1990 Strangeways Prison riot administrative offices on the lower floor and the chapel on the upper floor. Remand prisoners were held in wings G, H, I and K of a separate prison, linked to the main prison through workshops and a kitchen. The Certified Normal Accommodation Figure for Strangeways, the number of prisoners the prison was designed to hold, was 970. The population of the prison had increased in the months before the riot, from 1,417 in January 1990 to a peak of 1,658 on 27 March. On 1 April, the prison contained 1,647 prisoners – about 925 convicted adult prisoners, 500 remand prisoners
Apodaca prison riot essentially run by one cartel or another. Eric Olson of the Mexico Institute at Wilson Center remarked, "The strategy has been to arrest a lot of people, but when you warehouse prisoners in prisons that are overcrowded and poorly managed, you are likely to have this kind of warfare breakout inside prisons." The Apodaca prison riot was the third riot to result in 20 or more deaths since October 2011. And according to the writers of InSight Crime, Mexico's prison system is slipping into anarchy, with inmates slaughtering each other at alarming rates; below is a quote from a newspaper,