The Newsroom

We'll call this the first in a continuing series on the stories, people and experiences that have punctuated my 32 years in the newspaper business.

The early morning of Feb. 2, 1980, I was working the cop beat in Albuquerque when a call came over the scanner of a disturbance at the state penitentiary in Santa Fe.
After debating a few minutes whether to go, I hopped in my car and made the one-hour trip. The images and haunting memories that followed have lasted 28 years.
Thirty-three inmates were killed over a 36-hour period in the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Though 43 people - 11 of them guards - died during the infamous Attica riot of 1971, Santa Fe represented a savagery unmatched by anything before or since.
As a young reporter, I jumped at the chance to stay on the story - day and night through that cold weekend outside the prison gates, and in the weeks and months that followed.
I followed inmates who were transferred to prisons in Arizona and Marion, Ill., the "new Alcatraz" where reputed riot leader Michael Colby was sent after the rampage.
I sat in the living room of a quiet bungalow in Albuquerque, where the mother of a 19-year-old prisoner killed during the uprising talked in hushed tones of her regrets as the parent of a child gone astray.
I saw the blood stains and heard the horror stories - of "protected" inmates tortured, one by one, with makeshift knives and blow torches; of severed heads stuck atop broomsticks and paraded around as if props in some hellish version of Mardi Gras; of desperate guards who prayed for a death that never came.
More than any story I ever covered, the terror of Santa Fe shaped my view of prisons and justice - toward redemption and rehabilitation not as an emotional salve, but a pragmatic and necessary response to an inmate population that continues to spiral out of control. That 19-year-old was camped in the same prison dormitory as hardened, career criminals and likely would have become one himself if they hadn't ended things for him.
It also gave me a bird's-eye view of government accountability at its worst. Mark Colvin, who wrote "The Penitentiary in Crisis," had this to say to a group of college students many years later:
From about 1976 until after the 1980 riot, the administration of the Department of Corrections was in complete disarray. Lines of authority were unclear after the department went through a series of very confusing reorganizations. So many people in the administration thought that they were in charge that in reality no one was in charge. There was a complete lack of accountability and oversight of operations at the prison. The chief of security at the prison told us that he had not inspected the night watch (which was the shift in which the riot started) for security lapses in over four years before the riot, because he thought that the captain of the guards (his subordinate) was doing this, which in fact he was not. So it was a case in which the "right hand never knew what the left hand was doing." Also, the guard force itself was very demoralized (the turnover rate was 80 percent, meaning that 80 percent of the guards quit during the year). So many of the guards, with some exceptions, really could care less what happened. They just wanted to get through their shift as best as possible and go home.
How many of those same words have we used to describe some contemporary institutions here in San Bernardino? Indeed, I've thought a lot about Santa Fe with regard to Operation Phoenix - both as a solution (recognizing the need for prevention and intervention) and as part of the problem (what can happen when no one's minding the store).
At some point, I'd like to go back - to see with my own eyes if the ghosts of Santa Fe have been exorcised, or merely forgotten.