a group of inmates at the New Mexico State Penitentiary attacked three guards during their nightly count. What followed was one of the deadliest prison riots in U.S. history, and definitely the most horrific Drunk and angry inmates seized the prison and 36 hours of hell on earth followed 12 guards were taken hostage

33 inmates were killed and over 200 people were raped inmates were lit on fire Beheaded and brutally tortured when was all over everyone wanted to know what led to such carnage What created such extreme feelings of rage and frustration within some of the inmates at the New Mexico State Penitentiary? The answer was a buildup of problematic legislation that led to terrible prison conditions, overcrowding, understaffing, and inmate abuse in the years leading up to the riot. By the late 1970s, the New Mexico State Penitentiary was one of the worst in the US. It was filthy, grossly overcrowded, lacked education, and work opportunities for inmates

looking to better their lives, and many of the guards horribly abused the inmates they were in charge of. And then the prison's most brutal inmates were able to abuse other inmates further, worse than anyone, thanks to not nearly enough guards and to violent prisoners being housed in the same poorly supervised dorms as non-violent inmates. Hardened murderers were sleeping next to literal shoplifters. A failed classification system put first time offenders with violent gang members and sexual

predators. A shift in politics from prisoner rehabilitation, to the beginning of the war on drugs, to campaign promises, of locking up as many criminals as possible led to overcrowding and to very little societal concern regarding the health and well-being of any of the inmates. And there are eyes, the inmates at New Mexico State Penitentiary had a lot of scores to settle by the time this riot broke out. And one night when a large group of them were drunk and angry, they impulsively hatched a plan to take over the place, to get revenge on the guards that abused them and inmates that had wrong them

Today we'll discuss US penal system changes in the mid to late 20th century the deadly 1980 New Mexico ride and the aftermath of one of the most shocking events in New Mexico history on today's Did this shit actually happen or is this the script for a new purge movie edition of time suck? This is Michael McDonald and you're listening to TimeSuck. You listening to TimeSuck? Welcome to the cult of the Curious Meat Sack. Happy Valentine's Day. Lucifina says, what's up?

She also says she shouldn't need a holiday to remind you mother fuckers to worship her. Fair enough. So glad you're here. You're just in time for this week's meeting. Don't worry about it if you, you know, don't have a hooded cloak on next time. I'm Dan Cummins, Sucked Miss Prime, guy who really, really, really does not want to end up in the kind of prison I'll be talking about today. My loophole cannot take it and you are listening to Time Suck. Hail Numerad, Hail Luciferina, Praiseful Jangles, and Glory be, triple him. Gonna be in Orlando this week, at the Improv for the Symphony of the Sanctuary, gonna be in Oklahoma City in two weeks, then Atlanta, Charlotte, the rest of spring dates up at

Dancomans.tv. Thanks for getting tickets. This month's charity again is SEO Sponsors for Educational Opportunity. SEO's mission is to create a more equitable society for closing the opportunity gap for young people from historically excluded communities. SEO annually serves 6,000 plus people across America through its various programs like SEO Scholars, A.E. or Academic Program that gets public high school students to and through college, with a 90% graduation rate.

And they do so much more. For more information, go to SEO-USA.org. We're going to be donating $13,680 to this charity, which is 90% of the bad magic Patreon donations for the month, other 10%, 1520. This is a new thing, going to go to the Cummins Family Foundation Scholarship Fund. That's a working title, but the scholarship will happen, and that will be the monthly percentage funding it. By the end of the year, hoping it adds up to an amount that's

really gonna give someone, or hopefully multiple meetsacks, some real help towards their higher education pursuits in 2023 when we start giving out those scholarships. So, hail Nimrod and very excited for that. In honor of Valentine's Day, now in the store at badmagicmerch.com, we have a new bagpiper tea. You guys know the Logan art warlock smokes a lot of weed. He does. But we do have a new backpacker tea, available in military green and silver. This tea is shirtless. Hey, I like the backpack because who doesn't love the backpipe. Just listen to that Piper play. Oh man, thanks, Jack.

Hey, what you get in other guy? Oh, God! Yes! Yes! Oh, available now at badmagicmerch.com. And you know what? The shirt doesn't actually make any noises. So just keep that in mind, if you think about getting one. This week's trigger warning. Trying to remember that now.

Explicit descriptions of torture, mutilation and murder. The New Mexico State Penitentiary ride. One of the deadliest prison rides in US history and the most unbelievably violent. Before we get into that violence, so some fun with numbers, going to first go over US prison population that really began to rise in the 1970s, they're going to look at why it rose. Hint, it was tricky, Dixfault. We'll look at how the war on drugs changed the US penal game. We'll also look at how a philosophic shift from rehabilitation to a punitive tough on

crime stands seemed to have made the US prison system much worse than it was before. We'll examine what prison life was like in the years leading up to the 1980 riot. And then we'll look into specifically what life in the New Mexico state penitentiary was like in the years leading up to the right. Like what conditions directly led to an orgy of chaos and violence. Then we'll jump into a timeline of the riot itself. It's fucking insane. It's surprised again that I knew so little about such a timeline of the ride itself. It's fucking insane. Surprised again that I knew so little about such a crazy topic before this week. And then after the topic, we'll look into what reforms came out of the aftermath of

this ride. And if they stuck, you know, are things better in US prisons now, you know, across the US and also specifically in New Mexico, then they were in 1980. So let's get started. [♪ INTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ According to a 2003 US Bureau of Justice Statistics report, between 1974 and 1979, you know, the year before the New Mexico prison riot,

the total number of US prisoners in state and federal prisons increased from 1,819,000 to 2,100,000. That was a 15.4% increase in incarceration, while the overall population increased during that same period was just 5.2%. So suddenly to use monopoly game lingo, a lot more people were not passing go, not collecting $200, they were going directly to jail. The curve of incarceration was steepening heading into the 1980s as more and more funding was being given to fight the war

on drugs. Right from 1980 to 1984 for example the federal annual budget of the FBI's drug enforcement units went from 8 million to 95 million that's a bit of an increase. And according to a May 1991 United Press institution article between 1980 and 1990, US prison populations grew by 134 percent, more than doubled, far more than double, bringing the total count to 771,000 inmates in US prisons. During that same time frame, the overall US population, these inmates were coming out of, did not more than double, not even close. It only grew 9.9%. How fucking crazy is that? 9.9% population increase, 134% increase in incarceration.

Was there sudden explosion and anarchy? Right? Did tens of thousands of people just start running around in public, light and shut on fire, punch old ladies in their faces, shitting on cop cars, was everyone suddenly pounding whew-pull? No. So why did this explosive growth happen? And the simple answer is, you know, the war on drugs.

It led to a lot more arrests for nonviolent offenders. And drug charges now came with much tougher prison sentences than they had before. So that's sweet, that's super smart. I'm sure a lot of really wise parents suddenly felt a lot safer knowing that their precious children were no longer at risk for getting hooked on the devil's lettuce and or that nose candy.

Actually to be fair, elicit drug use did decline during the 1980s a lot. As much as it dismayes me, the stats conclusively point to that as being a fact. College student in 1989 was about half as likely to use illicit drugs as they were in 1980. Marijuana use was 16% in 1989 compared to 34% in 1980. Cocaine use was down to 2.8% from 7%.

Marijuana use for young adults, ages 18 to 25 and older was 35% in 1979, less than half of that in 1988, 16%. Similarly, cocaine used dropped from, you know, by half from 9.3% to 4.5%. So America's youth was losing its fucking edge. Boring. No, but Nancy Reagan just say no campaign was working. That bobble headed female real life skeleton. You know, she had to have been so proud of herself. More aggressive punitive measures, more raids on dealers, also on cartels, did reduce overall drug use for sure.

But at what cost did this decline in use come? And more importantly, I think, did it last. You know, there were an estimated 580,900 drug law violation arrests in the US 1980. The year of the right, decade later, 1990, approximately twice as many, roughly 1 million 89,500 arrests. We'd love to back these stats up to 1970 to lead into the right for today's story, but more drug use and abuse stats are available in the 1980s than they were for the 1970s, thanks to increased funding and more governmental focus on the war on drugs that led to a massive spike in incarceration

in the 80s that had begun to trend upwards, you know, in the 70s. Drug overdose deaths did drop during the initial years of the war on drugs. After President Nixon declared it in 1971, that year there were 6,771 deaths in the US attributed to drug overdoses. By 1980, that number had dropped significantly to 2,492. Right? That is impressive. That's a massive drop, undeniably huge.

Just like Nancy, I'm guessing Tricky Dick is very satisfied with those numbers in the rare moments he wasn't thinking about how he'd been impeached. Sorry, sorry, how he resigned. He resigned, so he wouldn he'd been impeached. Sorry, sorry, how he resigned. He resigned, so he wouldn't have been impeached. But back to these annual overdose death numbers. By 1990, it was back up to 4,506. By 2000, it was up to 17,415. By 2010, 38,239.

And by 2019, the most recent year I could find stats for in the same chart, up to over 70,000. So after the 80s, you know, overdose deaths did skyrocket again. Hello opioid crisis. Yes, the war on drugs did keep drugs away from a lot of Americans in the short term, but it also put way more fucking people in prison in the short and in the long term, and it did not reduce overall drug abuse and deaths in the long term. Why?

Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious. Supply and demand. Where there is demand, like the demand created by a huge spike in opioids, right? In opioid addictions, there's gonna eventually be supply, right? Heroin sales skyrocketed. If there's enough will,

there always seems to be plenty of way. And this line of thinking was discussed in great detail in the El Chapo episode of Time Suck back in April of 2021. So, you know, I won't be the shit out of this same dead horse again here. But a brief review of how the beginning of the war on drugs led to mass incarceration rates is important for this episode.

Because it did without question, contribute substantially to the overcrowding that directly led to the New Mexico prison riot. And again, some of these stats will be for the years following the riot, not leading up to it only because there are more drug and incarceration stats, you know, available for those years. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in 1991, prison population has also been affected by changes in the extent of the illegal drug problem.

Inestimated two-thirds of those in state prisons for drug offenses were convicted of trafficking or manufacturing illegal drugs. Since 1985, the number of adult arrests for drug violations has increased by 74% and the number of arrests for sales or manufacturing of illegal drugs has grown by 137%. There are some evidence that changes in criminal justice policies have increased a criminal's probability

of being incarcerated from levels existing in prior years. Murder, non-negligent, manslaughter, rape, robbery, aggravated assault and burglary are among the most serious crimes in account for approximately half of prison commitments from courts. Speaking of rape and murder, many academics who study US penal policies think that this,

you know, additional incarceration led to more violent crime in the long run, right? The logic is sometimes you lock up a nonviolent drug user or dealer, but then by the time they're released, there's a greater chance that they're now, you know, a rapist or murderer or fucking robber, armed robber, then they would have been if they had not been thrown in prison. Right. This is somewhat speculative.

There has been some research conducted on this, but not a ton, and it's hard to truly determine correlation and causality here. But this belief comes from the thought that prisons, particularly very violent prisons, like the New Mexico State Penitentiary was in 1980, and the years laid up to it, do a lot more criminal educating than to do criminal

rehabilitated. Here are some stats that seem to point to this being true. At least at quick glance. In 1971, there were 17,780 murders in the US and 42,260 rape convictions. 1980, there were 23,040 murders and 82,990 rapes. 29.6% leap in murders, 96.4% leap in rape. For a comparison, the population only increased 9.4% during that same period. And I promise this episode is not going to read like one fucking giant statistics class. These numbers are important for today's story, though,

so we'll go over a few more. The 1970s marked the beginning of a major shift in US penal philosophy. Rehabilitation was replaced with a focus on retribution, which many of you can probably guess I'm not bothered by for a very rare group of certain criminals, right? See serial kiddlers, rapists and murderers, murderers. And I'm fine with putting bullets in their heads and the fucking dump in their bodies in a ditch. But overall, I am very opposed to this mentality

because if the emphasis is not on rehabilitation for prisoners who are going to be released back into society Don't we all lose? I mean, do you want rehabilitated former inmates released into your neighborhood? Or do you want angry former inmates who have been unfairly brutalized and now want to strike back at society? And some people commit certain crimes more out of desperation than out of a true lack of character, right? Other people didn't have the right role models growing up, didn't kill or tragically victimize anyone, and they can still turn their life around. Hail Nimrod, by the way, to all you meat sacks who listen, who I know have done that from the stories you've

shared, or who are in the process of doing that, or who will be doing that. Someone coming from broken beginnings who digs themselves out of a massive socioeconomic hole or one dug by a series of truly unfortunate choices, someone who turns criminality into an inspirational tale who goes from takeer to giver, I think you're some of the most special and impressive people on the planet. Also statistically, the philosophy of punishment over education has been proven to be a societal failure time and time again. Human Rights Watch, an international non-governmental organization, Headquartered in New York City. It's been conducting research and advocacy on human rights since 1978, noted that 98% of inmates

get released at some point, and they often leave more dangerous than when they came in. And I'd explain how they arrived at that exact conclusion, but it's a pretty dense 112 page report. Let's talk about something I've never thought about before this episode, how hard it is for a nation to properly manage a prison population. If the amount of prisoners, you know, experiences, either a huge drop or a huge spike, as it did in the years leading up to the New Mexico prison, right? A 1999 report by Alfred

Bloomsdene and Alan J. Beck for crime and justice, export a 75 year period of US prison stats from 20th century history. For 50 to 75 years, incarceration rates remain stable, roughly 110 people for every 100,000 people in the population are locked up. And these researchers don't think

that that stability can be attributed to the amount of crime being committed, you know, remaining stable or to quincense. I think it comes down to legislative management. I think this phenomenon is explained by the theory of the stability of punishment, first published by researchers Bloomsdene and Cohen in 1973. And this theory states that society to maintain a stable incarceration rate, balance the tolerance of marginal crimes against the fiscal and political costs associated with too large incarceration rate. So, I.e., you put too many people in prison and your society suffers thanks to nuclear family degradation, counterintuitive increased crime rates, economic costs of too many people

and they're working crimes being taken out of the workforce, the tax burden of paying to incarcerate all these people and to help subsidize their lives once they're released because they have a harder time finding gainful employment and on and on and on. According to this theory, if you want, you know, your prison occupancy to remain stable, when crime increases in society, you raise the threshold of the types of crimes that offenders perceive to warrant incarceration. That is, if there is more overall crime, only severely punish egregious offenders. And then if crime decreases, the society should lower the threshold of appropriate crimes and offenders warrant punishment.

So more marginal offenders will now be incarcerated. That is, when the prisons have plenty of room, don't be afraid to more harshly punish those committing lesser crimes. To keep crime rates from increasing, I guess. I'm not sure I agree with this theory, slash mentality. It seems to really fuck over marginal offenders when the crime rate is low, but I can see how it can be beneficial to the greater good. And I'd never thought about this before.

If you don't adjust how you incarcerate based on how seriously you punish various crimes, you're going to end up with a bunch of job losses due to empty prisons and some circumstances or a bunch of overcrowdy because you can't magically just build a whole bunch of new prisons when there's a spike in more crime or when tougher legislation about crime has passed. You can't just lay a whole bunch of people off when there is less crime or when legislators decide to not be so harsh on crime and hope to magically fill those positions later with the qualified employees, if there is suddenly more crime or again, a harsher attitude towards crime.

You won't have experienced guards to work in these prisons now, inexperienced guards, you know, also led to the New Mexico prison, right? And again, it seems like a fucked up way to decide how long to send someone to prison for. But there are no magical prisons out there. They just always have enough room for whoever happens to be committing crimes during any given year, or always have enough room for, you know,

how society decides to legislate crime. In the early 70s, Tricky Dick, relating this back to our story, you know, 37th president of the US, he fucked this stability way up. He suddenly wanted to throw a fuck ton more people in prison, but we didn't have room for them. The infrastructure wasn't built out and advanced, right? The existing penal infrastructure didn't match his demand for punishment.

And the government said no one was just him. June of 1970, President Nixon passed a controlled substances act, classifying drugs into five schedules. Schedule one drugs carried the harshest penalties for sale and use. And that class includes common recreational drugs like marijuana you know, marijuana, LSD, heroin, ecstasy, many of the most commonly abused, you know, drugs. And I've gone over how much I hate this classification system in recent previous sucks. So I won't lay out the same arguments here again.

Just know, especially if you're a new listener that I fucking hate sending people to prison for drug use. Also, if America was truly serious about protecting their citizens from harmful drugs and punishing the worst drug offenders, street-level dealers wouldn't be in prison for life, right? Certain big pharma execs, like various members of the Sackler family behind Purdue and some of their top execs, you know, they'd be fucking beheaded. Feels like a bullshit coward move to continually punish the poor, the bottom fucking tears of the drug system while the rich almost always get a pass. Now done for real with that sub-box though.

June of 1971, Nixon, of course, declares the war on drugs. He creates the DEA 1973 to enforce his new drug laws. Most of the people arrested on drug charges are kept in federal prisons from 1970 to 1975. But then that shifts to placing them in carnivals and circuses in the late 1970s, which led to a huge drop in how much fun people were having at carnivals and circuses, and a massive uptick in clown and rickety ride-related murders, which AK, of course. Those arrests on drug charges started to be shipped off to state prisons. From 1975 to 1980, state prisons like the New Mexico State Penitentiary. In the early 70s, US prison incarceration rates began a period of averaging 6.3% growth a year

all the way until 1996. The number one reason for the increase in carcerations was of course these drug offenses. Not only was there an increase in arrests, there was an increase in how long people were sentenced. By the end of 1980, there were 330,000 inmates in state and federal prisons and pure and per bureau of justice stats. Prison throughout the country were operating at 18 to 29 percent above maximum capacity. And prison, what a really shitty place to be that overcrowded. I mean, it's one thing to be having drinks in a bar that is roughly a third over capacity. It's harder to get a drink, harder to find a place to sit, greater chance to have in someone bump into you, split your drink, lesser chance of finding someone who wants to have sex with you, a greater chance of being beat up, higher odds of you saying, fuck this place,

let's go, et cetera. But to be trapped in a prison where you were already sharing a tiny cell with someone who has a greater chance in the, you know, of being way more fucked up than the average bear in a non-over crowded situation. And now you are maybe sharing a cell with two or three or four fucked up bears or sitting really, really crammed in at the cafeteria with a bunch of super fucked up bears. And now there's less room to work out in the wreck yard harder to get your turn, you know, to use the weightlifting equipment harder to get a spot in a basketball game, less of a chance of a guard making sure you don't get gang raped on and on and on, right?

More crowding, more anger, more tension, pretty easy to see how this is going to lead to more, you know, frustration and violent confrontation. A Bureau of Justice stats bulletin published in May of 1981 by acting director Benjamin H. Renshaw provides specific stats on 1980. The year the prison riot occurred, to show just how much of a problem overcrowding had become in US prisons. 1980, there was a total number of 329,122 inmates, record number, and because of that, 28 states, most states, given court orders to reduce the now very significant problem of overcrowding. But just because the court says you have to do something,

doesn't mean you can do it. If you don't have the budget, right? There was a lot of budget limitations. You can't just build a big new prison, hire a whole bunch of new people to run it, just because you need one. If the money in the budget is not there. And if the money is there, right, that shit takes time.

Unless you're building fucking new prisons out of a camp and gear, or linking logs or some shit. 16 states had a backlog of sentence prisoners waiting in local jails for space and state facilities. The 1980 increase in overall prisoners was 5% double the increases of 78 and 79. Between 1969 and 1980, prison populations had increased by total of 61%.

The incarceration rate for sentence prisoners went from 98 per you know, per 1,000 to 140 per 1,000. Less and less plea deals are being given out. We're the guilty. You know, don't have to serve any time. Interestingly, only state facilities like the New Mexico of prison experience a real surge in inmate population during this incarceration spike. Right because in the late 1970s, the feds decided to concentrate their resources supposedly on white collar crime, leaving the arrest and confinement of other criminals. They would have prosecuted in previous years for robberies, auto theft, drug offenses to

state and local authorities. They were on drugs now causing right this explosion in state prison populations. Drugs became the single largest defense category among prisoners from 1980 to 1996, and it was trending in that direction in the years leading up to 1980. Bloom seen him back, right? The authors of that 1999 report, they explored that 75-year period of US prison trends in the 20th century.

They wrote, the proponents of the responsibility for prison population growth lies in the sanctioning phase, the conversion of arrests into prisoners, and the time they serve in prison. These trends must raise concern about the benefits gained through the increase in time served. From the viewpoint of deterrence, most research has shown that between increasing the probability of commitment to prison and extending time served,

the latter has the weaker deterrent effect. From the viewpoint of incapacitation as time served increases, the more likely it is that some individuals will be serving time after their criminal careers would have ended. So I think it's an interesting conclusion. They get in tough run crime, doesn't necessarily lead to less crime. It can lead to more crime.

And it does make sense to me, right? But I really think about it, right? To use an extreme example, just to make the point. If I got sentenced to 20 years in prison for shoplifting some groceries, when I'm 20 years old. And then I get out of 40 Now have a harder time getting a job to pay for my groceries, right? Then I did when I was 20 because I didn't build out any kind of decent resume during some very important working years

It's gonna be more likely that I'm gonna turn back to crime to make money and get the shit I need Then it would have been if I would have been given six months and then got out when I was still 20 had an easier time getting a job Right more time to turn my life around. Also in six months prison isn't going to fuck me up. It's going to harden me and twist my identity towards gang live overall criminality. Like I would imagine it would over 20 years, especially in these prisons like the one we're talking about today. But politicians often don't seem to care what researchers have to say about well, much of anything. All that matters so often, unfortunately is optics, what voters, you know, get worked up about. All that matters so often, unfortunately, is optics, what voters get worked up about. And in the 70s, more and more politicians, from the left and the right, promise to put

more criminals in prison with their tough on crime policies, right? Because that played well to their basis. A lot of people, you know, they were moving out of the suburbs for years in America now at this point, they want, yeah, fucking lock them up. You know, throw away the key, which, you know, I've said on certain types of crimes, but they were just kind of doing that car blunch. It's fucking lock everybody up. Anybody who commits any crimes, lock them up.

Who cares? What problems? It might all lead to later, right? The optics are good. One way the US politicians got to our front crime and the years leading up to the riot was through passing determinate sentencing laws from 1976 to 1980. Thirty-seven states passed determinate sentencing statutes. Determinate sentencing puts inmates in prison for a set number of years that have to be paid for no probation

Restitution or suspended senses violent crimes armed offenses, you know drug offenses repeat offenses most common crimes They get determinant senses and in some situations. I am a huge fan of this But when you do it, you know, again, kind of carte blanche, and you don't build enough new prisons, you know, fund them properly, it fucks things up like I did that led to this right. New Mexico abolished parole completely for those crimes. During the same period, only 15 states passed

indeterminate sentencing laws that would allow for the possibility of probation, restitution, or suspended senses. Determinate sentences or fixed minimum senses tend to result obviously in longer prison terms than indeterminate senses. Determinant senses or fixed minimum senses tend to result obviously in longer prison terms than indeterminate senses. And that led to what's called piling up in a variety of US prisons, including in New Mexico. This piling up happens when determinant sense inmates, you know, they remain incarcerated

longer than they would have if they would have had indeterminate senses. And while they are serving these senses, you know, new inmates, of course, are being continually admitted. And because everyone has to do all of their time, this can raise the total inmate count sometimes significantly. Many states like New Mexico credited the shift in sentencing procedure as the primary cause of their new, really fucking shitty problem with severe overcrowding. Okay. Now that we looked at why prisons like the penitentiary of New Mexico became, you know, so overcrowded, leading up to that we looked at why prisons like the Penitentiary of New Mexico became so overcrowded leading up to the right, let's look at the conditions that inmates are living in.

Back in 1980, what was life like inside the Penitentiary of New Mexico and other US prisons? Photographer Steven Milinowski, blah! Visit US prisons again. Visit US prisons around the country in the mid-1980s and published a book of photos titled Duplicity. He later told business insider,

Americans very much ignore prisons in prison life, unless they live near a prison. Where the prison is a source of some level of local employment. Americans seem to only take notice of prisons when there's a problem and escape. A prison disturbance that receives national media attention or when there is some breakdown in the system. And I think that you know, attitude largely holds true today.

I'm sure it has, you know, pretty much always. It certainly seemed to be true back in the 1980s or, you know, 1980 in New Mexico. I mean, I mean, have you ever thought, gee, how prisoners are being treated well in prison? I sure are getting good food, access to therapy, plenty of time in room to exercise, proper medical treatment, anything else they might need so they can thrive. I doubt it. I don't think I've ever thought anything along those lines.

I have a close love one, ever served prison time, not ever visited someone in prison. I don't know that I've ever thought about how well or how not well prisoners are being treated outside of research for this podcast. I watch prison documentaries, I'm fascinated with prison subculture, but I don't recall thinking about how I I hope they're nutritional emotional and psychological needs are being met. I would imagine most people think some version of ah, fuck them. If they didn't want to live in a really shitty place, they shouldn't have done what they did and end up in prison. Well, I honestly don't care about the living

conditions of some prisoners who've committed crimes. I feel have permanently ejected them from the pool of people who deserve basic human rights. It is crazy to not care about how prisoners are being treated in general. I mean, if we're not going to care at all, why not just send everyone to some island or have them all executed. And if we're not going to do that, we should make sure their living conditions allow them a decent chance to transform themselves into functioning members of society, shouldn't we? And even the lifers, we should provide them with some kind of minimum level of decency, or what are we, a civilized society or a medieval band of savages. At the very least, for the sake of the guards who work at some of these prisons or all these prisons, I don't know why I said some, just some of these prisons, you know,

fuck all the guards. No. Prisoners should be given some incentive, you know, not to write to behave, not cause problems. A 1991 report from that human rights watch, part of their work for the prison project, focused on prison conditions in the US. And they wrote about how, you know, back at the time this right, many US prisons were using solitary confinement and isolation from nature for multiple years as punishment.

And some prisons inmates were stripped naked, put into solitary confinement, forced to earn back their clothes. More prisons had a lack of access to educational resources, undesirable jobs were being used as punishment instead of work opportunities. Collective punishment was often being used to discipline inmates. The overpopulation problem was combining with the recent hardening attitudes of courts, lawmakers, and prison staff towards inmates. More punishment was being doled out. And when inmates complained about cruel and unusual punishment, their complaints being taken

less seriously. A federal judge gave a statement for the HRW report saying, prisoners who complain about the conditions of their confinement do not generally get much sympathy from society. But sympathy is not the issue here. People who are abused and treated with violence are those most likely to treat others abusively and violently. Makes me think of that quote from the poem with the beginning of the episode. I interpret this as another great reason to make sure prisoners are treated decently in prison.

If they're treated with abuse and violence, they are more likely to abuse and be violent to others when they get out. So let's not treat them like animals if we don't want them to behave like animals in our neighborhoods and our communities upon their release. The conditions of many, if not most US prisons around the time of the ride in New Mexico, can be summarized as follows. Lack of outdoor access, lack of educational programs, use of physical restraints as a form of discipline.

Hey, Luciferina, hey, oh, Susperina, hoey! JK, not talking about sexy, BDSM stuff here. Talking about role-present, some prison sex fantasy. Prison sex fantasy, I don't know what I said there. Collective punishment, prohibited under the UN standard minimum rules. And collective punishment, by the way,

is punishment or sanction imposed on a group for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member of the group. In this context, for example, you shouldn't punish everyone at the cafeteria table when one person from that table has thrown something at a guard. You can't just get lazy with your punishment and punish a big group of people when you can't figure out which member or members of that group actually did something wrong. Denial of access to reading material for disciplinary measures, lack of basic furniture and cells such as tables and chairs, lack of record keeping, putting non-violent

offenders with violent and dangerous inmates. This was a real problem in New Mexico, led to a lot of non-violent offenders being the recipients of holy shit, some truly, just horrific torture porn shit. Lack of protection from inmate on inmate violence, using an inmate scrotum as a speed bag, even when not training for a sanctioned boxing event, lack of work opportunities. Guards of the opposite sex regularly seen inmate's naked and violating the privacy.

Non-violent undocumented immigrants being held in detention centers with violent convicted felons lack of visitation from family Guards always hiding one and only one piece of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle Now here are some authorized disciplinary measures that guards were allowed to use around the time of the right a loss of privileges disciplinary segregation loss of canteen privileges canteen is you know prison commissary or store basically a 7-11 inside the prison. A reduction of recreation time, taking away smoking privileges, disciplinary diet,

tasteless food for 10 days. That's what they were supposed to kind of do. Here are some unauthorized punishments that they were commonly, you know, commonly being reported at US prisons, whipping, beatings, spraying with mace and non-emergency situations, right, just to fuck with prisoners, not allowing prisoners to watch the series finale of any TV show or the last five minutes of any sports game, guards stomping on prisoners, Kit Kat candy bars while singing. Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar. You could keep it to yourself, but that wouldn't be fair, cause the chocolate crispy tastes is loved everywhere.

Give me a break, give me a break, break me off a piece of that kit, cat bar. That's, you know, fucked up. And maybe I made up those last two punishments, and maybe I made up the jigsaw puzzle pieces, being hidden, and the scrotum has been used as speedbags. I'm guessing you figure that out. I just, you know, I wanna make sure.

Normal daily activities in US prisons around 1980, were watching TV, having recreation time. Many inmates wanted to go to classes, have job opportunities, but they now had little access to those things at the time due to budget cutbacks for things considered to be luxuries for prisoners, like that during these tough on crime years. So that's not good, right? What is that saying?

You know, idol hands at a devil's workshop. Why would you not want to fund keeping a big group of criminals' minds occupied with something positive? It makes we're often housed in dorms around this time. I didn't, if I knew that before, I forgot about that, man, fucking prison dorms. What a horrific, just premise. No, thank you.

These dorms are big rooms with rows of bunk beds, like some military barracks, you know, like the kind of shit you've seen in movies like Full Metal Jacket, if you haven't been in the military. Like myself, not having been there. Upwards of 100 prisoners might always sleep in the same big room,

up to 200 I read in some cases. You can see how this might in addition and not having privacy and being a lot noisier than a cell lead to shit like gang you know, gang rapes and murders. Overcrouting was sold by creating all kinds of these dorms. Prison officials around the country put double bunks in day rooms, classrooms, office spaces, other non-housing areas. Back in the Alcatraz suck, you know, I talked about how prisoners only had 45 square

feet to themselves compared to the average bedroom size of 132 square feet. In these dorm situation, some inmates had 20 square feet to call their own. And in some men's prisons like the Penitentiary New Mexico, some of these dormitories were left completely unsupervised at night. Fuck yeah bro, nice. What's the worst that could happen? Probably being shanked to death after being

violently, angely raped. But hey, if you didn't want something long and hard, penetrating both your ribcage and your bottle, well, then you shouldn't have sold that weed, all right? You should have been wrongly convicted of a double homicide. Andy Dufrein, Shawshank Redemption reference there, that was confusing. The shift from single-cell or roommate housing

to dormitories of course increased violence in prisons. Assassinations by fellow inmates were the second and third leading cause of death that you can have vacillate back and forth in US prisons from 1980 to 1990. Kind of go between 10 and 12% of all deaths. Number one cause of death suicide. And those suicides often would follow violent beatings and or rapes.

If you died in prison, it was most likely that you either killed yourself or someone else killed you. Executions and accidents were also in the list of leading causes of death in prison in the 80s. And of course, natural causes. And then a large group of cases were listed as unknown, weird. Nothing suspicious about that. What happened to McNeil and not sure, Gordon?

We found him laying face down in the shower, a bunch of holes his neck, large metal pipes sticking out of his ass Someone carved snitches get stitches in his back. We're thinking he probably used too much shampoo slipped fell and that's how he died Was this we're not sure now we think we should list his cause of death as unknown The sanitation of many state prisons in the 70s and 80s almost nonexistent There were small number of toilets for hundreds or thousands of inmates. In some cases, broken dirty bathrooms, dirty hallways, living spaces, broken windows, dim lighting, prisons often infested with roaches, rats, mice,

ants, mosquitoes, was none common for inmates to sleep on moldy pillows and mattresses. There was often no air conditioning, frequently very poor heating inmates experience intense cold in the winners, roasted in the summers, rape, documented in prisons, very hard to get an accurate stat so because inmates likely often were too embarrassed to report it and didn't want to be seen as snitches or the prison officials didn't take the report seriously, didn't file them away. The 1991 human rights watch does list account after account from inmates around the US talking about being violently raped in their cells Showers and the dorms often by multiple other inmates and often after the initial rape

They're then raped repeatedly, you know unless they can somehow join a gang that will protect them But then in order to gain protection from these gangs Sometimes these inmates would have to agree to be sexually abused by one or more of the gang members Basically, they would have to agree to be raped by one of those inmates or a few of those inmates so that they didn't have to worry about being raped by all of the other inmates. Holy fuck. This all does sound like some shashank redemption shit, right? Worse actually.

Prison in the 80s in the US and in the 70s, you know, late 70s, if you were not large, physically strong, good at fighting, if you couldn't become a tough guy in one of the prison gangs, your poo poll was getting savagely loopholeed on the regular. And where the New Mexico State Prison is located just south of Santa Fe. Yeah, it's just especially uncomfortably, despite like the violence,

I didn't think about the weather too. So I feel like a lot of people don't understand like the weather in Santa Fe. I was surprised first time I went to New Mexico. It can get up to 100 degrees in the summer, you know, Fahrenheit, down to negative 24 degrees in the winter. That high desert can be brutal.

Its elevation is over 7,000 feet. That's more than Aspen, Colorado. Your freezing, your fucking ass off in the winter. Your roach in the summer, cockroaches, rats, mold, rape, beatings. Such a truly horrible place to be stuck in. And then during the riots, things would get so much worse than ever. Supposedly things have gotten better

in the US, US prisons in the past few decades, I hope so. There were a lot of gangs in prison back in 1980, still a lot of gangs in prison. I've watched so many docs, including the BBC doc on the New Mexico prison riot. We're inmates and former inmates talk about how, you know, if you didn't join up with a gang, you were fucked, you were getting fucked.

You know, your only hope was to become part of a crew, then you can have protection, you know, strengthen numbers. Over 50% of inmates in prisons in the US in the 80s, according to that massive report, were in a prison gang. Prison officials did try and curb some of this violence, but often not very effectively. Overcrouting plus budget cutbacks, it didn't allow for additional hiring to counteract an increase in inmates, meant that staff were out outnumbered less able to properly monitor inmates. So to try and curtail an uptick in violence, the structure was implemented in many penitentiaries, described as a prison within a prison.

Special units were created with stricter rules and regulations. Violent inmate sexual predators inmates with the highest scape risk will be placed in these special units oftentimes These special units were solitary confinement units some inmates would spend years in solitary Being left alone for years is enough to drive someone fucking mad But maybe better than having your colon so worn out that by the time you are released it feels like it's made out of a old worn out sock Right thread starting to unravel more holes and just the one in it, you know, putting pressure on it starts to tear apart. You get it. Now, let's zero in specifically on the New Mexico state penitentiary.

The riot was primarily caused, you know, by a combination of overcrowding, rampant, inmate on inmate violence, abuse from guards, abhorrent living conditions. According to most former inmates, the road to the riot began to be paid in 1975. Atturning point, marking worsened prison conditions there. That year the penitentiary began getting dangerously short on staff. The turnover rate was already 60 to 70% each year. That's fucking crazy. 60 to 70% of the prison guard of the corrections officers would quit every year.

Staff were under trained, overworked, underpaid. The often couldn't hire fast and after replace workers who quit, placing additional strain on existing guards, who then burned out more quickly than also quit, which further strained existing guards, you know, it's Center, it's a terrible cycle. Santa Fe, remember the, you know, the prison just out of it, not a big city back in the late 1970s.

There was only around 45,000 people living there. That's not much of a labor pool to pull from. If the pay is shit and the job is hell. I couldn't find salary numbers for correction officers for the year of the riot specifically, but the starting salary for a correctional officer in New Mexico in 2001 was, and to me this is fucking absurd. $15,943. That's 1328 a month, roughly $7.65 an hour. To risk your life and safety, working in an overcrowded prison full of sometimes exceptionally

violent offenders. Minimum wage that time, 425. Back in 2016, you got, you know got 26,229 a year to be a CEO in New Mexico, about 12, 16 hour minimum wage, 750. So you are getting paid quite a bit more than minimum wage at least percentage-wise, but only a few dollars more back in 2001. And I bet it was only a dollar or more an hour above minimum wage back in 1975 when things started to go downhill or less because there were articles I couldn't find again, specific numbers for those years and late 70s, 1980, but after the riot, they did some big pay increases. So it was probably much closer to minimum wage back then. You know, was that extra 50 cents or buck an hour worth it? You know, at least in McDonald's, you never really had to worry about getting fucking stabbed.

Not going to get, you know, probably not going to get angly raped, working the fryer, making a milkshake and all those cheeseburgers are delicious. So again, you have underpaid officers. They're exhausted due to chronically being short staffed because they were short staffed. A lot of them are pulling a lot of overtime. And I know that's priced out of weird. I just realized for a second to talk about officers getting raped, but that actually did happen.

That happens a lot in our story today. So it wasn't just the guards or it wasn't just the prisoners. Excuse me. And then you have, yeah guards or it wasn't just the prisoners. Excuse me. And then you have, yeah, you have an increasingly unhappy prison population. Partially because they're getting crammed in that shitty ass prison tighter and tighter, partially because there's a policy change. You know, that began in 1975. 1980 New Mexico stated, attorney general report whipped up in the aftermath this, right?

Notes that the prison was much more peaceful, even when overcrowded when there were those incentive based programs. They gave access to education jobs, promoted cooperation between inmates, and civic Notes that the prison was much more peaceful even when overcrowded when there were those incentive based programs to give access to education jobs, promoted cooperation between inmates and civic organizations pre-1975 between 1975 and 1980, you know, those programs were reduced eliminated. Thanks to massive budget cutbacks, state officials again going with tough on crime, you know, rally cry, slashed funding for a lot of rehabilitation programs, overall vibe, the New Mexico state prison switch from rehab to punitive prison official switch tactics

from rewards to punishment. And they began to dish out solitary confinement on a regular basis unauthorized disciplinary measures. There was a lot of fucking, you know, just kind of the glossed over didn't really pay attention to these beatings that happened all the time. New and veteran officers at New Mexico State reportedly were widely abusive, right? Inmates at New Mexico State were sometimes held in basement strip cells based on info given by snitches or because they couldn't control themselves due to mental illness.

And again, because of not enough funding, the prison did not have the adequate psychiatric staff to properly treat these inmates that in a perfect world wouldn't be in this prison the first place. They'd been a psychiatric facility, but now they're being abused by guards inmates in these strip cells, often stripped naked, starved, had to use a hole in the floor as a toilet. Guards would hose them down for showers. Sometimes apparently excessively, just having fun with them, hose them down. These cells essentially sensory deprivation cells, no light, no sound, inmates sometimes stayed in them for 15 days straight or more allegedly, not good for their mental health.

Inmates claim that they were often beaten by correction officers in these cells. Some inmates even reported they were, you know, once forced to run naked through a gauntlet of officers holding acts handles. Check this shit out. Here's a specific example of the abuse. And this is, you know, a lot of, a lot of witnesses for this. A lot of people will say, like, oh, yeah, that for sure happened. 1976, there's a work strike organized by inmates as a response to the president's poor conditions. And in an attempt to subdue the protesters,

deputy warden Robert Montoya authorizes a use of tear gas against the striking prisoners. All right, that move makes sense to me. I get it. Have to respond to a prison right, have to try and restore some order. But then as the prisoners exited the dormitory, coughing from the tear gas, they are grabbed, assaulted, stripped naked, then pressured under threat of further violence to run nearly a hundred yards down a central corridor through a gauntlet of officials, you know, this row of on each side, who are beating them with fucking acts handles. It was called the Night of the Acts Handles, not real creative title, but, you know, spells this row of on each side who are beating them with fucking acts handles. It was called the night of the acts handles, not real creative title, but, you know,

spells it out. The incident was corroborated by several eyewitnesses, including some former prison officials themselves in that BBC documentary I watch. And it resulted in a number of serious injuries. I'm, of course, it did. And be with acts handles. Supposedly no deaths. I don't know. They maybe they covered it up. And a federal lawsuit.

Now if that lawsuit was settled, it seems to have been so acquiredly. No sources I can find say, you know, that it was settled and how much, if any money prisoners received. You know, so that's obviously just a wee bit fucking crazy. I feel like a good little, you know, inside into the vibe at this place.

And the ax handle beating happened in 1976. And between 1976 and between 1976 and 1980 things in this prison somehow got much worse. After this night, riot leaders were transferred out of the prison. Prison staff took a much more punitive tone than ever before. Maybe because they got away with this, I guess they were like, oh, it's fucking on now. This is how we handle shit going forward. Real cool hand Luke Warden vibes.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. A new snitch system came out of the aftermath of this right. This we get a lot of people killed in the right. I can't fucking believe they did this. Prison officials wanted to figure out who was responsible for doing what during this earlier right. And they start threatening prisoners with punishment if they don't snitch. And then soon they're punishing prisoners who, you know, won't snitch, right?

They're not just threatening. They're punishing them. They're putting them in those sensory deprivation chambers, allegations of severe beatings, of transferring prisoners into the cell blocks or dorms of other prisoners who wanted to hurt them and who were notoriously violent. Then by 1978, when inmates wouldn't give prison officials information, they wanted, they started having them wear this literal snitch jacket. They would put these fucking jackets on them. They were a different color from the prison uniforms. I think they actually said where it's snitch on them, a clear marker to all other inmates that they were a snitch. I mean, you might as well just fucking tattoo, please

rape and kill me on their foreheads. Guards would also leak out information inmates gave them sometimes as well. So other inmates knew who actually did snitch on them. So you don't snitch. Then you get a fucking where the snitch jacket. But then sometimes when you do snitch, if I can leak out of fresh and sometimes when you would snitch they put the snitch jacket. So people couldn't figure out like who was really the snitch.

God damn, why the fuck would they do this? To a road inmate solidarity. They wanted to get the prisoners to turn on each other. This was a conscious choice. They thought that if the inmates were focused on hating each other, it would prevent a prisoners versus guards mentality and prevent another right. And they were right about the first part.

It did cut way down on prisoners versus guards' tension, but they were very wrong about this not leading to a riot. Inmates wanting to get back at people perceived as snitches would help motivate the 1980 riot ring leaders to do some unbelievably horrible shit. Once the riot began, it would lead to, you know, the most inmate on inmate violence of any prison riot in America's history by far. And it's what a fucked up thing to do to somebody, to feed them to the fucking lions if they don't snitch.

And then when they do snitch, sometimes still feed them to the lions. And a lot of these snitches were non-violent offenders, people in prison for crimes as trivial, not just using this as an exaggeration shoplifting. One of the guys who will be so brutally massacred in the riot was in there for shoplifting. And these guys would not just be labeled snitches, but also left unsupervised and sell dormitories with convicted murderers and sexual predators. And that behind the bars, BBC documentary, a former guard working there before and during the 1980 riot said that by 1980, things he got so bad at this prison that he and other

guards would just lie oftentimes when it came to doing nightly head counts, rather than walk into certain areas of the prison where they felt unsafe. Right? They were scared to go into some of these dormitories. They would just report the same head count number from a previous shift. This prison was quickly becoming hell on earth in the late 70s. Former inmate Michael Colby, I also spoke to the behind-the-bars BBC documentary team, saying that overcrowding got so bad leading up to the 1980s that inmates

went from sleeping in single cells in the early 70s to bunk beds, then to big dorms full of bunk beds by the mid 70s to people sleeping on the fucking floor like they didn't even have enough beds in these crazy dorms for all the inmates, by the time of the right. A crowded mass of people, some so violent and unstable the guards were scared to walk into their dorms at night. Colby said, everybody there is a fucking thieving line dope themed. When you're out on the streets chasing the dragon, you don't have to associate with these people 24-7, but in there you do.

And there's a lot of competition because there's very little to compete for. I've seen people hurt or killed over a pack of cigarettes. Out there, if you don't pay your bills, they take your fucking house. In there, if you don't pay your bills, they take your fucking life. And that guy is a scary fucking dude. Watch his interviews.

He was suspected, or he will be suspect in the rights of murdering quite a few people, but they just couldn't prove it. Attorneys for many of these prisoners were arguing in the years leading up the riots that the dorms were too big for proper supervision and that officers couldn't even see inside them unless they stood directly outside the gates. They also claimed the guards routinely failed to lock doors and hallway gates. One of these failures would make the 1980 riot possible.

Too many new guards, thanks to all that turnover. Not enough guards, thanks to overc that turnover, not enough guards thanks to overcrowding due to an inadequate budget. Inmate on inmate violence increasing due to their snitch jacket system, all this and more making the prison more and more unstable and dangerous. The dorms in cell block three were the most unstable and dangerous at New Mexico State Prison. By 1978, 25% of the inmates were housed in this cell block. The unit was only designed for 86 people, but roughly 200 inmates are there in 1980. So over double capacity, this is the cell block that guards would avoid the most at night.

When they weren't avoiding it, they were also abusing prisoners, housed there during the day, so that's cool. That's good. Let's get them all riled up. According to multiple former inmates, guards escorting inmates to cell block three would regularly push them down the fucking stairs. I saw this in the documentary and they pointed it out. This like, you know, concrete stairs. They'd be handcuffed, handcuffed, and then they just fucking give them a little ride

down the stairs. The producers for behind the bars interviewed Larry Mendoza, a former guard who said a lot of this shit was true, who started working in the prison shortly before the ride. He claimed that he received no training. Just tour the prison before his first shift. He said he was a nervous wreck at the thought of having to control all these prisoners. Also said that on one of his first shifts, he was invited by officers to participate in the illegal savage beating of an inmate, said he declined. Probably what maybe kept him alive or helped him

alive during the ride. A guard was supposed to have a thousand hours of on the job training, but really never got that by the time the late 70s came around. They were higher in the bottom of the barrel for a lot of these positions by 1980. At the time of the ride, 70% of the guards employed at this prison had less than a year of experience. All these conditions led to this boiling over effect that many who were incarcerated there said they saw coming for years. To the residents of Santa Fe and to many of the new guards working there in 1980 seemed like the right exploded out of nowhere, but that was far from the truth. All right, now we know some background.

This can help us understand this ridiculous story. Let's take a look at what happened during the 36 hour right and look a bit more into the years that led up to it, not much but a bit, and today's TimeSock timeline. After our mid show sponsor break. Now we return to New Mexico to see how this insane riot played out. Also, if you're hearing any ads interrupting the narrative of the show, and not just ads before the show starts,

or at the very end, or during this mid show break, please email us at bojanglesatimesockpodcast.com, let us know if you can the date, time, time zone of the incident for these techies, your device, OS version, your IP address. So the engineers are hosting company can try and figure out exactly what's happening. It's only been a few isolated issues so far,

but I feel bad, don't want people to deal with that. You can also try listing using a different platform. Now it is time suck, timeline time. Shrap on those boots soldier. We're marching down a time suck timeline. Oh, my God. 1956, the New Mexico State Penitentiary Opens. There are almost no rats cockroaches or mold

and it'll never look this nice again. The new facility built about 11 miles south of the original prison, which has been built way back in 1885, but was now right in Santa Bay and no one wants to live next order of prison. I get it. Given the choice, I would rather not look out my backyard and see a tall fence, razor wire, guard towers, and some skin heads lift lift weights. The brand new president will go from a brand spanking new to super fucked up by 1980, just 24 years later. It has a max capacity of 900, but 1,157 inmates will be housed there in 1980 over 28% above

capacity. Leading up to the right local officials and inmates alike will complain for years about substandard conditions, violent cramped housing arrangements, you know, as we talked about. Like I said before, if the state doesn't allocate the necessary funds to expand a prison system, which is keeps arresting too many people, well, then what the fuck are you going to do? You're going to keep housing inmates and overcrowded and violent prisons, I guess. 1976, New Mexico Attorney General Tony Ananya signed a state court agreement and court

order to improve living conditions in prison discipline practices. The optics are great here. I need to get this picture in the paper. It's face shown in the local nightly news, big smile from handshakes. Nice wave to the people at the press conference. Let's clean it up, gang. Come on. Let's clean it up.

There are people too, but nothing changes. Prison officials ignore the court order. Right? They're short staffed, underpaid. They have long stopped giving a fuck about how they probably shouldn't beat and harass inmates. During the year 1976 alone, there are 13 grand jury reports criticizing living conditions at this prison,

but nothing changes. 1977 inmate Dwight Durand files a lawsuit citing cruel and unusual punishment here. The year before an inmate who was seeking medical help for heroin withdrawal at this prison hospital was thrown into the hole and cell block three of the penitentiary, right? Uh, one of these solitary sensory deprivation type chambers. And then is allegedly badly beaten by adults or by adults. They bring some adults in. They bring some parents, right? Show them what's what? Uh, beaten by the guards, including being kicked, quote, repeatedly

in the scrotum. After being released from segregation a month later, this inmates health deteriorates. Dwight Duran is a boyhead friend of this guy who's unnamed in sources and attempts to nursing back to health, but his condition just keeps getting worse. Duran and other inmates are pleading for almost a year with authorities to please hospitalize their friend. Please get him checked out by a real doctor.

They're told to shut up unless they want to be beaten and thrown in the hole as well. Let's say, what they're fucking nuts, stumped on. When this inmate is finally examined at a Santa Fe hospital, he's found to have an advanced malignant tumor on his testicles. Then he's transferred to a locked ward in the state mental hospital for some reason and then dies two weeks later. So clearly, his human rights not taken very seriously. Durant's filing was taken up by the ACLU and combined with the other inmates lawsuits in a class action civil rights case with his name as the lead plaintiff. Dwight, very impressive, actually, hand wrote his initial legal brief in secret.

He had a hider from the guards to avoid having to destroy, to avoid, you know, having his fucking nut stomped on. Shockingly, the US District Court accepted Dwight's legal brief as a class action lawsuit, representing the new Mexico prisoners, and the court appoints lawyers for Dwight Durán and two other inmates here. The court responds, plaintiffs content with the totality of the overcrowding and other conditions at PNM fall beneath the standards of human decency, inflict needless suffering on prisoners, and create an environment which threatens prisoners' mental and physical

well-being, and results in the physical and mental deterioration and debilitation of persons confined therein, which is both unnecessary and punyologically unjustifiable. The the Iran consent decree then becomes the basis for the most sweeping reform ever proposed for any single prison in American history. That's how bad this fucking place is, right? They want to reform it more than they've ever reformed any of their prison, because it's such an fucking hell on our shit hole. I feel like shit had to have been very bad for the court to side with prisoners over the prison system, right? The court ascending prisoners to the prison system and say that their mental and physical wellbeing is not being taken care of.

1976 Dwight is thrown into the hole for snuggling out his handwritten civil lawsuit against the state D.O.C. and governor Jerry Apodaka. He is punished for snitching on prison officials. David Freeman was a lawyer, a man who also represented inmates after the riot. He notes the state is still reluctant to make any changes after the court has ordered, based on this lawsuit, there's like courts like, yeah, you gotta treat these guys better, but then really nothing changes.

Inmates warn Freeman 1978 that if you don't start doing something here, this place is gonna explode. Also, Dwight Duran was serving four years in this hell hole for $4.35 check. Doesn't that seem excessive? Judging it in a little too tough on crime, on that one. The four $4.35 check. Doesn't that seem excessive? Judge getting a little too tough on crime on that one. The forge of $35 check, I'm sure he had a, you know, criminal history, but still, Jesus Christ, four years.

Dwight's lawsuit settlement negotiations are in their final stages when he is notified he's getting paroled in December of 1979. He will be paroled and leave the prison just 12 days before the big right. And he was scared when he left, not for himself, but for those who was leaving behind. Dwight was a leader at the prison just 12 days before the big right. And he was scared when he left, not for himself, but for those he was leaving behind. Dwight was a leader at the prison by the time he left and he'd helped a lot of inmates there kind of stay calm.

He was respected by a lot of different groups. He kept him under control by telling them about the progress his lawsuit was making. He'd given them hope that things were going to get better soon, you know, but then they didn't. Now he's leaving. And he feels like something is going to erupt when he leaves, and he turned out to be right. Duran went on by the way to become a paralegal and never according to his nephew, New Mexico house, or representatives, a current member and Tony O'Mastos from Albuquerque, never had

so much as a traffic ticket for the rest of his life. Past away at age 68 in 2008. So good example of someone who should have been, you know, placed in a rehabilitative penal system, not a fucking horror show. Dwight wasn't the only one concerned about the prison. Many had already predicted a disaster is imminent. The prison was the only maximum security prison in the state at this time. It had been a mixing violent career criminals with nonviolent first-timers, you know, due to overcrowding for years. December 10, 1979, 11 inmates escaped the New Mexico state penitentiary by cutting through two prison fences and running. This occurs within sight of a guard tower. So, you know, not good. After they escaped, they stabbed an elderly man's tealous guns in his truck.

Takes a few days to capture 10 of the inmates. The 11th would remain on the run for years. The prison blames you escape on some recent renovations to cell block five. This will play into the right. Violent inmates had recently been moved out of that secured cell block for renovations. They also blame the escapes on a lack of needed officers and overcrowding. All legitimate excuses. They were way understaffed. That'll come up later. It's absurd how understaffed they were. Still, no extra funding is released to help fix anything at the prison. Attorney Mark Donatelli will tell the Albuquerque Journal after the December escape, it became apparent and people were saying it out loud

that if something wasn't done soon, there was gonna be hell to pay. While the authorities searched for the inmates, the entire prison was locked down. Legislators who visited worried the prison was becoming a pressure cooker, they could explode at any moment. Inmates are now warning civilian staff at the prison was becoming a pressure cooker, you know, that could explode at any moment. inmates are now warning civilian staff of the prison that are right as imminent, you know, so again, some inmates seek transfers out of dormitory

E2, which is housing those new violent cell block five inmates during these prison renovations. Why do they want out, you know, rumors of beatings and rapes? January 11, 1980, Dr. Mark Orner, a prison psychologist, sent a memorandum to the superintendent of correctional security, Manuel, or Manuel, excuse me, uh, Cornios. Dr. Orner related information that inmates were planning to write and take hostages and that ammo and homemade firearms had been hidden in dorm. Me too, the administration conducts a shakedown inspection of the dorm, but doesn't find in the ammo alcohol or weapons so they don't take the right concern seriously.

On January 23rd, 1980, Deputy Warden Montoya sends a memo to Warden Griffin, discussing rumors about the possibility of a hostage being taken in cell block three. You heard it was supposed to happen during evening count. Confidential informant says that the inmates in cell block two were making knives, distributing them to other inmates, Warden Griffin orders staff to review the riot control plan, and exactly two fucking staff members are able to obtain a copy of this riot control plan and read it. So when the riot breaks out, two staff members kind of maybe know what to do.

So they're really firing on all cylinders this place. They're running a fucking well-funded, well-oiled machine. Tidest of tight ships. Friday, February 1, 1980, the first stages of the riot begin. Old Maine was the name for Dormatory E2 at this time, considered the most dangerous section of the prison. The inmates lived in double bunks. There was low lighting in the room, right? Officers had to count all 60 inmates every shift.

The inmates need to were violent escapees and or trouble makers, but they weren't always doing the counts. Many of them normally lived in cell block five. These inmates had been moved from individual cells into dorms instead of dispersing them into different dorms. They were just all crammed into e2 dorms with other non violent inmates. This is the main area. Again, the guards were reluctant to go thoroughly check at night and do a proper head count.

Earlier this day, an inmates told one female prison employee, when I come and tell you not to come to work the next day, don't come to work. She never reported that incident. A female officer who'd been warned that something really bad was going to happen, calls in sick, doing that would save her from 36 hours of hell. And God knows how many rapes at 8.30 p.m. a group of inmates inside dormitory, e2 began drinking some alcohol they'd made. Remember how they make that stuff in prison? We talked about that. And the Jamies and Whiskey and cannibalism suck. They were drinking that twine, that taint wine.

The prisoners would put some grapes behind or off to the side of their testicles when they had a yeast infection and let it ferment a bit before adding into a bottle of soggy bread to give it a bit of that beer flavor. And they'd mix that with some water and drink that sweet Tate wine! Do you remember when I said that twine stuff was bullshit? Still is. Now these guys did make hooch from fermented raisins and yeast smuggled in from the kitchen. Probably didn't taste much better than that Tate wine. The staff began to track down the source of a rumor that night that there was a planet take a hostage, cars are anxious a fear disturbance might happen soon. They were very right to be anxious

10.30 p.m Those e2 inmates who transferred over from cell block five are drunken angry This is a quote according to attorney general Jeff Brighamins later report drunken angry and talking loudly about Taking over the place. Just fucking just talking about it. Just you know loudly about taking over the place. Just fucking just talking about it, just loudly. You're getting rowdy, openly discussing, starting to ride, no guards are hearing them because the guards, for the most part, are too fucking scared to go near them.

The place is an absolute shit show. Too bad these guards didn't stay away from them this night, though. Their plan wasn't really much of a plan, these inmates. They had no leader, no organization. They weren't thinking about escaping, apparently. Their only goal was to, quote, take over the place. They had no leader, no organization. They weren't thinking about escaping apparently. Their only goal was to, quote, take over the place. They were relying on the fact that officers regularly failed to follow basic security protocols.

Excuse me. Inmates had been noticing that not only did officers, you know, not always do their shift count. When they did do it, the officer assigned to the dorm's main door would rarely lock the door. Officers would often keep that door slightly open in case they had to fucking run out of the place quickly because again, they were terrified to be in there. According to former inmate Gary Nelson, one of those drunk prisoners that night, another drunk inmate suddenly jumped up. He said he'd been drinking and said, look, when they come to count and they leave that door open,

we're going to jump them and take over this place place And that was how the riot was planned one drunk dude saying do it another aversion of we don't get him Then we go raise hell. Yeah, yeah, Hawkfolk dogfolk. Let her fucking rip And then a few guys started pounding that sweet sweet Whipple and shit was fucking on Trying to break out of river fucking cageer in your giant pussy with some Whipple! Prison Riot Edition! Prison Riot Edition Whipple is made out of mostly meth, with a touch of liquid cracks thrown in. Some old crow ditch whiskey, some shiv rust, and a few drops of anal blood.

Whipple, Prison Riot Edition, isn't built for taste. It's made for fucking mayhem, and if you can't keep it down, then you might as well lay face down, ask up, let your bunk mate wreck that delicate little princess loophole yours. Go ahead and drive from mommy. Tears making great chains are for whipple. Prison ride edition. So fuck you. Fuck anyone who gets you in your way and drink whipple!

Prison ride edition. So, yeah. Now I'm back. For real though, I find it darkly funny that this ride was based in less of a plan Prison ride edition. So there you go. Now I'm back. Oh, for real though, I find it darkly funny that this ride was based in less of a plan and more in a, hey, let's see if we can just pull this shit off. Just kind of drunken and pulse of idea. And then that led to the bloodiest day of inmate on inmate violence in US prison history.

Only 25 officers are working the night of the ride. That is not nearly enough. 11 of them are outside in guard towers and doing vehicle perimeter patrols leaving only 14 officers scattered throughout a prison with over 1000, you know, with over with some not over. Excuse me, with 1,157 inmates. For perspective on that number, check this out. Typically, looking at 2020, US Department of Justice, Justice Management Division reports, the typical ratio of inmates to correction officers now, and a prison with violent inmates, like a maximum security prison is between five to one and six to one, the ratio of prisoners to guards at the New Mexico State

Penitentiary, the night of the ride was over 46 to one. So if they just would have had roughly eight times as many guards as they did, it would have been in the acceptable range for today. You know, they had 25 inexperienced guards instead of at least 200 guards, which is how many they need it. So weird that Shikki get rid of that at hand in a situation like that. In the early morning hours of Saturday, February 2, 1980, the riot begins. Inmates in dormit 2, pretending to be asleep. Four officers make their way to the dorm to count, shut down the adjacent day room, several

prisoners get up over power the guards. This marks the start of the deadliest prison riot in American history. Well, one of them, almost only the Attica prison riot in Attica, New York, back in 1971 will be bloodier. 33 inmates died in Attica, the exact same number that will die in New Mexico. In Attica, 10 officers also were killed. However, Attica played out so differently. In Attica, the prisoners were not killed in each other all willing, no. It was prisoners versus guards. And of the 43 men who died, including the

10 hostages, all but one guard and three inmates were killed by law enforcement gunfire when the state retook control of the prison on the last day of the uprising in a massive show of force. In Attica, in additional 85 prisoners and six additional officers were wounded, primarily by this gunfire. In New Mexico, over 200 additional prisoners were wounded and seven officers, but in New Mexico, all of the deaths, all of the injuries were dished out by inmates. As far as inmate led violence, no riot in US history comes even close to how brutal this

riot will be. This shit was so intense. The full riot only lasted 36 hours, described by one witness as a frenzy of brutality and murder that left much of the prison south of Santa Fe a smoking hulk The Attica Riot lasted four days Okay, let's now go over how this went down minute by minute My mother fucking McDonald My mother fucking McDonald's. By the time he showed up again. The great triple M is Golden Voice.

Heaven's Songbird. He'll never. But let's seriously go over things I'm going to buy a minute now. At 109 AM, guards started to close the South Wing of the prison. At 140 AM, inmates jumped four guards in dorm E2, right? Captain Roybal, Lieutenant Anaya Anaya officer Smith and our Martinez They should have skipped the count again this night right captain Roybal lieutenant Anaya and An officer enter the dorm the captain and lieutenant then give their keys to an 18 year old officer with four months of training

Order him to watch the dorm door right fuck yeah, bro. I guys gonna stop him After the three enter start counting two on the bunk closer to the door. Just five feet away, rush the door, overpower that poor 18-year-old new guard. Others then jump the three officers inside the dorm. None of them are carrying firearms. Inmates loop a belt now around the neck of one of the guards, push and kick him towards the prison's control center. The inmates beat this guard so badly, so quickly that his co-workers in the control center will not recognize him by the time he gets there. All four guards

are stripped blindfolded, severely beaten at a drunken rage. The inmates took the guard's keys, began unlocking door after door after door throughout the cell block. It's about to get real, real bad. At 1.45 am. the inmates take four more officers hostage officers Bustos Curry H. I'm sorry officers Bustos Curry H. Gale God damn it. Gagos and V. Gagos our caps are just outside dorm F2 prisoners continue unlocking cells years later former inmate Ernest Bacera tells K.O.B. TV it's the Albuquerque NBC affiliates. The corridors just started filling up

and that's just how it went from dormitory to dormitory to dormitory. There's a tension that you can feel. You can feel the something's not right. Now Ernest was just 20 when the riot happened. He locked himself inside a cell on the second floor. He told the reporters, anyone who tells you they weren't scared, they're lying to you.

After getting control of E2, a handful of drunken inmates leading this riot, only a total of 50 of them will be charged for crimes later this riot later and very few convictions. Some of these 50 now run through an unlock gate and an open riot control grill. They attack four officers in dorm F2, steal their keys, start unlocking all the dorms. Except for E1, the protective custody dorm full of inmates, many of their either pedophiles or prisoners who have been labeled as stitches, inmates who had been deemed as needing protection

from other inmates, they just weren't able to get keys for that place. These guys really needed protection that night, and they will not get it. They will have it for a little while, but not long enough. Inmates, E1, barricaded themselves by pushing their bunks against the door. Most of the E1 inmates will then escape

through a window and narrowly avoid being murdered later, but unfortunately not all of them will escape. 157 AM officers in the control center and patrolling or patrolling around the prison. Here then they hear the inmates over the walkie talkies, right? Two officers in a mess hall, now watch a mob of inmates in the main corridor, push and kick a naked man officer Bustos with a belt around his neck, worn as if he is a dog on a leash. According to numerous people who are there, some of these officers will be raped at night. At this point, almost 500 inmates now freely roaming around the prison guard Larry Mendoza, some other officers still have no fucking clue

what's going on. No Mendoza was having a cup of coffee with a friend. Uh, he was leaving the head back to work. He heard a strange loud rumbly noise. Looks up as he's close to 200 inmates running down a hallway towards him. That's fun. Dude deserves a medal for not shit in his pants that moment. His adrenaline kicks the fucking he runs away from them, bangs on the windows of the control center, then tries to escape from the north side of the facility instead of the front door. Doesn't make it. Larry and a coworker taking hostage, she'll be stripped, tortured, possibly raped. They never did release official details regarding, you know, which officers were sexually assaulted.

They kept it sealed for their privacy, but it sounds like probably all of them. 158 AM, more of the staff learned that there is a riot happening in firmery tech, Mayas, locks himself in seven inmates in part of the hospital ward. They hide. 2 AM between 75 and 100 inmates reach the control center start breaking the security glass. The prisoners begin attacking the observation window eventually shatter it with the fire extinguisher. They throw the fire extinguisher at the glass three times for cracks. Officers Lawrence Lucero and C. DeBaca. They flee leaving all the keys to the rest of the prison behind. Special glass

of install just two weeks earlier. If it hadn't been reinforced bulletproof glass, these guards would have probably been taken hostage or killed because those guys would have gotten a lot faster. The glass was one in three sixteenth inch thick and able to stop three thirty eight caliber bolts fired in a tight pattern, but it could not withstand a concentrated attack such as one from the fire extinguisher. Officials will initially fall to glass company for the right. Right at the glass hadn't been broken, the inmates wouldn't have been able to get all the keys they needed to, you know, theoretically take control of the prison. Glass company was ultimately declared not a fault for the right. Officer Lawrence Lucero later testifies in court the fire, the screams, the torturing

of people. It's just something not even a movie could prepare you for. It's just something beyond this world. He sees a man dragged with the belt around his neck. A lot of people being dragged around with fucking belts. He watches an inmate's head get bashed in as he's killed. She does about to go full purge in this fucking place. 201 AM officer tells the control tower to call the state police. 202 inmates take over the control center, gain control of the prison. Officers V. Martinez and vigil here the news, hide in the basement near the gas chamber. Thankfully inmates will never find them.

The break into the control center only takes a few minutes and 22 minutes now the inmates have control over most of the prison according to the Santa Fe new Mexican anarchy now descents. There are no guards to keep law in order. Bloody chaos ensues. Inmates began forming groups based on race, gangs, other previous alliances. They quickly create weapons out of metal pipes, chair legs, retrieve other homemade weapons stashed previously.

Inmates find gas masks, where those, they're wearing bandanas around their faces to hide their faces protect themselves from smoke Is there set and shit on fire? There were welding torches left out in the open because contractors were using them overnight Not knowing a fucking riot was gonna occur, you know when they left Some inmates got ahold of these bad boys and we'll soon put them to some very graphic use Listing to various descriptions from people who were there on that BBC documentary, it truly sounds, again, like this was,

you know, a fucking new purge movie. Justice violent, justice chaotic. Inmates begin to make their way to the north side of the prison now, release everyone except those in cell block four, they can't find keys for that one area. Some inmates rip out, some plumbing fixtures, the prison has now flooding, it'll end up having six inches of water by the time this is over on the floors. After a few hours, you know,

this water will be stained red with blood. Former inmate Gary Nelson later reports, you have people running around out here stabbing people just to see what it's like to stab people. We've got people stabbing dead bodies. It's nuts. 2 15 a.m. the psych ward is set on fire because why the fuck not? City and state police now begin showing up outside the prison. After what happened in Attica, they decide not to go in guns blazing. 2.30am, more maximum security prisoners in cell block 3 are set free. The inmates then invade the administrative offices.

They dump cabinets full of official records onto the floor, set them on fire. They set punching bags on fire in the gym. The wooden floors catch fire. They punching bags on fire in the gym. The wooden floors catch fire. They start burning people alive in the gym. Some prisoners have made the kitchen, steel butcher knives and food. They raid the pharmacy. G. Hurliman, a New Mexico journalist at the time of the riot,

author of the hate factory, a firsthand account of the 1998 riot at the Penitentiary, New Mexico, wrote, in minutes, the inmates had themselves a candy store of every kind of downer you can think of. There were also hypodermic needles and syringes for those who liked a more potent hit. So now some of these bloodthirsty anarchists and nihilists

and psychopaths are getting super high, right? Only good, of course, is gonna come from that. Some of these men who start the uprising are now forming quote, death squads with allies and cell block three. These are some of the most dangerous men in the prison. quote death squads with allies and cell block three. These are some of the most dangerous men in the prison. The death squads now start going around the prison settling scores with snitches who were in protective custody. Some of the men in protective custody will be tortured and mutilated before being murdered.

There's hack marks in the concrete floor that are still visible today where one man was beheaded with a fucking shovel. Black stain shows where one inmate had his eyes completely gouged out before his face was melted with one of those welding torches. Drunken high prisoners, set shit on fire, raping, torturing, killing people left and right. No one safe reportedly over 200 different inmates and prisoners will be raped in this right. Most of them during this first night of hell on earth. A few dozen inmates will participate in desquads. Most of the other inmates trying to hide from these sadistic motherfuckers. Hundreds of inmates will flee the prison

before the rights over. The majority of these prisoners did not seem to be pro right. They just wanted to get away from all this. In the midst of this chaos, some inmates will help officers escape or give first aid to fellow inmates and officers, right? Not all these inmates, not by far or monsters. Inmate, uh, Lee Roy Vierro, uh, he was a monster though. He was part of the death one of the desk watch. He spoke to that behind the behind bars, doc team about his experience. True social pack.

Didn't give a fuck about what he'd done. He said, I went to find two guys I wanted to kill and to be truthful I would have enjoyed every minute of killing them I killed some people and I won't say no names, but I did kill some people There's some guys there that some deserve to die and maybe some didn't deserve to die But you know when you're going around looking for who you want to get whoever gets to my way they just have to die, you know? No, no, we don't know. Lee Roy you fucking animal You know, no, no, we don't know. Lee Roy, you fucking animal. 235 AM, New Mexico governor, Bruce King

receives an emergency phone call. He's informed that the warranty on his vehicle is about to expire. This is a courtesy call in regards to the warranty coverage options for your vehicle. Records indicate that you have still not activated the coverage program available for your vehicle. Now, he didn't get called by a fucking telemarker,

but he did get a call. Chief Martin vigil of the state police calls him to inform him about the riots. Visual tells him governor, we've lost contact with the penitentiary. When we call there, we don't get an answer. I thought I'd better alert you. I think we have a serious problem. 2.40 a.m. Governor King alerts National Guard, National Guard general Franklin Miles about what's going on there.

3 a.m. officers or take him in Doza, Gutierrez are captured in cell block two. 315 a.m. inmates use a torch to cut into one of the dorms and capture officer Hernandez. Another hostage is officer Michael Schmidt. He's 25 when the ride happens. He's overpowered by inmates held for 22 and a half hours blindfolded shackled to a metal bunk. He knew a ride was happening when prisoners slammed the door on him. As he turned off a light in the day room, he said, they came in and beat the hell out of me. They had a strip tour underwear, closed the door, left the day room. There wasn't a whole lot I could do. By then, I was not in very good shape because they had beaten the crap out of me.

You could hear all the commotion going on. Then all of a sudden, they had radios. And I could hear them giving themselves little nicknames, Chopper 1, Chopper 2. Some of these inmates were having a ball. Other inmates were crying. Then all of a sudden they had radios, and I could hear them giving themselves little nicknames, Chopper 1, Chopper 2. Some of these inmates were having a ball. Other inmates were crying. They were scared and had no idea what was happening. You could hear screams yelling, crying. It was a madhouse.

The inmates were coming into the unit talking about dead bodies everywhere. They were saying you could look into the flames and see inmates that were hung in the gymnasium. Right, some medieval shit going on. This is kind of shit I expected to be talking about in last weeks until the hunts suck. Tired for me to imagine witnessing this stuff in real life.

Officer Schmidt monitors the inmates progress by how they treat him. He says he knew they took over the kitchen in the hospital because they gave him food and aspirin. They brought him a coke from a vending machine so he knew they'd taken over the whole prison at that point. Some inmates came in late Saturday night to get him to use as a bargaining chip.

They told him to get up, but he couldn't because he was shackled. So they started beating me, he said. They were beating me on the head with whatever, with what felt like pipes, bars, whatever. This beating was worse than the first one because they had weapons. I got beaten all the way to the floor,

crawled as far as I could under the bed. Four am, a death squad begins cutting through a jammed door of cell block four, that protective custody cell, right? They get those welding torches, uh, is like a settling cutting torch. They're taunting the prison, they're telling the people in there what they're going to do to them once they cut their way through. Uh, prisoners in the cell block, you know, they try to signal to the state police outside for help or screaming.

They don't receive any help. From four to seven in the morning, some of the most brutal murders and mutilations will take place here. One man in cell block four will be beheaded. There were several beheadings. Another will have his face burned with a torch until his fucking head exploded. I didn't know that was possible. An officer who worked in the prison interviewed for that BBC doc said he saw this happen.

Said he saw they melted this guy's eyes out. Then the torch gases must have gotten into his skull accumulated until his skull exploded He talked about how he'll never be able to forget seeing that. Yeah fucking bet I'll never be able to forget just hearing about that But I will say this is the craziest part the guy who's had exploded somehow did live His name was Arthur J. Shawcross, Genesee River Killer, a man who could not be killed by head trauma. Obviously joking. But if anyone could have survived having their head exploded, it would have somehow been Arthur. Another inmate was beaten to death with the tear gas

gun. Other inmates were beaten to death with pipes. One inmate at a piece of rebar, they cut like one of the cell bars off of that torch and they jammed that bar clear through his fucking head roughly ear to ear. And he did live his name. His name was Arthur J. Shockross. Uh, no, now you die. It's like to do to his head, I've said, uh, a dozen snitches will be killed by hanging

decapitation, fire, a metal bar, mutilation, uh, some inmates will be hanged and burned, some cell block for inmates who escaped had to run past inmates swinging metal pipes at them chasing them. One man beaten a death on a toilet seat. A lot of these guys also raped because there was no dedicated mental health unit mentally ill prisoners are also kept in protective custody. And some of the death squad members just killed whoever they got to first. So some of the people, right, they weren't snitches. They weren't pedophiles. They were just, you know, people who are mentally ill, wrong place, wrong time couldn't defend themselves, get butchered.

There are rumors of gang rapes being carried out on some of the individuals before they die or as they're dying, right? These motherfuckers are truly in hell. Inmate Mario Eurosti, 28 from Santa Fe, he was in this prison for shoplifting, right? It references earlier. The week before the riot, this poor son of a bitch had been gang raped by seven inmates and he wanted to press charges on him.

So he was placed in cell block four for his safety so he wouldn't be killed for snitching. Then of course this riot happens. His dead body will be found hanging on a wall, she twisted into a rope around his neck. He had been raped again, probably by many assailants, throat had been cut, dick and balls cut off, stuck into his mouth, possibly if not probably

while he was still alive. Again, dude was in there for shoplifting. Why? Because the minimum security facilities where he should have been jailed were all so overcrowded, fucking insanity. The authorities wait outside in the go-shaped while this is going on.

They don't want to do anything again. They'll jeopardize the lives of officers inside. We're taking hostage. Again, thinking about Attica. Inmate Michael Colby, that's psychopath. Later said, I think everybody realized the minute an officer died, we died. There was a preservation thing.

That was the only ace we had. The only reason they weren't in there was because we had an officer. The interviewer then asked him, but no one was going to come in to save the men in cell block four. And he kind of laughs. And he says, who gives a fuck about them? I mean, you know, the way they were treating them, they were in six by nine, two or three of them living in there like that. They didn't care about them. Once they'd gotten the usefulness of them testifying or giving up information, they gave up, you know, they're

as useless to them as they are to us, matter of fact, they're a burden to them because they have to take care of them. So they don't give a fuck about them at all. Michael was an Aryan brotherhood gang leader, who later admitted to being extremely high when he broke into cell block four, not known if he killed anyone, but he was charged with a couple murders. They just couldn't stick on him. So I'm going to say he did kill some people. One of the few inmates will speak about all this after the right. He comes across interviews as a guy who doesn't lie about this kind of stuff. It's my own opinion. Not an exaggerator, just a very cold blooded, very scary dude. 5.25 a.m. and inmate escapes from the prison. He had been bashed in the head with a meat cleaver. Also been thrown from the roof, landed on his head. He had also had a welding torch taken to his head

and had his head smashed repeatedly by a closing cell door. Then other inmates had taken turns for half an hour, jumping from the second floor to the first floor, landing directly on his head. And an inmate who once played minor league baseball, power hitter,

got a hold of a metal pipe, used this guy's head for batting practice. He was bleeding profusely, but said he otherwise felt fine He would later be identified of course as Arthur J. Shockross So I can help myself up a for real one inmate did escape badly injured in the head by meat cleaver guard also saved by inmates They released him disguised in inmate clothing 640 a.m. and it made demands now to speak to the media all for some negotiate People across do Mexico are now waking up to the news that this prison riot, you know,

is taking place. The riot dominates just about every TV screen in the state that day. Families have been made start to gather outside the prison to wait for news updates. Reporters from New York, LA, Chicago, we're already flying in. Most information during the riot will come from a two-way radio transmissions between inmates and deputy warden Robert Montoya The media will only over here information on their police scanners No one knew what actually happened in there until after the ride was over

One point there were rumors and speculations of the National Guard was shooting inmates and that hundreds of people were dead So nobody knows what's going on 6.45 a.m Inmates open up negotiations with Warden Jerry Griffin governing King king now. While negotiations are taking place, state police, national guards around the perimeter, helicopter, circling overhead, officers and riot gear or awaiting orders to prepare to storm the prison. The inmates demand that federal officials be brought in to ensure no inmates will be retaliated against in the aftermath of the riot. Prisoners be reclassified. So first timers with short sentences are not having to live with violent lifers.

No more overcrowding. No more harassment from the guards, better food, better recreational facilities, more educational opportunities, new disciplinary committee. And I gotta say, this list of demands doesn't seem to be outrageous. Also doesn't fit the anarchy.

Doesn't match the anarchy of what's happening inside. I feel like the blow torch until his head explodes, desk quad purge guys and the negotiation guys are not the same guys. Hours pass and no progress in negotiations is actually made. Inmate, negotiate, negotiate groups, frequently changed throughout the day,

which makes their demands come across as very disorganized, right? And of course they're disorganized. This is not a well planned right. This is anarchy. This is truly anarchy. This is holy shit. Some drunk guys actually overpower the guards and we have torches. What the fuck do you want to do? At 7 a.m. 84 prisoners escaped through a window and surrender to authorities. These people give first hand accounts of the, you know, atrocious acts being committed inside. 702, one hostage is released. He has been badly beaten. According to attorney general Jeff Binghamins later report, knowledge of inmates being killed did not change the

negotiation process. The official strategy continued to be stall for time, tried to talk the convicts into releasing hostages. Although corrections officials knew that some of the guards were being beaten, stabbed, and sodomized, they clung to the hope the negotiations could at least save the hostages' lives. Gosh! Dang it, my heck! This is the nightmare. 830 AM, 20 more inmates escaped the prison and surrender. 858 Governor King speaks to inmates over the phone, promises to allow them to speak to journalists. You also promises they wouldn't storm the prison if the host is or kept alive. The prisoners say that if their demands are met, they'll give up the prison by mid afternoon,

but their demands keep changing at noon. An inmate negotiator demands to see the media and threatens to decapitate prisoners if the demands are not met. Well, yeah, that's already happening. Some inmates have already had their fucking heads cut off. 110, 30 more inmates escape and surrender. 125, 20 more inmates escape and surrender. 320 governor king receives confirmation that hostages, the guards are still alive. 510 PM and inmate threatens to start killing the guards but is talked out of this by other inmates. 650 PM, some prisoners bring out

the first inmates dead body. 11 25 PM, another guard slash hostages released. He is badly beaten and tied to a chair when he comes out. The right slowly fizzles out on Sunday, February 3rd, 1980, a slow flood of inmates escaping the prison and the release of the rest of the hostages will bring the riot to a quote, unremarkable end. At 107 a.m. negotiations are paused at 8 a.m. authorities count 800 prisoners outside now that have surrendered at 10, some remaining investigators, I'm sorry, some remaining inmate negotiators meet with the TV crew and prison officials inside. K.O.B. TV was the station that was allowed in. And inmate told the reporters were human beings, just like everybody else. We don't expect to be a king here, but we expect to be treated right. Another inmate said, where is the money coming from?

Where is the money coming from in the prison industries to better jobs and rehabilitation and institution? There isn't any. Another inmate with a baseball bat sticking out of his head said, could I please have some aspirin? Of course, later identified as author shock. All the inmates on TV were mass to hide their identities, but during the conference in mate negotiators reduced their demands to only post-ribe protection and enter harassment and out of

state transfers for themselves. But no demands will ever be met. 1055 AM some inmates help another hostage escape. 1234 PM, the body of inmate Pauline Paul right out of the prison. Pauline, one of the inmates who had been beheaded his head was sitting on his legs when he was carried out. Pauline was mentally ill, been housed in cell block four. He was either 36 or 37 years old. Oh man, according to former CEO Bob White Pauline had a, you know, mental abilities of a 12 year old probably had no idea what was happening during the rites. Bob said he was killed because he was black and because he wasn't smart enough to get out of there.

Guard Larry Mendoza later said that at one point, a group of three men had come into the room, he and other hostages were held in, holding Pauline his head. And the leader asked who wants to be next. 126 PM, two more hostagesages are released and then that was it. By 130 on Sunday, the prison was retaken by the guard. State police, city police entered, secured the prison, arresting the few inmates who still remained inside. Now the investigation, body recovery and cleanup efforts will begin.

Attorney David Freeman from the Dwight Durand case, attorney Charles Daniels, who will go on to become a great fiddler. No, not that Charles Daniels, who go on to become next new Mexico Supreme Court justice from 2007 to 2018, went to the prison to offer help. The starter right and instructions on legal paths for prisoners to order food, water, medical care, mattresses, Freeman said the prison guards were paralyzed. They were scared to death. The last dead body to be taken out of the prison was another person who had been decapitated.

And the man's penis had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth. It gave us so fucking crazy in there. Albuquerque ABC News affiliate, KOATTV, reporter Marylyn Roper, one of the first journalists inside the prison after the riot. She told Albuquerque Journal, it is something that is etched in your mind for life. It was extraordinarily cold.

We're walking through water. Some of it had blood in it. You could feel the horror. When you saw the bars of a cell individually cut by what we learned later, where a settling torches, you could imagine the absolute terror of the inmate trapped inside while others waited to get at him. There was a toilet bowl smashed. I was convinced someone's head had been used to smash it. When we got to the control center, we saw that everything had been broken and broken again and smashed again.

You could feel the rage. Jim Bell-Shaw from the Albuquerque Journal also went inside saying, I remember a thick swath of blood about a foot wide. It ran across almost the entire length of a cell wall. I remember the cold, dank air, and the sense that we had just stepped into a nightmare that was beyond anything we might imagine. I remember the reddish brown water that flooded the building where we walked. Correction secretary Robert Rob Perry who was also there said when we got to the last

inmate out of the main, it was like a weight came off my shoulders. We could put an inmate who was doing well in another prison into the main and suddenly the guys walking around like a mafia boss Starting down the hallway that place was an infection Marcella Amarillo Former guards soon gave her story to the Albuquerque Journal Marcella was one of the first employees to survey the destruction after the riot She was the only woman scheduled to work the night shift when the riot broke out and She says I tell myself all the time they would have killed me just to kill me.

Normally Marcella came to work two hours early, but she never showed up that Friday. She had a little too much to drink, on a night out with some friends, called in sick. I've always felt guilty about that because I should have been there with my comrades, but thank God I wasn't a no-holy roller. I don't go to church, but I do think somebody was helping me that night. And what a lucky reward for getting fucked up the night before. Those are the stories you don't hear enough of. How alcohol sometimes saves lives. When Marceler rushed to the prison on Saturday morning, her supervisor burst into tears.

She said, he didn't know I had shown up for work. They imagined the worst. Or it didn't know I hadn't shown up for work. They imagined the worst. Her opinion about the end of the riot would differ from the opinions of many others. She said, we didn't take back the prison. Those inmates allowed us to go in. Marcellable later, like many of the other officers and staff believed the prison didn't do much to help them,

cope with what they saw. She'd later say, I'm mad because nobody helped us get through this. There should have been a debriefing, training. Someone to help us process what we saw, what we experienced. We had to deal with those bodies. Oh God. If you see the photos It would give you an idea of what we had to go through Right, no surprise there I mean if they weren't going to spend the money to hire way more guards to make sure something like that didn't happen in the first place

They're not going to then spend the money to help the guards who were there To be fair to New Mexico It does have a long history of being one of the poorest states in the nation, generally in the top three, and generally the poorest state in the West. And legitimately, it doesn't always have enough tax money to do what should be done in a variety of situations. Corrections officer, ride hostage, Michael Schmidt will agree with Marcella saying years later, the prison system didn't care about us when we were correction officers, and they really didn't care much about us afterwards.

They didn't fight for us. They didn't help us at all. It's not like they offered any kind of love or support or anything for the families. The state paid his workman's comp, paid for a psychologist. If they didn't have to acknowledge us, they didn't have to, you know, they didn't have to admit there was a problem. While New Mexico didn't seem to spend much on helping the officers who worked at the prison when the riot went down, they would have to spend a lot of money to fix the

mess that the riot went down, they would have to spend a lot of money to fix the mess at the riot left. It would cost around $100 million to restore the prison. Repairers alone cost 10 million, cleanup efforts cost 38 million. And then the government had to pay to ship hundreds of inmates out of state. In the end, 33 men were dead, the oldest was 40, the youngest just 19, over 100 inmates were hospitalized

for serious injuries and drug overdoses or and or drug overdoses, and estimated 200 plus inmates were raped and allegedly many of the guards. From 1980 to 1983, state officials will end up charging 50 inmates with riot-related crimes. Most of them pled guilty with no extra time added to their sentences. 17 of the 33 homicides weren't prosecuted. Prosper years only got jury verdicts in two of the remaining 16 cases. Roger Morris, author of the Devil's Butcher Shop. Man, another book on the right, wrote,

Three years after the carnage, the conclusion seemed inescapable. In stark terms of proof of punishment, many, if not most, of the men who rampaged, raped, tortured, murdered, and mutilated. At the Santa Fe riot got away with it. Efforts for prison reforms began after the riot reluctantly. 68 claims were filed in an effort to recover damages for the deaths and injury of inmates. 124 inmates.compensation, only 47 got some. 77 cases were dismissed. Sorry, you got raped and

beaten and set a fire a little bit. You know, shouldn't have sold that weed, buddy. The state paid out of total of $6 million. After all, the claims were settled. Some families of dead inmates only received $10,000. My February of 1983, all the prosecutions ended. 37 inmates were charged. 26 received extended sentences. There were eight first degree murder convictions, 15 pleaded guilty to second degree murder, received nine year sentences, 17 inmates were convicted for lesser charges. States sued the glass manufacturer, right, but the lawsuit was dismissed. 13 former guards found a lawsuit seeking 52 million in damages. Not sure how much of any they ended up getting in the settlement. the numbers doesn't seem to have been publicly disclosed. Excuse me. Uh, right after the riot, legislators scrambled to approve a $38 million emergency appropriation for cleanup and restoration.

They knew if they didn't hurry up and get the inmates back in the prison, then, you know, other New Mexico prisons are going to become grossly overcrowded. And another riot or riots might happen. Attorney General Binghamen, voting his big report, the penitentiary can be repaired and even a bureaucracy can be repaired. But the men who day by day, for a year after year, have to look over their shoulder

for the man with a knife, who lack enough opportunity to make decisions in their daily lives that they forget how to decide, these men cannot be repaired. They are forever broken by a system designed to correct them. According to retired District Judge Mike Vigil,

the riot continued in slow motion for the next 18 months. There will be more violence. Two officers and six inmates will be killed during that time. Some of the murders are related to inmate deaths during the riot. Retallations, right? It's a place of fucking dumpster fire still. The first few months after the riot are actually peaceful, but then some legislators who had sent inmates away were demanding they be returned as soon as possible. It was nearly impossible to get the prison back and order fast enough, right? The basic reconstruction, painting alone, cost $10 million. National Guard served the prisoners meals for months because the kitchen was destroyed.

Most of the inmates were backed by late summer and then the violence starts again. On September 12, 1980, inmate George Savretta is stabbed to death in his cell October 24th inmate, uh, Apalina, Paul Moraga, stab to death and a recreation yard. December 21, 1980 inmate Ricardo Tafoya killed in cell block two. January 16, 1981, uh, inmate Arthur J. Shockross had his head used as a ramp by evil connevil for a jump over the prison he made to raise money for repair efforts. Shockross was fine, but then as he was taken back to his cell, he was hit in the temple by a meteorite. Nearly ripped his head and clean off his neck, but he was still, uh, quote, totally fine.

Or at least no worse than he'd been for many years. Come on, I know I keep kidding, but it's kind of funny, right? February 26, 1991, real tragedy occurs. Officers, Lewis Jewett, uh, officer, not officers officer, Lewis Jewett, officer, not officers, officer. Lewis Jewett is stabbed while attempting to save inmate Bobby Garcia, who had also been stabbed. Bobby dies that day, Jewett dies April 6th. April 16th, inmate Jesus Jose Atunias is killed in the wreckyard. One of the five inmates charged

with killing inmate Ramon Madrid during the riot. Ramon had been found burned to death in the protective custody cell block. Tunea has had maintained his innocence and was waiting trial. There was no signs he was going to be a witness against other inmates, but rumors are that he's a snitch. Tunea gets into an argument with the fellow inmate also

about who's gonna get a porter job cleaning their cell block. The CEOs are warned to be careful when taking a Tunea to the wreck yard the day he dies as they're removing his handcuffs. Lorenzo, excuse me, man, uh, Lorenzo Shavez, a co-defendant in the Madrid murder and, uh, Raymond Erragon, the inmate who wanted that Porter job, they both attack him. Uh, attunias is stabbed over 40 fucking times. Shavez and Erragon plead guilty to second degree murder. No word on if Eriegon got that Porter job. I'm gonna say he didn't.

August 21st, 1981, inmate Danny Baca stabbed in the recreation yard. This is a fucking stabby place. August 30th, 1981, officer Gerald McGee killed by five prisoners who stole guns. He was attempting to prevent an escape and is killed by other inmates. 1987, now Warden George Sullivan tells the Albuquerque Journal that the beedians of officers during and after the riot and the two officer murders in the aftermath of the riot destroyed the normal relationship between officers and inmates. He said because of the riot and post riot murders a threat uttered in this institution is a threat

inmates have a higher expectation will be carried out. There's a very active element of fear here that you don't find in other prisons in the country. 1998, the prison after all those renovation costs, it closes this door permanently. It is now used as a movie set and tourist attraction. The whole structure now called Old Main, a new minimum security prison, is nearby and is currently active.

Old Main becomes a movie set for films like The Longest Yard, The Astronaut Farmer, Into the West. What have they screened any of the Saw Franchise or purge films there? The corrections department initially offers free tours or did offer free tours, but then so many people came out and they started charging. The tour was called Respect Our Past to create a better future. Visitors could see cases of shanks and weapons from the rides. They could see dorm E2 inmate possessions, gang signs on the wall to mark this dark piece of history. I think they're still giving tours.

Recently, ghost tours were also, for a while, given off and on in Old Man. It's reportedly very haunted. Let's hop on out of this time. I know and looking to what prison reforms that the right and the violence and its aftermath did lead to. Good job, soldier. You've made it back. Before I get into that reform stuff, sorry I forgot, I do have one more sponsor. Today's time stock has been brought to you by Shockross Helmets, Helmets made tough by the only man who never needed a helmet. I'm under Shockross, founder of Red Daddy Guy. I'm always want to be daddy guy if kids'm always, I'm always wanna be daddy guy

if kids need watching and I can get away with it. But also, Dean and Dean need helmet. Scientists have studied my school and made a shock cross special. This helmet can stop anything from smashing your thought noodle case. Discuses, javelins, bowling balls, wrecking balls, shock and blast. I'm taking all that to my head with no helmet. I'm fine. And now if you want to wear my skull helmet, you'll be fine like me.

No income as of this daddy guys knocking, and now I give my greatest gift to you. Each helmet is made of a two inch thick human-ish skull bone. Proving to stop the following, and more from harming your brain melon. Rocks, marbles, boulders, light poles, missile strikes, concrete floors, concrete sealants, samurai swords, drone strikes, parachute fails, laser rockets, power drills, and dynamite. Ha ha, give me one of my school helmets, ye ha, give me your best daddy guy try. If he doesn't work, you can put my head in a vice and don't have to play nice!

Call one-eighthundreds-shockcross. School helmet thing daddy guy nice try! I would have never eaten vaginas but mommy made me! And that's why I chose paper holes! Uh, yeah, so that's another horrible sponsor. Be know what? As you know the day money's money. Let's talk about what we did learn from this crazy ride.

New Mexico attorney general Jeff Binghamon wrote a big ass report shortly after the ride ended. I've referenced several times, obviously already. One of the sources we use extensively for today's info and the legislature authorized $100,000 for Binghamon's office to investigate and make this report on the ride in its causes. The first volume of the report

gives a minute by minute account of the ride from 300 inmate interviews. Excuse me, the second volume title, a history of neglect, details of prison conditions that cost it. It revealed what we've already went over. That the prison had been dangerously understaffed underfunded for years, that it was dangerously overcrowded.

Violent offenders had been housed in dorm situations, no less with nonviolent offenders. Puzzle pieces, right? Always going missing. Scrodom's being used as a speedback. You know, JKN was last two, but more real ones. The rehabilitation programs have been done away with, right? Guards used punishment off an illegal punishment

to control inmates without anything positive for them to work towards. All of that, plus improperly trained guards, the whole psychotic snitch jacket bullshit led directly to the right. You know, you treat a group of people like animals, people who are already more prone to violence in the average person, people who already have less respect for law and order than normal. And they're going to be more apt to act out with savagery, like they did in that right.

And also, you can't preposterously underfund shit like that, right? That was the main thrust of the report. If more money had been spent in the right ways in the 1970s, they would definitely not have been a riot in 1980. The riot did lead to reforms in how the state trained officers and improvements in inmate treatment. At the time of the riot, the cowboy coalition, as it was called, was in session, the state legislator in alliance between conservative Democrats and Republicans. In a 1979, that legislator gave less than $20 million to the corrections department. 20 days after the riot, legislators then had to approve almost 40 million dollars for

emergency funding to rebuild the prison, hire more officers, prosecute and defend inmates, pay the National Guard, pay other prisons to hold new Mexico inmates, then lawmakers, allotted another 50 million dollars to build a new maximum security prison. After seeing how much more they had to pay to fix the bullshit, then they would have had to pay to prevent it, the state did start to fund the state penal system more effectively after the right. February 7th, 1980, the House appropriation and finance committee approved a bill that increased the salaries of prison employees. So that was good. The legislature spent, you know, $100 million on building prisons in Santa Fe, grants,

and lost cruises New Mexico. But at these prisons inmates continue to escaping killing each other and killing officers. In December of 1981, the New York Times reported improvements in conditions and security at the state penitentiary here have reported, you know, been gained grudgingly if at all. In July, 1980, after the AG's report, the state was ordered to institute reforms at the prison, right? Five hours a day of meaningful activity, one hour of exercise standards for education wreck programs additional staff access to law libraries improve food service quicker access to medical care a revised classification system right to keep rival gang members away from

each other keep violent offenders away from nonviolent offenders however a report written by Daniel Crone hired by the state to monitor compliance with the order from November 1980 to March 1981 found that the state only complied with 132 out of 624 issues. So God damn it. None of the shit means anything if no one is following court orders, right? Money, money, money. You know what help fix this prison system and give them the money they need? I don't know, maybe stop arresting people for using drugs. Tax is shit out of legally sold drugs. The answer is right, fucking there. It's so frustrating. It's maddening. New Mexico just finally legalized, right? Recreational marijuana. This is last summer. The tax income projection

are for them for next year, for that is over $69. Legalized psychedelics too, double that shit. Then funnel that money into higher pay, better training for law enforcement, correction officers, create better, more rehabilitative prisons, or keep thinking that all drugs are scary, or execute everyone in prison. That would also definitely save some money. JK, just do that to PIDidos and serial rapists and serial killers. In the 80s, despite the AG's report, she didn't really seem to improve much in New Mexico prisons. All the new prisons they were building that were meant to reduce overcrowding just filled

up again because the war on drugs kept escalating. Right? Remember all those 80s and carceration stats? However, instead of dorm style, prisons were using individual cells, so that was good. But then those cells, you know, did start fill up, and then inmates had to sleep on cats and day rooms, so that's not good. We're right back to where we started. This created the same dangerous situation for CEOs as they had during the right. In the 1990s, Governor King, same governor, he took eight years off, then ran a one again.

He signed a bill allowing the corrections department to use private prisons and approved a financing scheme that would allow local governments to finance the construction of private facilities. That did improve things for a while. The new private prisons, you know, started housing, you know, no more than two inmates in a cell, no dorms. They reduced overcrowding, but they didn't properly screen inmates and rival gangs, you know, rival gang members often put in the same units and that led to a lot of stabbing murders. Recently, New Mexico has started to shift back away from private to public prisons.

In 2021, the state took back control of two prisons. They've been ran privately for 20 and 30 years respectively. And right now, 25% of the state's prisons beds are in privately operated facilities, right? So the public is back to controlling 75%. Both private and state prisons, a Iran consent decree based on on Dwight Durand's lawsuit did help with summer forms. Remember, he's a guy that sued the prison system after he tried to help his buddy.

After the guys, Balls got kicked in, and he died from untreated tumor. The Durand consent decree was approved in July of 1980 and after revisions that came from the right, or after revisions that came from the right, the decree ordered sanitary conditions in prisons, heating, cooling, access to hygiene products, regulations on discipline, inmates were guaranteed access

to medical services, mental health services, attorneys, mail, and more. The years following the decree, the court appointed a special master to monitor the state's compliance with these laws. Lawyers continued to make adjustments to prison regulations until it reached a new settlement in 1991. Both parties made a deal.

If the state comply with the most important parts of the decree, the plans would vacate other provisions, excluding overcrowding. New Mexico prisons did seem to avoid the kind of overcrowding that led to 1980 riot for years. In 2017, lawyers did though a file complaint, containing the state was violating the overcrowding provision now in four state prisons. But then in May 2020, the state lawyers reached another new settlement, pushing the state to comply with more terms, reducing populations, certain prisons.

So inmates always got 50 square feet of living space, regular pass control, no more punishing inmates for reporting sexual assault and more. And recently in the past two years, for the first time since the riots, since the right, New Mexico's prisons actually not overcrowded. And the reason seems to have less to do with crime rates and funding or reforms, more to do with COVID actually. There's been a dramatic decline in the state's prison population from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021, according to New Mexico's sentencing commission.

jury trials were suspended during the pandemic and the Department of Corrections worked to find elderly and at risk prisoners who were eligible for early release, according to the MNNMSC, the decline in prison population did begin to go down there before the pandemic. So there's, you know, there's hope that it's going to be, you know, improving after the pandemic is, you know, totally over. So for the first time in the last 10 years, the peak male prison population has dropped below 6,000 prisoners,

and the peak female prison population has dropped by total of 24% over the last two fiscal years. So that's good, some good news there. Hopefully that's gonna help with staffing ratio, ratio ish, Jesus Christ, staffing, ratio, issues. Those are words. Understanding or under staffing continue to be a real problem for years after the right.

May still be a big problem. Couldn't find any stats for the last 10 years, but a 2010 Albuquerque journal article said that some state facilities still had inmate to guard ratios as high as 86 to one. So hopefully that's gotten a lot better in the last 12 years. Nationwide, as of 2020, many of the same problems do seem to exist in US prisons

that were there in 1980 overcrowding, short staffing. What the prison system now has is better containment and social control of inmates. There's a much greater concentration on security, greater focus on reintegration of inmates back into society, so that is good. US prisons no longer house inmates of all classifications under one roof. Prisons are built in a pod design with a central control room for each pod. Inmates separated by classification. New prisons less for the line on keys. They use control rooms with electronic doors. Prisons have better lighting and sightlines in general for guards, which is great for guard and inmate safety, less assaults, less rapes. Also, multiple doors keep inmates contained if they do

escape from one section. Much harder for them to get into other sections. CEOs are still overworked and underpaid. Currently also it can take up to six months for an application to be approved to be a correctional officer in to Mexico. Even people who want to work in prisons can't often, you know, wait that long for the job when they need money. New reforms are working on a two-day qualification system, plus a now standard eight-week academy in many places. More works don't need to be done,

but things are better. So that's good. 98% of inmates get released back into society, 50% of those inmates will be offend currently. Some places like LA County have been experimenting in recent years with new programs to reduce these recidivism rates. A support of housing programs established by the Office of Diversion in LA County improved housing stability and reduced criminal justice involvement with pretty impressive outcomes. 86% of participants had no new felony convictions after 12 months. So hopefully we can keep moving things in the right direction for society's sake, right? No bloodbath of a riot like 1981 has occurred since since 1980 so that's good. I know we have a lot of corrections officers who listen to this podcast. I hope you're being treated better those

officers were back in 1980. It does look like the paying benefits packages have improved vastly since then. I hope you're getting the staff support you need wherever you're working and the prison and jails you work at provide, you know, the inmates there with enough positive options outlets to keep them from feeling so hopeless that they want to try some shit like this again. And hope legislators give our penal systems the funding that they need. If you're going to be tough on crime, you got to be generous with the funding. Alright, now let's go over some of what we learned today and also get a bit spooky with

today's Top five takeaways. Time, shock, top five takeaways. Uh, start from my pauses, by the way, too. You forget to take an allergy pill for one day and your scientists go crazy. Uh, number one, the New Mexico State Penitentiary Arriot was started by drunk inmates, housed in dorm E2 at the time, E2 housed some of the prison's most violent inmates because their normal cell block was being renovated. And then they'd been placed in virtually unsupervised dorms, also housing nonviolent offenders, and the dorm became a breeding ground for violence in Mayhem.

Nonviolent first time offenders, you know, sleeping alongside murderers and sexual predators. As far as I can tell, just type of situation no longer occurs in US prisons or at least, you know, it's not supposed to. Number two, one inmate Dwight Durand was a leader in an effort to change prison conditions in New Mexico. His handwritten legal brief was accepted and taken up by attorneys who turned it into a successful class action lawsuit. Federal court orders that allowed are that followed, excuse me, did improve sanitation programs, access to medical and mental health services and overcrowding for inmates in New Mexico was at least reduced. And Dwight became a paralegal after his release from prison and never got so much as a traffic

ticket for the rest of his days. So hail Dwight, bright spot in today's dark tail. Number three, most of the guards working at the New Mexico State Prison when the riot occurred and the years leading up to the riot were severely under trained and did not follow basic safety protocols. Most of them had less than a year of experience, were terrified of the inmates, regularly failed to do their nightly counts,

left doors unlocked, gates open. On the night of the riot, they left a riot grill open, which could have prevented the entire ordeal. Despite warnings that something was coming, only two employees were able to read the right safety plan. Most importantly, they were severely understaffed. There was a 46 to one prisoner to guard ratio when it should have been closer to six to one in a perfect world. Number four, the New Mexico State Penitentiary. Now

he tourists attraction and occasional movie set movies like Adam Sandler's Longest Yard film there. Visitors can take a tour of the prison, see evidence the right literally gouged into the walls and floors of the prison. And number five, new info, old Maine, since it was closed down, and perhaps before, supposedly very haunted. The most notable of the consistently reported phenomena is the observation of a human-shaped shadow terrifying, seen wandering down dark corridors, especially where dorm E2 once was, side of the most horrific examples of that purge-like riot violence. Unexplained noises have been heard by many, including loud cell doors slamming shut.

I watched a clip of a local news crew. They got real freaked out, doing some ghost hunting there. They bailed, ran out before their little tour was over. No one should hear any door slamming. The doors originally ran on electricity, and the prison shut down, and the electricity was cut off

uh... now those doors you know theoretically can only be opened or shut manually cranked with metal wheels that are very hard to turn some of them very rusted yet they slam with no one around them all the same might have to research this haunted place a little further for a scared death podcast tale sounds like a good setting for a very, very spooky story. Let's get out of here. Time, suck, tough, right takeaway.

The 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Riot has been sucked! What a fucking tale. What a wild-ass purge tale. Imagine being one of those poor inmates that wanted nothing to do with I don't know if you've ever been to a hotel or a hotel or a hotel or a hotel or a hotel or a hotel. You imagine? Imagine being one of those poor inmates that wanted nothing to do with this. You're in there for fucking shoplifting. And God damn, they have torches burning. You know, you're stuck in your cell, maybe locked in there hoping that you can just wait it out

and then they come and show up with that torch and they got gas masks on. Those fucking people getting, you know, dragged down the hallway with leashes and fucking naked. Now trying to their cut their way into your cell, saying all the kinds of horrible shit they're gonna do to you. I got.

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions team. For, you know, the help they have do here every week for me not, you know, being one of these presidents. I don't know why I'm thanking them for that, but I'm just thankful for not being one of these presidents. Queen of Bad Magic, thanks. Thanks to Herlinds and Cummins for running this business. Let me focus on creative. Thanks to Reverend Dr. Joe Paisley for production for not you know, turning me in for

anything. That would send me to one of these presents. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I'll be in there too, though. So it'll be a problem. We'll be, we'll be bunk mates. Good luck to us. Good luck to us. Thanks to Bit of Lake Sarah for keeping the time stock app running smooth. Thanks to Logan the art warlock Keith creating the merch. Badmagicmerge.com, for running socials with Lizzy and Chantras, the Chantras Hernandez. Thanks to the all-seeing eyes,

moderating the Cult the Curious Private Facebook page. So many times that groups out there, if you search, they're all running their own private groups. Very awesome to see. Go out there and find your tribe. Thanks to Beefstake and his mod squad running discord and to producer Olivia Lee for her initial research. She did some great deep dive research.

That was a huge report to come through. Her and I both watched that documentary on the 1980 New Mexico Prison Rite. Next week, we're gonna head back to the realm of kind of a cult, maybe, maybe it's a super conservative kind of odd religious group with an exploration of the Amish. And to do that, I will not be using any technology at all, so it's going to be different.

Just going to speak into a dark room, you know, by myself. And you're going to have to imagine the whole podcast, because using podcasting equipment is, of course, sinful. JK. Oh man, I don't hit that button. So who are the Amish? The Amish also called Amish Menonite. Members of a Christian group in North America, primarily the Old Order Amish Menonite Church. Of course, there's splinter groups. The church originated in the late 17th century among followers of Jacob Amon. Amon's teaching stressed the things that are now mainstays of the Amish

lifestyle, humility, family, bad haircuts, community, separation from the modern world, as well as the unwritten code of behavior called the Ordinung, the dictates the lives of each and every Amish person. Amish came out of the Protestant Reformation, but more hardcore than most groups they did. The community is growing surprisingly. To me at least, the Amish population in the US

numbers more than 350,000 and growing rapidly due to a large average family size. Seven children on average, you don't have to have, you know, a cool hair to fucking have kids. You don't have to have laundry to make kids. And a high church member retention rate of approximately 80%. Despite making up a not insignificant chunk of our population, there's still somewhat of a mystery.

Who the fuck are they? What's going on with the Amish? What are they practice? What are they choose to live a lifestyle? It's an increasing odds with almost everything around them, all of our world's modern infrastructure and technology. The simple answer is, at least for the last question, they think living that way brings them closer to God.

But like any topic we cover here, the Amniscient, oh far from simple, their religious beliefs and practices are complicated. Like room springa, the time when the rules for omnis teenagers are relaxed and they're free to explore the modern world, before deciding to either commit themselves fully to the omnis lifestyle or burn it out forever! One of those choices. to the Amish lifestyle or burn it out forever! One of those choices. All of that and more, probably some kingpin references. Next week on another crazy edition of Time Suck, right now let's head on over to this week's Time Sucker Updates. Updates, get your time sucker updates.

Starting things off today with the Jehovah's Witness update, maybe because of the Amish or on my brain right now, and that made me think of Jehovah's Witnesses. Also, this is just a wild ass update. A super sucker, Shane Holcomb has a story that shows just how dangerous and destructive a dark secret can really be. This is intense.

So hello, Master Sucklord. I'm catching up on some episodes because I missed I missed because I was in the hospital. I hope you're feeling better. I just listened to Jehovah's Witnesses suck and wanted to say thank you for pointing out their shitty ways. My best friends mom's family were witnesses and his dad's family were Christians, but him and his little sister always had to go to church with the witnesses. I basically spent my whole childhood at his house and sometimes I had to go with him. He hated, truly hated the church. I can never understand why he always got so angry when he had to go. Years after we became friends, I went over to his house to say the nights after they got back from

church. His little sister who was around 10 years old at that time was acting weird. That night I heard a fight between the sister and the mom and the sister came into the room. Her brother and I were in. After some convincing, she told us that a man at church molested her, but that their mom wouldn't do anything about it because of the church. My God.

My friends started yelling, throwing things, punched holes in the walls. He basically said that he had told the man that he didn't care what he did to him, but not to touch the sister. Apparently, he was well known in the church, nothing ever was done about the man. That piece of shit was also their neighbor.

The next night after I left, my friend went over and killed the man. That piece of shit was also their neighbor. The next night after I left, my friend went over and killed that man. He was just 12 at the time. My God was sent off until he was 18. While he was locked up, his parents separated because the dad thought that what he did was righteous, the mom thought it was a church matter. His father left, never had any contact with his wife or kids again. Mom just owned both her son and daughter. She threw her daughter out because she believed she brought on the abuse and was a whore. She went and stayed with the distant relative that wasn't part of the church. When she was 16, she died in a car wreck when she was drunk.

Jesus Christ. When my friend got out, he became a complete recluse. I bet. He lives out in the woods, has no technology, no contact with anyone. His mother did end up leaving the church about 15 years later became an alcoholic and drank herself to death. The entire family was destroyed because the church wanted to keep a pedophile secret. He had been doing it for years.

Nothing happened to him. Sorry for the truly long message. We all appreciate what you're doing. Open the eyes of people to things he might otherwise not know. Holy fuck, Shane. Thank you for sharing that horrible tale for others to learn from. God damn, such a good reminder of why those pedophile mother fuckers need to be exposed, right? Taken down so they don't take their victims down instead. I hope that neighbor, whoever

he was, I hope he is fucking dead and I hope it was so painful. I wish his name would have been the one of the names in the victim list from today's riot casualties. So sorry, your friend and his family went through all that hell. My God, all the deaths and just destroyed lives. Man, death to pedophiles and hail Memoron. Now for an Arthur Shaw Cross update that's lighter than that last one. Kick ass sack chase Wilmaq is basically the same person as Arthur. I'll let him explain. Right? Hey, Master Sucker. Just wanted to say I love your podcast. Just listen to your Arthur Shaw Cross episode. You mentioned that he had client-feltor syndrome. I have the same syndrome. I almost drove off the road when you called it sad tiny nuts syndrome.

I can tell you I have some of the symptoms. I'm six foot six, introverted, and infertile. My sex drive is normal. I don't have the tiny nuts. Damn, or those sweet breasts you speak of. Decofs, please. Overall, it's not the worst thing to have STN. I don't have to wear a condom, hellos of fena, and people admire my height, just not my personality. I wonder if I can put STN on my medical paperwork now. Love the show. My huge fan here's stand-up. I've been listening to this show for about a year now. Keep on sucking. Well, thank you, Arthur. I mean, thank you Chase. Seriously though, good on you for having a great sense of humor, right? We all have something, don't we?

You know, some of us have, I don't know, fucked up toes. Some of us can't speak one language correctly. Some of us have tiny sad nuts. I don't have tiny nuts either, but I do have asymmetrical nuts, which is sometimes upsetting. One is a bit bigger and stronger than the other. I have a good nut and a weak sad nut that I don't fucking care about. I have a problem, ball.

Open balls are healthy and handsome. Keep shooting those blanks in hell, Lucifina. And you should definitely put STN on your medical paperwork and you keep on sucking. Now for a different serial killer connection, SuperSucker, Kayla, Ome writes, Dear Moshmoth McBlindy, Pants. You know, I was a little bit blind today. I forgot to enlarge the font on my notes, which was so easy.

I didn't do it until the last five minutes, the episode, and I was like, you fucking idiot. So much easier to see it now. I was catching up on TimeSuck when in the middle of episode 274, the Kenan Barbie killers, you referenced my hometown in a certain family who kept a girl in a box, yes.

My siblings and I grew up with some of the hooker children. I believe his daughter and nieces and nephews were who we grew up with. There was a family of weirdies. I'm not sure if that was because they were social pariahs. Hope I'm using that right. Yes, I think you are. Or because they were just playing odd.

One of the nephews got in trouble at a football camp once for talking his roommates and to have a circle jerk as a freshman. And the adults, Cameron, siblings, slash relatives, all kind of gave off creepy vibes. A lot of them have that visual crazy look going on. We were strongly discouraged from hanging out with these kids. My folks just said the family wasn't quite right.

Yep. I wasn't until I was at a high school that my mom told me the story that I read Colleen's book. I was shocked that all this took place in our small town. I guess she can happen anywhere. If you didn't read her book, you should. I forget that it's not a really well-known story. It would for sure be an interesting topic for suckers who do not know about it. There was also a lifetime type movie

made out of about the story. The last time Cameron Hooker was up for parole, a lot of people were upset locally, voiced their concerns. I remember seeing people arranging protests over Facebook, an entire community, in an uproar over this one nut job. No one wants that fuck out of prison. He should continue to rot there or be put down, agreed. Anyway, had a good time listening to you air out our small towns skeletons. Keep it up. My family loves time sucks.

Scared of death and your stand up. Take care. Be safe in this weird ass world. Sincerely, Kayla, PSU, always fuck up my last name. It's Oom, O'M, O'M. I know. Kayla, you need more letters in your last name, okay? Talk to your family about it.

Come and agree with it. Add some letters. There's not enough. There's only three. I appreciate the pathetic help. And the story Kayla is referring to is the tale of Cameron Hooker, whom Paul Bernardo, aka deadly innocence admired, a piece of shit who kidnapped a hitchhiker 20 year old Colleen Stan, then trained her to be a sex slave, put her in a very small wooden

box, left her very little room to move in. At first for 23 hours a day, Hooker kept this woman as his prisoner as his sex slave and his red bluff California home that he and his young wife, Janice shared for seven years before authorities finally arrested him. Hook remains in San Mateo County, jail he's been incarcerated since 1984 won't be up for parole again until 2030 and I hope someone purges him, you know, long before that. So fuck that guy. Thanks for sharing a crazy connection, Kayla. And now let's end the updates on a message of remembrance. I think wonderful sucker Dave Sheeter could use our positive thoughts. My heart aches for him. Hopefully I can hold it together this time. He writes, Dear Overlord of Suck, I've been a huge fan of your comedy for years and I spend about

six months listening to every back episode of Time Suck to get caught up. My fiancee's go to was Is We Dumb and Scared to Death. All in all, we're big fans. We would share episodes and jokes from episodes and spend hours laughing and talking about all the topics. You provided us with literally months of entertainment. Now strap in. This is where it gets dark. Nikki was diagnosed with breast cancer last June and when it was caught it was stage 4. It was fucking everywhere. She started chemo immediately and when she got too sick to go out your podcast kind of became a solid go-to for us. Even when it was an absolute shit show, we always had someone to laugh at and distract us up until the end. She passed on Veterans Day,

and it's been a daily process to keep moving forward. The last few months, I just wanted to say thank you for helping us both, giving us amazing topics to talk about. Those talks, I've become some of my favorite memories of her and I. I think about them daily. Thanks again, the work you do has a bigger impact than you realize.

Fuck cancer. Keep on sucking Dave's year. Oh god damn Dave, not even gonna blame allergies this time. Fucking cried. I read that the first time and then the second. So fuck cancer is right. Fuck cancer is fucking loophole. Why can't only active pedophosal get cancer? Come on, God fucking wake up. Come on mother nature, right? Up your fucking game. Help us out down here. So glad you and Nikki shared a lot of laughs. I'm sure she was absolutely amazing

and her energy is for sure somewhere now, live somewhere. Smoking that toad venom, that God molecule five-mego-dm-t, it fucking changed me, like fundamentally, I think forever. The universe's live, we're all in the same stream of energy. I know that I sound like a fucking crazy person. I say shit like that, but I believe it 100%. Everyone dead in life, all part in the same stream of energy I know that I sound like a fucking crazy person when I say shit like that but I believe it 100% everyone dead in life all part of the same cycle same current

right it's beautiful it's peaceful and I fully believe that Nikki's there uh and they'll all be with her you know uh down the road so keep her alive in your memories here Dave uh time really is some kind of flat circle hail Numeraud brother. Love you man Thanks time suckers. I need a net. We all did Thanks again for listening to another bad magic production spot cast meat sack Don't go on a drunken purchase week and start cutting you know people digs off Or if you do release focus on pedophiles and keep on sucking. Hey Joe, hey Joe. Yeah, what's up, man? Do you want to come in here? There was one more, there was one more true fact

from the episode. There was another true fact I wanted to share with you episode. There was another inmate that was released and I didn't explain what happened to him. But for I guess two hours, most of the rest of the other inmates in the prison used his head as a trampoline. And do you know his name was?

Was it Arthur? Chakras? Yeah, yeah was Arthur Chakras. How do I know that? I? I don't know. Maybe I'm just I'm a genius or I probably did that joke too much. You know, maybe yeah Maybe you did the joke a lot throughout the episode that we just recorded. That's true. Okay. It was funny Thank you. Yeah, still place still place haha episode that we just recorded. That's true. Okay. If that was funny.

Thank you. Yeah! Still place! Still place! Ha ha!