Chapter 63
When your products are guaranteed to protect others against the worst people in the world, how do you prove it?
You hold an invitation-only riot.
In 1997, the Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Corrections and Law Enforcement Training and Technology Center initiated the annual Mock Prison Riot in the former West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville. After the prison closed in 1995 because its casket-size cells were judged cruel and unusual punishment, the host organizations started bringing in Blade Runner technologies and putting them in the hands of corrections officers and tactical team members to take for a test spin.
The prison itself is as old as the technology is new, a Dracula’s lair monstrosity of turrets and battlements built in 1876, a dark-and-stormy-night castle of corrections. The penal institution radiates creepiness, the way Chernobyl glowed with radioactive waste, down to the exterior walls charred with smoke and grime. Tours of the penitentiary show visitors West Virginia’s original electric chair, Ol’ Sparky, not far from where Charles Manson’s mother was once incarcerated in the five-by-seven-foot cells. Mr. Helter-Skelter himself grew up in Moundsville and applied for a transfer to the prison when he was doing time in California.
It was an appropriate setting, in the shadows of a dead prison, for a trade show with immense impact but of which little is actually known.
The genesis of the show was two-fold. First, up-to-the-minute displays of crime-fighting technology had been a mainstay since at least the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. At the latter, in St. Louis, Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Co. built a model jail in the Charities and Corrections section to show visitors the cutting edge of hoosegow technology.
The second reason is rooted in one of the greatest population booms on record. By the early twenty-first century there were 502 adults per 100,000 residents locked away in state and federal prisons, an imprisonment rate five times that of 1972. In the twentieth century, there had been an average of 13 prison riots and disturbances a year. Near the end of the century, those numbers, like the prison population escalation itself, accelerated. In 1973, for example, there were an estimated 93 riots per 1 million prisoners, a statistic, experts feared, fated to increase in the face of growing imprisonment rates unprecedented on a worldwide scale.
To quell the threat of thousands of prisoners, stacked like kindling together and just as flammable, from exploding into multiple Atticas, Correctional Emergency Response Teams began forming. Adopting their methods from the Special Weapons and Tactics groups, the CERTs moved into the county, state, and federal jails and prisons. Over the years since their inception, CERT teams have been joined by SORT (Special Operations Response Team) and SERT (Special Emergency Response Team). Their effect has been as dramatic as their existence is obscure: from the above-mentioned 93 riots for every 1 million prisoners in 1973, the violent outbreaks dwindled to fewer than three for every 1 million prisoners in 2003.
But just as no knife stays sharp on its own, no emergency response team stays poised and ready to rumble without constant and intense training. That’s where the Mock Prison Riot comes in. Every year, about 1,000 law enforcement attendees from across the country—including, for example, teams from the New York City Department of Corrections, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections, and the Northern Nevada Correctional Center—come to Moundsville to test out new technologies, like cell doors thwarting prisoners from jamming and barricading them, puncture-proof gloves that shield guards against needles and knives during body searches, holsters that automatically load a guard’s gun when he draws it, and stab-resistant body armor.
To try out the novel tech, the show stages a variety of likely scenarios where the attendees can put the new tools through their paces. More importantly, the scenarios allow them to flex their muscles, test their discipline, and assess their training against “inmates.”
Most of the faux prisoners in this demonstration hailed from local or outside colleges, their bodies young enough to take the roughhousing that mandated signing a slew of waivers. For the 2005 Riot, they could volunteer for any of more than thirty scenarios, ranging from inmate disturbances in the yard to staff being taken hostage on a bus, to a food fight in the dining hall to convicts hiding in the basement or chapel.
In one scenario, prisoners on a basketball court refused to return to their cells. Each prisoner wore the Brooks Brothers outfit of the prison world, the orange prison jumpsuit. They pimpstrolled around the court, felonious squirrels caged in by twelve-foot-high fences with a tiara of razor wire. Nearby was a guard tower where real prisoners once inched out a tunnel under it using cafeteria spoons.
Maggie, a corrections trainer at a nearby prison who helped out at the Riot, told one participant, “If you go beyond the scenario, they”—in this case the team from the Northern Nevada Correctional Center—“will put you down. Hard. Believe me, I know. I’ve been a prisoner.” To “go beyond” meant going “Fight Club” on them. “If it gets too rough,” Maggie told the volunteer, “remember, shout ‘Excalibur.’” “Excalibur” was the safe word. Scream it and a safety officer would squeeze an air horn and the scenario would come to a halt, like hitting the pause button on a TiVo.
A cop playing a prisoner entered the yard, encased in a body armor so ribbed and thick, he looked like an eggplant-colored Michelin Man. He talked smack and waved a blade. The Riot had begun. Outside the caged-in court, a new LRAD audio-compliance system was aimed at the prisoners. It delivered a crippling beam of high-frequency sound louder than a 747. Before the operator pulled the trigger, another man, with a Voice Response Translator that was used by the Marines in Iraq, warned inmates in Cantonese and Arabic to comply with the guards. The guard told the Translator what he wanted it to say—e.g., “we will use tear gas on you” and then specified which of 125 languages to say it in.
The Nevada team swooped in, all Rollerball in their body armor. A bull pounded the uncooperative Michelin Man with high-velocity pepper spray pellets from a new, handheld “less lethal” (nobody used the term “nonlethal”) gun, the Jet Launcher. Wielding it like a flashlight, up close to his shoulders, he let loose a projectile with a chemical irritant that slammed into the prisoner at 280 mph. He went down with the thunk of a dropped bowling ball.
The Nevada team continued to advance like Roman legionaries in their ancient battle formation rows, except with stab-resistant body armor, Plexiglas shields, and riot batons with silver balls on their tips they wedge between your ribs and exert excruciating pressure. They tossed a version of flashbangs—stun grenades—whose effect was like Led Zeppelin playing in the prisoners’ ears while someone waved an emergency flare in front of their eyes. The guards then shot a modified pepper ball (actually, talc, for purposes of the drill) at inmates’ feet and ankles while the sound gizmo zapped them some more. The prisoners fought back with their only real weapons: shouting volleys of swear-bombs and throwing whatever garbage they could pick up off the cracked concrete court. Some jumped on the fence like wolves crazed by fire.
The team advanced in synchronized Rockettes steps. One prisoner paced back and forth in front of the line and shouted how he loved the Frederick’s of Hollywood leather thing they had going, punctuating the taunt with an air kiss.
The bespectacled prisoner pulled out a shiv. But instead of trying to use it on the guards, he took another prisoner hostage. “I’ll kill him if you don’t back off now,” he yelled. The Nevada team didn’t hesitate. They shot his feet and ankles and thighs with pellet guns. Under the hail of pellets, he went Sleeping Beauty on the weedy concrete. “You in the glasses, crawl forward,” the guards yelled, “crawl forward now.” He started to inch forward when two guards swooped in like big black birds of prey and dragged him away, knotting his hands in flex cuffs. One by one, the guards took out all the prisoners with the tuned methodical exactness of Swiss watches. When the scenario was done, the Nevada team stripped off their helmets and shook hands with the volunteers. Everybody talked about their performance like actors in a community theater production of “Our Town.”
The remaining scenarios took place in much the same way: attendees rehearsing what they’ve been trained endlessly to do—for example, rescuing prison personnel held hostage on a bus, and tracking down escaped prisoners hiding in a darkened basement, using little-known tools for a little-known world familiar to us only through the softened filters of Oz and Orange Is the New Black. Harsh battle was followed by cons and bulls alike swapping stories and compliments until it was time for them to square off again.
In the ensuing years, the Mock Prison Riot was taken over by the West Virginia Division of Corrections and the nonprofit West Virginia Corrections Training Foundation. Now forbidden to the media, the show offers 44,000 square feet of exhibit space, and the rare opportunity to test established skills and new technologies in an extraordinary kind of penal cosplay unlike anything else in the world.