The Devil's Butcher Shop

"In the cold early hours after midnight on Saturday, February 2, 1980, convicts seized the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe, taking twelve guards hostage. When the institution was surrendered thirty-six hours later, rampaging inmates had murdered and mutilated almost beyond recognition at least thirty-three men, tortured eight of the hostage guards, and raped, wounded, and terrorized scores of other prisoners in the most savage penal riot in American history. Gutted by fire and by flooding, blood-soaked sewage, the penitentiary stood in the Sunday mountain twilight a dank and acrid charnel house, the butchery so complete that anthropologists would later sift through the muck for occasional shards of bone as if searching some prehistoric burial ground.

This is the story of that event, and of its origins and aftermath."--from the Preface