Review of The Hate Factory: A First-Hand Account of the 1980 Riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico by Georgelle Hirliman, W.G. Stone (As Told by)

The Hate Factory: A First-Hand Account of the 1980 Riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico

by 

Georgelle Hirliman,

 

W.G. Stone (As Told by)

The more I read about riots, the more I remember the old saying: "The players might change, but the game remains the same."

In 1953, former assistant San Quentin warden Douglas C. Rigg was tasked with investigating the causes of violence at the New Mexico State Penitentiary. He concluded that the system had "an inadequate system of classifying inmates for placement and security...idleness, lack of education and recreation, insufficient medical services, untrained and underpaid guards, and little dissemination of information to the press and public" (p. 81)

A quarter-century later, on February 2, 1980, a riot engulfed the prison; thirty-three inmates were left dead, all killed by fellow inmates during the riot. 

Anyone care to guess what the causes of the riot were? Georgelle Hirliman's book describes, in great detail, how Rigg's factors persisted at NM State Penitentiary--even after a new facility was built (at great expense) and opened (with great optimism) on April 20, 1956. In short, this book is a story of how the State "was willing to provide money for literally concrete ["brick and mortar"] changes, but not for the people inside the concrete, not in terms of rehabilitation programs or in raises for corrections officers" (page 82).

As Hirliman's passionate Foreward to the Revised Edition (written in 2005) points out, it's unclear that the State has learned any lasting lessons from one of the worst prison uprisings in U.S. history (pages ix-xxi).