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Descent ito Madness: An Inmate's Experience of the New Mexico State Prison Riot, by Mike Rolland. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson, 1997. 153 pp. $23.95 paper. ISBN: 0-87084-748-1.
Shortly after the New Mexico State prison riot of 1980, I stood on a tarmac at the Phoenix airport and watched about a hundred Santa Fe prisoners descend from a U.S. Marshal's plane. I was part of a security detail from the Arizona Department of Corrections assigned to transport these convicts to our maximum security unit in Florence. I will never forget the look on their faces. A lieutenant standing next to me said that he hadn't seen that look since Vietnam. It was the look of men who had seen things.
Several books have been written about the riot over the years, ranging from the scholarly (Colvin 1992) to the sensational (Morris 1983). Yet none of them has contained the level of materialistic detail offered by Mike Rolland, a Vietnam vet, a convicted bank robber, and a Sante Fe prisoner who lived through the riot. And unlike most prison memoirs, this one is wrapped in humanistic sociology. The work is prefaced by Michael Braswell; Mark Colvin then examines the riot from an historical perspective; and Bo Lozoff concludes the work with a moving epilogue. In between lies Rolland's narrative, which accords with official versions of the events that transformed the New Mexico penitentiary into a killing ground. This unique approach provides an antidote to...