"Hellhouse" Becomes a Madhouse

By Ed Magnuson

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."

The atmosphere"of intrigue and fear in the prison has continued despite the willingness of the New Mexico legislature to spend $90 million on improving the institution's facilities. The operating budget has been boosted by 39%. Overcrowding, considered a partial cause of the riot, has been alleviated: the prison population is down from 1,157 to 675. Still, a third of the convicts remain housed in army-style dormitories, an arrangement that many penologists say breeds conflict and gang rule.

At the same time, most of the reforms urged by the state agencies that looked into the riot remain to be carried out. After inmates brought a civil rights lawsuit in federal court, prison officials signed a consent decree to put 624 new regulations into effect. But Daniel Cron, a lawyer hired by the state to monitor compliance, claimed in a blistering 482-page report last May that more than half of the changes had not been made. State prison officials then fired him. They took him back only after the lawyer for the convicts threatened to seek a contempt of court judgment against them.

In the persisting poisonous climate, even guards do not trust one another. The veteran turnkeys consider the many rookies too green and soft. "We've got young men going up against inmates with 20 years' experience," observes Deputy War den Mixdorf. "The prisoners can psych us out." The turnover in guards is high.

"A new man is hired, the gates close be hind him, he panics and quits on the spot," says Officer Byers. The younger guards, on the other hand, contend that each shift captain makes up his own rules for running the cell blocks. Prisoners seem baffled by the inconsistency. One convict was thrown into solitary for wearing a knit cap and tennis shoes; others have been handcuffed to their beds for little apparent reason. Says John Palladini, a discharged New Mexico convict who has served time in four federal prisons: "New Mexico is worse than any place, since the harassment is irrational. There's no consistency. There's only vindictiveness."

More than 300 prisoners have signed a petition asking that federal authorities take over day-to-day operation of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, everyone worries about another bloody riot. Prison officials admit that they are helpless to control the violence inside the walls. The exercise yard of Cellblock Three, where some of the most violent cons are kept, is so dangerous that guards require each convict to sign an unusual form before he steps into it. The document releases the state from liability for anything that might happen to him while he is in the yard .

-- By EdMagnuson.

Reported by Richard Woodbury/Santa Fe

With reporting by Richard Woodbury

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