"Revisiting the Nightmare: Bloodstained Road to Recovery"

Interesting article. I didn't realize that it decades for New Mexico to recover from the 1980 riot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary. A heavy price to pay:

The carnage didn’t end when state and local police reclaimed the prison after 36 hours of unspeakable violence that left 33 inmates dead and much of the prison a smoldering ruin.

The cleanup effort and costs were staggering as legislators scrambled to approve a $38 million emergency appropriation. Hundreds of prisoners were shipped out of state.

Retired District Judge Mike Vigil of Santa Fe, who previously represented inmates, said in a recent Journal interview that the riot didn’t actually end Feb. 3. Instead, it continued “in slow motion” over the next 18 months – claiming the lives of two corrections officers and six inmates.

...

[F]ormer Corrections secretaries Rob Perry and Gregg Marcantel said they were initially surprised when they took over the prison system – Perry in 1998 and Marcantel in 2011 – that the prison riot continued to have such a large impact on the daily operations of the prison system.

“The impact was profound,” Perry said.

Marcantel said, “What we had was a culture of containment – no escapes, no riots. For over 30 years before I took the job, our view of success was – we didn’t have another riot.”

...

The Legislature, led by conservative Democrats and Republicans known as the “Cowboy Coalition,” was in session during the riot. A year earlier, the Legislature appropriated less than $20 million for the Corrections Department. Just 20 days after the riot, legislators approved nearly twice that amount in emergency funding for rebuilding the prison, hiring more corrections officers, prosecuting and defending inmates charged with riot murders, paying the National Guard for riot-related expenses and paying other prison systems to hold New Mexico’s inmates.

Later in the same session, lawmakers approved $50 million for a new maximum security prison.

...

One of the report’s themes was that the prison was quiet, even when overcrowded between 1970 and 1975, when there was an incentive-based program rewarding good behavior by inmates with access to education, prison jobs, and inmate organizations that had contact with community civic organizations.

But in the five years before the riot, prison officials did away with programs and the system relied more heavily on coercion – including solitary confinement and other punishments.

...The report also strongly suggested the state move to a greater reliance on community-based corrections programs, including state halfway houses and drug programs.

That didn’t happen. Instead, the Legislature embarked on a $100 million prison building program that opened new prisons in Santa Fe, Grants and Las Cruces, and greatly expanded the prison in Los Lunas.