Andrew Brininstool is the author of the new book High Desert Blood: The 1980 New Mexico Prison Riot and the Tragedy of the Williams Brothers. He lives in Grapevine, Texas.
Q: Why did you decide to write a book about the 1980 New Mexico prison riot?
A: I grew up in Santa Fe, but wasn’t born until a few years after the riot. Nonetheless, my parents and grandparents (who are from Carlsbad) knew the story quite well. Listening to them discuss some of the victims’ families, where they were when it went down, who they knew inside the penitentiary at the time—it was an (admittedly dark) piece of lore as a youngster.
Having said as much, I never considered writing about the riot until I was teaching college. One night, myself and a friend, Dr. Michael Martin, were chatting on his patio—killing some time before we needed to get back to grading finals. I made an offhand remark about the riot, and he asked about it.
Like many, he knew little about what had taken place. He listened as I spoke about it and, as he has background in teaching nonfiction narratives to his classes, he told me I needed to work on this. He was insistent and encouraging. I would’ve likely never focused my attention on what became this book without his guidance.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: This book took years of research—archival digging, interviews with former inmates and prison staff, legal records, media coverage, and declassified government documents. Some of the most valuable sources weren’t the official reports, but the people who had been there.
The prison itself—the physical space of it—was also crucial. Walking through what remains of the facility, you can still see traces of what happened. The scorch marks, the broken walls, the places where inmates were tortured and killed.
Q: The writer Jimmy Santiago Baca said of the book, “Brininstool explains the cause and effect of the events, which lends the book a purpose and meaning even the best novelists lack.” What do you think of that description?
A: I truly appreciated his praise for the book, and I am glad that he saw this in my writing. I set out to not just tell a true crime story, but to tell a story about real people and the very real lack of direction our prison system has, to show how and why this riot happened and why it will happen again.
The U.S. has never decided what the prison system is for – rehabilitation or discipline and punishment? Since the 1970s prisons have become more punitive and have never swung back to focusing on rehabilitation.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: The riot was a warning—a warning that went unheeded. It exposed everything that was broken about the American prison system: overcrowding, inhumane conditions, unchecked violence. And yet, instead of fixing those issues, the system became even more punitive, more profit-driven, and more expansive.
Today, we have more private prisons than ever. We have solitary confinement units that function as modern-day dungeons. We have a system that punishes more than it rehabilitates. The same problems that fueled the New Mexico riot still exist—just on a larger scale.
If there’s one lesson to take from this book, it’s that systems don’t collapse overnight. They decay, slowly, under the weight of negligence, corruption, and disregard for human life. And if history tells us anything, it’s that when we ignore the warning signs, we will see history repeat itself.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: During the 2020 presidential debates, a major talking point was criminal justice reform, clemency, and the notion of no longer locking people up for nonviolent crimes. It seemed that both candidates were taking the novel approach of outdoing each other on being softer on criminology--rather than the tough-on-crime mantra that had been the norm since 1973.
And yet, now, we are seeing nonviolent persons taken in by ICE, detained, shipped to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT), one of the most notoriously dangerous and overcrowded facilities in the world. President Trump has also considered sending undocumented persons to Africa--another place known for abject and inhumane prisons.
The whiplash of the last four years echoes a problem the United States has had since its inception. And the Penitentiary of New Mexico/Old Main serves as a perfect microcosm--or an index—for this sort of chaos.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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