Preventing the Great Escape

The explosive growth of the Mock Prison Riot, which debuted in 1997 with just four technologies and 50 officers, parallels the staggering expansion of our nation's prison population. In 1982 the United States held 610,272 prisoners in jails and prisons. By 2002 that number had more than tripled, topping two
million. "Each officer now has a heavier load on the job," says Wayne Barte, project manager for the National Institute of Justice's Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization, which runs the mock riot. "Technology helps them keep inmates under control so that we don't have to invoke force."




When corrections officers do employ force, rarely is it in response to an actual riot, of which there are only about 12 per year in the United States, according to Bert Useem, co-author of States of Siege: U.S. Prison Riots 1971â€1986. The more immediate threat comes from individual assaults, especially those carried out with homemade weapons. David Locklear, the veteran marine who shot Maloney in J-Block, has seen blades fashioned from cigarette butts (all it takes
is repeated whacks on a concrete floor), explosives concocted from nondairy creamer, and ice picks molded from toilet paper ("Wet it, work it, wet it, work it, and you can make it deadly," he explains). "We have to constantly stay on top with superior tactics and technology," says Sims.




In the J-Block scenario, that tech took the form of a flexible scope to look around corners, into cells, and under bunks without entering the riotous cellblock; a pinhole spy camera embedded in an everyday communications device to provide real-time images of convicts' movements; and flash-bang grenades to create the confusion we needed to overwhelm the rioters with brute force.




That last part, however, is what worries me on day two when I play lead hostage-taker in the Gwinnett team's second training scenario. Sweating a bit, I brief my fellow conspirators on our mock crisis: We've killed an officer and taken a second one hostage with her own gun. We're hiding in a doorway, waiting for the Rapid Response Team to comply with our demand for a getaway van. When it arrives, we'll reach it by crossing the prison yard under a blanket so snipers can't pick us off without endangering our hostage. Then it's straight out the front gate.




The van arrives. I press my fake gun to the hostage's temple, duck under the blanket, and race with my cronies across the yard. Negotiator David Saunders follows us from behind a large, mobile bulletproof shield, ostensibly trying to talk me down. Really, though, he's jockeying for time as the Gwinnett County team gets into position. Then, when we're within sight of the van, he utters those seven dreadful words, which, alas, I already know: "Speed, we don't want this going south."




BAM! Everything happens at once: Stun grenades go off at our feet; the blanket is ripped off, revealing the entire Gwinnett County team standing in a phalanx not 10 yards away; and Locklear kills me with two dozen blank rounds. I collapse to the ground, startled they had gotten so close, so fast, with so little warning. I knew exactly what to expect—and yet I didn't have a chance in the world.