Tension builds again at a prison that exploded
"They're all paranoid and turning on each other," says Deputy Warden Lloyd Mixdorf. Warns Classifications Officer John Byers: "It's a madhouse. Everyone's thinking of either squealing or of who will squeal." Contends a state prison monitor, Daniel Cron: "The atmosphere is explosive. The prison is not under control."
The object of all the apprehension is New Mexico State Penitentiary, surely the nation's most notorious prison.
Sprawling across a dusty mesa outside Santa Fe, the stark gray pen—which guards and inmates alike call "the hell-house"—was the site of one of the country's worst prison riots. In February of last year convicts went berserk, killing 33 fellow prisoners, some with acetylene torches. Many of the victims were suspected of having broken the sacred code of cons everywhere: never snitch. Now trials are either over, under way, or imminent for 27 inmates charged with murder in the riot—and this, in turn, has inspired more bloodshed: Explains Joanne Brown, director of Adult Institutions and one of the state's top prison officials: "Everybody is a potential witness against everybody else. No one knows who will testify against them, and that breeds tension."
In the 20 months since the riot, six inmates and two guards have been slain.
Up to 75 other convicts and guards have been stabbed or beaten. For the past seven weeks the institution has been run under state-of-emergency rules, with many prisoners locked up most of the day.
A blue-suited SWAT team rushes sporadically through cell blocks, sometimes after midnight, to shake down prisoners for weapons. More than 100 assorted shivs and shanks (rodlike weapons often shaped from mop-bucket handles), as well as revolvers, have been seized. A sniper in one of the guard towers has shoot-to-kill orders. A trailer van bulging with shotguns, tear gas and riot gear waits outside the prison walls.
The emergency was declared on Aug. 30, when Guard Gerald Magee, 33, was slain in Cellblock Six, a maximum-security area. His screams for help had rung out far beyond the block as a group of five convicts made an unsuccessful break for freedom. It took three hours before other guards could reach him. He was dead, his hands shackled behind him and half a dozen stab wounds in his chest. Investigators doubt that the would-be escapees who took him hostage had done it. They suspect three Chicano convicts, one a member of Los Carnales, a prison gang whose membership requirement is a past murder.
Why was Magee killed? He had been on the job only 14 months. Yet shortly before he died, he had told a police friend that two prison supervisors were making illegal profits from their jobs and that there was large-scale fraud in the prison furniture shop. Moreover, he had given his fiancee tape recordings of prison conversations that she had locked up in a safe deposit box. State and federal investigators listened to the tapes but refused to reveal their contents. Declares Guard Ken Mock, 38: "I have no doubt that Gerry was set up."