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You have to be in your late 30s to recall even a speck of what happened during the 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, a reality that makes it a sepia-toned footnote for a big hunk of this state's youth and newly arrived population.

We tend to ignore the riot too often these days, casting it into a corner drawer like some terrible trinket from another time. Something that can be misplaced. Something that, eventually, can be forgotten.

Only problem is, history is never lost or suppressed. It's only repeated.

I don't care if you're 80, 60, 30, 3. I don't care if your address in 1980 was Albuquerque, Algodones or Altoona. The State Pen Riot still matters. And if it doesn't cause you to shiver now, grab a sweater anyway. It will.

The 36-hour riot probably is the single worst thing that's ever happened in New Mexico, and when people talk about it - even those with a vested interest - everyone should take heed.

To recap: On the frigid early morning of Feb. 2, 1980, inmates at the Pen near Santa Fe overpowered guards and embarked upon a crazed, demonic frenzy of violence. After taking control of the prison's Main Unit, they attacked, raped and killed one another with a viciousness no Hollywood director could ever replicate.

Thirty-three died there. A single paragraph from a post-riot report filed by then-state Attorney General Jeff Bingaman describes it best. And worst.

"When the cells were opened," the report states, "the rampaging inmates dragged many of their Cellblock 4 victims out and stabbed, tortured, bludgeoned, burned, hanged and hacked them apart."

According to survivors, a few bodies even provided more fuel for inmate-set fires - a funeral pyre, perhaps, to the state's crowded and poorly managed prison system.

Even 27 years later, the costs are almost incalculable. Publicly funded cash registers started ringing at $40 million for new prisons, then hummed for the better part of two decades with lawsuits, more construction, more cost overruns. From 1980 to 1990 alone, the state spent $127 million on prisons, according to the Associated Press.

Just as striking, perhaps, is the latent effect the riot had on the state's judges - who, when they weren't actually putting people in jail were, in effect, running the facilities to which they were sending them.

Two notable cases, the Duran Consent Decree, and the McClendon lawsuit, have been the expensive and necessary north stars by which our legal and penal communities are guided when it comes to inmate population and treatment.

People can debate whether the courts' intervention has been good or bad, but no one can dispute that if problems at the State Pen had been addressed in the years leading up to 1980, the state might have saved itself the nightmare of Feb. 2 and 3.

So, what does this mean today?

It means we need to wake up. Nowhere is that more true than in Bernalillo County, where the 500-inmates-over-capacity Metropolitan Detention Center is under scrutiny from inmates' lawyers who say crowding problems are home-brewing a 1980 scenario.

Sure, them's fightin' words: County officials are adamant the Metropolitan Detention Center won't hit the 3,000-inmate mark, and swat aside any linkage between 1980 and 2007.

I understand their frustrations. Judges, cops and politicians could do plenty more to control inmate levels at MDC. But that means sharing control, and no one wants to share control when it comes to law-breakers.

But do I dismiss the connections between now and then as some shrill, sky-is-falling ploy for attention?

Hell, no. Not for a moment.

I don't think they do, either. I think jail officials in this state still remember the riot. I think they live in fear of the phone call then-Gov. Bruce King got at 2:15 a.m. on a cold February morning.

"Governor," then-State Police Chief Martin Vigil told King, "we've lost contact with the penitentiary."

Worst day in state history. Let's not repeat it.