N.M. prison turns riot into profit

SANTA FE, N.M. — When it came time to organize the celebrations for New Mexico’s centennial last year, Gov. Susana Martinez turned to the members of her Cabinet for suggestions.

The Corrections Department secretary, Gregg Marcantel, a burly former Marine just months into the job, was stumped. What could the state’s prison system, faced with a high rate of recidivism and drastic budget cuts, possibly have to offer?

An unlikely answer, it turned out, lay in the department’s darkest chapter, behind the locked gates of the shuttered Penitentiary of New Mexico on the outskirts of Santa Fe, where one of the nation’s deadliest prison riots broke out Feb. 2, 1980. In 36 hours, 33 inmates were killed and more than 200 were injured — some dismembered, others burned alive inside their cells. Fourteen corrections officers were held hostage and brutalized during the rampage.

The savagery — fueled by feuds that had long festered inside a prison built for 900 but housing 1,100 — raged unimpeded and led to fundamental changes to the way prisoners were classified, housed and disciplined in the state. Opening the prison to visitors and telling the story of the riot, Marcantel said, was a way to preserve that history.

“We thought, let’s open it up for tours,” Marcantel said from his office, where a state seal carved in wood by an inmate decorates one wall.

The tours, initially scheduled for once a month, were booked in a matter of days. When extra tours were added, they were snapped up within hours.

Marcantel sensed an opportunity. As he began to plan, ideas that seemed at once ambitious and risky seemed also plausible: meals cooked by inmates served to visitors in the mess hall, haircuts in the prison’s barbershop, art like the carving hanging in his office sold at a gift shop.

“The possibilities are limitless,” he said.

Critics were vehement. His office received calls from people asking whether he had lost his mind, he said, or saying the place ought to be pulverized, along with the memories it held.

During the riot, dormitories were charred and flooded, the control center was destroyed, and the protective-custody cell block, where most of the killings occurred, was permanently scarred by the violence; hatchet marks remain visible on its concrete floor.

Cathy Catamach, a prison records clerk at the time, remembered returning to work after the riot “to salvage what I could,” but not much was left. Much of the prison was repaired after the riot, and it reopened several months later.

Gary Nelson, 65, was serving time for armed robbery at the prison the night the riot broke out. “We were just thrown in there, violent and nonviolent inmates together; no one cared,” he said. “People were amazed that level of brutality could happen inside a prison. The question they should ask themselves is, what led to that?”

On tours, there is the acceptable, like pointing out the outline of an inmate’s charred body by a cramped stairwell landing in the protective-custody wing, and the unacceptable, like recounting the ghost stories for which the prison has gained notoriety on television shows like The Dead Files on the Travel Channel or the graphic details found in books about the riot, with titles like The Devil’s Butcher Shop. (The prison is a well-used set for movies. Adam Sandler’s remake of The Longest Yard was filmed inside cell block 2, and Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound in Zero Dark Thirty was built on its grounds.)

Last year’s free tours, part of the centennial festivities, attracted about 5,000 visitors. Last month, as an experiment, the Corrections Department started charging $10, and 577 people signed up, said a spokesman, Alex Tomlin. The money has been used to spruce up the place, a job that included cleaning a visitor-center courtyard, which had become choked with trash and weeds.

On Oct. 25, Nelson joined some other riot survivors who were invited to a private tour of Old Main. For many inmates, shipped to other states’ prisons after the violence, it was their first return visit.

Reflecting on the tour days later from his home in Albuquerque, Nelson said: “The violence was so horrible there, but in a sense, seeing the prison did provide me a sense of relief. It’s over, you know? I’m never going back in there again.”