They were made from structural steel found in the walls of La Reforma prison cells — 600 knives, not innocent kitchen knives, mind you but lethal weapons, all of them were laboriously made by the convicts.

This is what a special force of 800 policemen found this week when they conducted an exhaustive search. What is chilling is how the prisoners got the raw material.

The director of the country’s biggest prison, Guillermo Ugalde, told La Nacion, “on occasion, I’ve thought A and B sections (of cells) could come tumbling down in an earthquake due to deterioration of the construction.”

The two and a half hour search carried out Monday occupied 700 prison guards supported by a hundred regular police. While the search was in action, a police aircraft circled the prison just in case some of the inmates decided to take advantage of the turmoil.

The search was carried out in cell blocks A and B of the prison at San Rafael de Alajuela where 1,800 of the 3,600 inmates are quartered. Prison officials say that the inmates get away with dismantling the cell structure due to overcrowding in the prison and lack of guards.

The overcrowding is not restricted to La Reforma, prison officials told La Nacion: the holding cells at San Sebastian are 80% overcrowded and the one at Cartago is 55%.

Moreover, knives and stilettos weren’t the only things being homemade behind bars — police found bootleg liquor distilled from bread and packets of powdered soft drinks — all together, about nine liters of it — hardly gourmet stuff, but powerful.

Said Reynaldo Villalobos, deputy director of social adaptation, the knives were the most worrisome, since they were a potential menace not only to guards but other prisoners as well.

But even the 21 cell phones confiscated were a worry — they are sometimes used to extort funds from the general public, by threatening them with mayhem by confederates outside the prison.

Many times, the threats are meaningless but a person whose loved ones are menaced has no means of finding out if the threat is credible or not. Police also decommissioned 600,000 colones in cash, some of which could have been extorted.

The Ministry of Justice, in charge of detention for criminals, acknowledges that this was what happens when there are too few guards and too much time on the convicts’ hands.

Unfortunately, tempers flare among inmates and killings are not unusual in prisons here. La Nacion mentioned that a prisoner in the young adult section was stabbed to death last September.

Acting Justice Minister Jorge Rodriguez said most of the vandalism of La Reforma’s structure occurred during the night hours when it is hard for patrolling guards to see what is going on in the cells.

Commentary: Unfortunately, prisons, as in most Central American countries, are at the end of the budgetary food chain here. In fact, they are palaces here compared with other countries in the region.

This country has yet to suffer, for example, a tragic fire that kills a score or more of inmates. But if this country does not invest more in correction, the conditions may deteriorate to those of the notorious San Lucas in the Nicoya Gulf of the first half of the 20th century — a sort of Devil’s Island.

La Reforma was conceived as a real correctional facility by the nearly neurotically sympathetic Costa Ricans. But the reality is that it has become a “university of crime” where overcrowding results in young convicts of minor crimes get thrown in with hardened criminals from whom they learn evil techniques.

Still, some classes are available to inmates so they can better themselves. But they lack counseling services — there is only one psychologist for every 400 prisoners, too heavy a caseload for even the most dedicated professionals to turn around most convicts’ lives.