Alabama, however, stole the show. They were the last group to arrive at the banquet, and the hall went silent when they did. All of the officers were men, the majority were black, and many had shaved heads. They wore black shirts, pants, and boots. Many looked like bodybuilders. They headed to the table where I was sitting, alone. Each member of the team put his hands on the back of a chair and then waited until the coordinator, a titan in wire-rimmed glasses, bellowed “Seats!” In unison, they sat.

I found myself next to Aaron Lewis, a trim 51-year-old African American with broad shoulders, large, dark eyes, and a neat black mustache. A former soldier and sheriff ’s deputy, Lewis stressed to me the high standard to which he and his fellow CERT officers, who all worked other jobs in Alabama prisons, held themselves. For his CERT service, Lewis got a 5 percent bump in his salary. “None of us do this for the money,” he told me. They had all signed up for the challenge, the sense of pride. CERT gave them a way to distinguish themselves.

Mike Coleman, the director of security for the West Virginia Division of Corrections, thanked everyone in the audience for coming. This was the first year the proceedings were being run exclusively by the state, he said. The feds had funded the event for a decade but this year had decided to stop. Six months earlier, the event’s very survival had been in jeopardy. But now the turnout was impressive. For a moment, the people in the audience considered a world with no Mock Prison Riot, and then applauded themselves for not letting that come to pass. Grinning, Coleman—who was one of the officers taken hostage at the prison in 1986— gave his benediction: “Let’s have a safe riot!”

The energy in the prison the next morning was nervous and tribal, like the first day of school. A big riot planned for the North Yard kept getting pushed back because a team from the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, hadn’t yet shown up. Bands of mock prisoners in loose and torn jumpsuits, looking like road-warrior extras from a post-apocalyptic Western, kept away from the CERT teams—who, in turn, kept away from one another and instead formed clusters in matching T-shirts. Finally, word came that a riot scenario was ready to go: prisoners had seized the dining hall.

I headed over for the show. The rioters—role-playing criminal-justice students from Utah—wore short-sleeved orange jumpsuits, knee pads, face shields, and goggles. When I got to the dining hall, they were chatting excitedly with one another and with observers. One hammy prisoner pranced the length of the kitchen, from food window to food window, slamming metal counters and demanding his “chef ’s salad, CO, right fucking now.”

Then Alabama entered the dining hall—and once again, everyone stopped talking. Still wearing all black, the team moved in low and fast and spread out along the wall, forming a phalanx of batons, helmets, boots, and clear-plastic riot shields. Suddenly the student rioters seemed less credible as barbarians. Together, the Alabama team moved away from the wall, advancing in formation toward the prisoners, some of whom charged the line, only to be thrown or pushed to the ground, where they were pinned down by knees or shields. The team’s formation was elastic. The line would momentarily stretch to absorb the charge of a prisoner and then, having quickly taken him down, would almost instantly snap back into shape. Watching the fate of their fellow inmates, those on the far end of the room lay down on the floor, prone. The Alabama team now crossed the hall in slow lockstep, bodies angled sideways, stomping one foot forward and then dragging along the other. The noise this produced was genuinely frightening. It suggested not just overwhelming force but also the inevitability of its application.