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Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours

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Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Santa Fe Ghost and History Tours
Phone:
+1 505-986-5002

Address:
Santa Fe, NM 87505

The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, in the state's maximum security prison south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in American history: thirty-three inmates died and more than two hundred were treated for injuries. None of the twelve officers taken hostage were killed, but seven suffered serious injuries caused by beatings and rapes. There had been several disturbances at the prison prior to the riot. One major one was an organized work strike about prison conditions in 1976 under Deputy Warden Montoya. His response was to use tear gas and make the inmates run the length of the prison from the dormitories in the south end to the isolation cells and segregation cells in the north end. All along the main hallway as they ran, the correction officers hit them with batons and some staff participated using ax handles. The event was called, The night of the Ax Handles. After this violent response to prisoner's concerns, one inmate, Dwight Duran, was prompted to draft a 99 page hand written civil rights complaint to the U.S. District Court of New Mexico, called Duran v Apodaca, later to become the Duran Consent Decree. There was ample evidence from over 10 Grand Jury investigations about the conditions at the Penitentiary, but the PNM administration resisted the changes and the legislature refused to allocate the necessary funds to make changes. The last time the U.S. District Court Grand Jury ordered improvements was in November 1979, 2 months before the riot. There have been conflicting reports about the inmate population at the time of the riot and the official capacity of the prison the weekend of the riot. According to the Report of the Attorney General on the February 2 and 3, 1980 Riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico PART I The Penitentiary The Riot The Aftermath, Appendix C1 published in June after the riot, the design capacity of the penitentiary was 1,058, based on the Phase II Technical Report: Facilities Inventory of the 1977 New Mexico Corrections Master Plan. However, that number included the 60 beds in Cell bock 5 which was closed for renovations. It also included the 24 beds in the Annex and the 32 beds in the modular unit both on the outside of the main facility. Therefore the official number of beds available on the night of the riot was actually 974, but even that number is hardly fair since it includes the 11 solitary confinement cells in the basement of Cell block 3. The official population of the prison the night of the riot was determined to be 1,156.There had been riots in the penitentiary before it moved in 1956, the first occurring on 19 July 1922 and the second on 15 June 1953.
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