A guide leads a group through Old Main. In 2012, the New Mexico Corrections Department opened the facility for tours telling the story of a deadly riot that took place there in 1980. Photos by Christian Filardo
In all likelihood the correctional officers chose to ignore the smell. Many guards were high school dropouts—some still teenagers—and training sometimes consisted of showing up on day one to put on a uniform. Between 1970 and 1980, five separate wardens sat at the prison's helm, each offering radically different approaches to penal operations. This led to frustration among staff. Regardless of the warden, correctional officers were underpaid, making an average of $9,000 a year. The annual turnover rate stood at 80 percent. Out of fear or exasperation or negligence, officers were known to cut corners. Some pencil-whipped their headcounts, signing off that everyone was accounted for without actually making rounds.Within just 22 minutes, inmates commanded the entire institution.
An abandoned cellblock
Immediately after the takeover, captured guards were forced into mattress closets to be used as bargaining chips in the inevitable negotiations with prison authorities. Without guards, CB4 had no defense. Inmates inside used bedframes to block the doors of their individual cells. This only delayed the inevitable. Informants trembled while, nine feet away, their soon-to-be executioners used the torches to cut through the cells' bars, all the while telling each victim what awaited.Inmates were castrated, kept conscious via smelling salts, and forced to eat their own genitals. One was shot point-blank with a tear-gas canister, crushing his skull. An inmate on the third tier was hanged; the rope broke and he fell to the basement. He was still alive, and a group gathered around him with pipes, shouting, "You won't die, will you? Die, you fucking snitch." One inmate sat in his cell for two hours singing the Eagles' "Take It to the Limit" while executioners cut through his cell bars. Once inside, they beat him, dragged him onto the gangway, and cut through his flesh with a torch. One informant had an angle iron drilled through his ear.On a daily basis prisoners had to navigate a hellacious game, forced to walk a high wire between remaining true to fellow convicts and staying on the good side of the officers.
A noose hangs above the site of the prison's old electric chair
The defunct gas chamber
A board used by guards to keep track of inmates from when the prison was operational
Most of the people tapped to be tour guides are reassigned correctional officers. Our guide, Cory, had worked on the line for four years before moving to a gang investigation unit. He walked backward as he led us down the main corridor toward the old control center. "I never turn my back on anyone inside an institution," he said. "Not even civilians." In the control center, a plastic clock is permanently set to 2:02 AM, the time it was destroyed by Danny Macias and the raiding E-2 inmates. Despite the presence of these clocks throughout the facility, the tour is almost Joycean in its nonlinearity, an outcome of Old Main's architecture and the fact that whole areas of the institution are still off-limits. Visitors are forbidden from taking photographs in certain wings, including Cellblock 4, where the outline of a trucker burned to death is visible and the hack marks done on another inmate's neck still scar the concrete. Though the tour guides have been encouraged not to shy away from the bureaucratic fuck-ups that led to the riot, if you don't have a working knowledge of the events, the meandering may leave you with more questions than answers.But it didn't seem like people tour Old Main looking for answers. When the Corrections Department decided to open up the facility to visitors, it hit upon a fundamental shift in the nature of tourism in the past few decades. No longer are we content to slather ourselves in Banana Boat and catch a few rays of sun. Instead, we often want to use our vacation to take behind-the-scenes looks at sites of misery and death, a practice that has been called "dark tourism."The anthropologist Erika Robb Larkins has argued that dark-tourism sites can be divided into two distinct categories. Sites of the first kind take an "in context" approach—museums and curated locations where labels and narration are meant to educate and to contextualize the violence of the past. In contrast, there are the sites of violence left largely empty, lacking narration or structure, and meant only to speak for themselves. They're attractive simply for still being around.The tour allows people to experience a permanent nightmare in the American collective conscious: prison.
Items made by current inmates are sold at Old Main's gift shop.