New Mexico Lit: The Devil's Butcher Shop: The Story of the 1980 Prison Revolt

Credit: Book Depository

Amok

In a political science class, I learned the origin of the word amok. The professor said it is an Indonesian word and it referred to an intermittent craziness that erupts  - to run amok - resulting in slaughter and other violent mayhem. From wikipedia:

Amok originated from the Indonesian word mengamuk, which when roughly defined means “to make a furious and desperate charge”.^[5] According to Indonesian culture, amok was rooted in a deep spiritual belief.^[6] They believed that amok was caused by the hantu belian,^[7] which was an evil tiger spirit that entered one’s body and caused the heinous act. As a result of the belief, those in Indonesian culture tolerated amok and dealt with the after effects with no ill will towards the assailant.

I thought of this term when I read The Devil's Butcher Shop by Roger Morris.



What the book is about:

1980 New Mexico Penitentiary prison revolt, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The legal, moral and ethical crimes committed before, during, and after the riot by: 

• Inmates, 
• Prison guards, 
• Contractors and vendors, 
• Corrections officials at all levels of authority, 
• the governor of New Mexico, 
• New Mexico legislators, 
• the New Mexico judiciary, 
• the legal community, 
• Penitentiary doctors and other medical staff, and 
• All the rest of us for our passive or active participation in the systemic brutalization of our fellow man's bodies, spirits, and minds.

In abundance:

Despair, disgust, contempt, anger, fear.

Horror, gruesomeness, murder, rape, torture, rage, terror.

Corruption, nepotism, theft.


Meager:

Mercy, kindness, heroism.

Hope.

Accountability, responsibility.

Action.



Thirty years later

Here's a 2010 account from Mary Racicot, who was a 28-year old National Guard medic who arrived on the scene during the revolt.

August 2013: New Mexico considers making the 1980 prison site a tourist attraction.

Have there been substantive changes to the New Mexico prison system? I really don't know. But I'd be surprised if the New Mexico system is substantially better than that of others in the country.

Could the 1980 prison revolt happen again? Yes, in a prison where similar conditions apply, including prolonged inhumane conditions, over-crowding, dormitory-style housing of inmates, co-habitation of violent and non-violent inmates, shoddy prison construction and security processes, corrupt law enforcement officials, and lack of effective oversight by people who should be monitoring the prison goings-on, but who are not. 

I know that when you've got a law enforcement official such as that man in Arizona who boasts of how he humiliates the people in his charge (some of whom have not yet been to trial), that's a red flag that abuse is happening. Indeed, under his leadership, the citizens of Maricopa County have paid $24 million in lost or settled lawsuits as a consequence of in-jail abuse or negligence that runs the gamut from inadequate health care to murder. The good people of Maricopa County who keep this man in office year after year know what happens in the jail and are thus accomplices to the abuse.  The local news media even show videos of negligence and deaths, such as here and here and here and here. So there are no viable protestations of ignorance, just as there were none in New Mexico. Eventually, the Maricopa County sheriff will be vilified by all, but among the people vilifying him will be those who have actively or passively kept him in power as long as it was expedient to do so.

In 2006, California's Secretary of State issued this emergency proclamation about the dangerous and expensive (to taxpayers, people!) over-crowding in the the state prisons. Cowardly legislators who fear  being viewed as soft on crime ignore this situation just as the New Mexico legislators did before the 1980 prison revolt. But that emergency proclamation is from 2006. Whoops, still a problem in 2013. Currently, there's a hunger strike among Californian prisoners. The inmates in the New Mexico prison also tried non-violent methods to effect change before the 1980 revolt. (And neither this statement nor any other in this post is a justification for the behavior of the inmates who tortured and killed during the revolt.)

Mother Jones offers America's 10 Worst Prisons (and 7 unsavory honorable mentions). Is it good news that New Mexico isn't one of them? Or is it that the 10 Worst are just worst than the really bad of so many others?
 

A quibble about the book

I couldn't keep all of the people in the book straight.

I would have loved for there to have been at least three org charts that covered various periods, not only to keep track of individuals, but to have a visual reference for how they were able to leverage their power because of - or in some cases - out of proportion with - their titles.

Another help would have been if Mr. Morris had used the individuals' titles throughout.


The BBC produced a documentary about the prison revolt, which you can find below:

But only by reading the book do you know what a heroic effort that inmate Dwight Duran (and two others) made year after year after year in their attempts to document what went on in the prison, to get their  information out, and to persevere through all of the obstacles in the path of the final Duran Decree. Or of the scandalous waste of taxpayer monies that the state of New Mexico spent to avoid the need to provide the basics of humane treatment.

Only by reading the book do you learn about the endemic corruption practiced by state officials from the highest to the lowest ranks, which also contributed to the 1980 revolt, and which robbed New Mexican taxpayers of millions upon millions of dollars.

New Mexico Lit: Jajedeh

Credit: Amazon

Jajadeh, written by Harry Hoge, is a work of fiction based on the facts of Apache interactions with the Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans who laid claim to the same lands as the Apache.

The story begins in the early 1600s with the Apache-Spanish era, and ends circa 1865 with the death of Mangas Coloradas in the Apache-Mexican-American era.

Overall, Jajadeh is successful as a means of delivering historical information in story form. It kept my interest throughout. It is also further evidence that the very things you would believe to be fabricated because they sound so outlandish, are the things that are true. Examples include the abominations delivered upon men, women, and children of all sides. 

I do have some quibbles, however.

For example, I felt a little exasperated with the stereotypical "hands on hips, feet apart" for at least two of the women in the story, like "spitfire" Maureen O'Hara in a movie with John Wayne. I also didn't get the sudden marital turn-off between one of the early protagonists and his wife. Where'd that come from?

I thought I would learn the story behind the crown dancers (one of which is featured prominently on the book jacket), but the dance was only barely alluded to. I also didn't understand why Mr. Hoge chose to use the (apparently archaic) term "jajadeh" instead of the modern-day term "ga'an" or "gan" or "ga he" to refer to the  Mountain Spirit.

But overall, again, Jajadeh is an educational, enlightening, and interesting read.

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter 3: Oliver La Farge

White Sands, Alamogordo, New Mexico

An essay on New Mexico, written by Oliver La Farge, comprises Chapter 3 of the book, The Spell of New Mexico. Written before 1952, almost everything Mr. La Farge writes about New Mexico still holds true. Some excerpts from his detailed, loving description of New Mexico: 

A New Mexican native never ceases to be surprised to hear visitors .... ask the tariff on a purchase they are contemplating "when we take it back to the States." 

Indeed, a former colleague of mine on the east coast sent me a card, upon which she had affixed postage for international mailing. 

Sunset at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo, New Mexico

...You can be camping up in the northern mountains, and in the morning break up your camp under blue spruce and fir ... By noon you can take your break under cottonwoods in an irrigated section of orchards and corn and chili fields, and camp that night in desert where you are lucky, and distinctly relieved, when you find a water hole. 

Upper Karr Canyon Recreation Area, New Mexico

Being based in Alamogordo, I never get tired of living in the high desert but being able to reach 9000 feet of cool green forest in less than an hour, and to smell the pine. It is a wonder. 

An amiable sort of running feud goes on between the people of [Texas] and [New Mexico], keeping both on their toes. When a Texan told me one time that he was a real old timer, and that he personally had dug out the bed of the Pecos River, he Lord gave it to me to answer that, while he was doing that, I was up in the Sangre de Cristo [Mountains] melting snow to run in his ditch. 

Rio Grande, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico

... on the Fourth of July, .... it is worth going to the [Mescalero Apache] celebration to see their renowned Crown Dance, a masked dance unlike any other, portraying the mountain spirits. 

Ga'an dancers. Credit: SFMOMA

Having gone to this very event, I can attest to its magic more than 50 years after Mr. La Farge wrote the above. 

... on a Sunday a Pueblo Indian, having spent the preceding week cultivating his red, blue, and yellow corn in his ancestral field, will put on his Indian clothes to sing in the chorus of a dance in which his daughter, who during the week works at Los Alamos, will take the part of the Buffalo Maiden, that during the performance Spanish-American neighbors will kneel in the bower at one side of the pueblo's plaza to sing alabados before the image of its patron saint, while artists, scientists (both anthropologists and nuclear physicists), tourists, and plain businessmen, watch the performance with appreciation and respect. 

Our Lady of Guadelupe Fiesta, Tortugas, New Mexico

[New Mexico] is ..... a land that draws and holds men and women with ties that cannot be explained or submitted to reason. 

Dilia, New Mexico

The Spell of New Mexico, Chapter I: Tony Hillerman

Tularosa Basin and Valley of Fires view from Highway 380, New Mexico

Awhile back, Josh, a thoughtful reader, recommended The Spell of New Mexico to me. Edited by Tony Hillerman, and published in 1976, it is a collection of essays by famous creatives who lived in or visited New Mexico.

My local library had the book, but it was missing until now. 

From Mr. Hillerman's introduction in Chapter 1: 

[Oliver] La Farge treasured New Mexico because it offered - probably more than any place in America - a rich variety of human cultures, religions, and value systems, and because it attracted and held an interesting variety of immigrants. ...

'The breadth and height of the land, its huge self and its huge sky, strike you like a blow,' [poet Winfield Townley] Scott wrote ...

To the above, I say check and check.

Angel Peak, New Mexico

Mr Hillerman described one of his special places in New Mexico:

...Those places that stir me have features in common. All are empty and lonely. They invoke a sense of both space and strangeness, and all have about them a sort of fierce inhospitality.

One such place is east of U.S. 54 near the old Three Rivers service station north of Tularosa. The road jolts across the Southern Pacific tracks toward the foothills of the Sierra Blanca and passes a high, grassy ridge. On a July afternoon, the view from there suggests a hostile planet. The ragged stone ridgeline of the Sierra Oscura rises fifty miles to the west, and the Tularaso Basin below is lost in a haze of heat. If you climb high enough and the light is right, you can see to the southwest the glittering line formed by the gypsum dunes of White Sands and below the Oscuras the Black smudge of the lava-bed badlands. 

For me, this is one of many of New Mexico's magic places. 

This place Mr. Hillerman describes is within a Bureau of Land Management site, the Three Rivers Petroglyphs. The old service station is an art gallery, gift and coffee shop.

I have stood exactly where Mr. Hillerman describes, and looked out toward that "glittering line" that is White Sands. This place that Mr. Hillerman found magical is less than an hour from where I live in Alamogordo.


Every time I see that line of White Sands - or the distinctive Organ Mountains between Alamogordo and Las Cruces - I imagine people of centuries ago returning from a long trip, and when they see that glittering line, think, "we're almost home."

Bisti Wilderness, New Mexico