Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! The Attica Prison Uprising

WYTS: Buffalo Bills. Original post here.

Say it with me, folks: “ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!” This is the Attica Prison Uprising.

I’m not 100% a prison abolition guy - there are people who are too dangerous to be allowed to live free in our society, the majority of them are politicians. I am, however, somebody who never freaks out when a high-profile character “only” gets five or ten years in jail. However bad you think prison is, it’s probably much worse. This is a subject that gets depressing very quickly. The American justice system is a burden of unimaginable bluntness designed to break people. It is all the worst parts of a bored unfeeling bureaucracy mixed in with the extra cruelty of psychopaths on every level of the system on a power trip, from judges to guards to various thugs in public office. Then there’s grifters and profiteering and obvious corruption. Penal work is the kind of labor that corrodes a person’s soul. The soil around a prison is more haunted than an Indian burial ground.

Attica Correctional Facility was opened in 1931, an imposing fortress in Western New York, about 35 miles east of Buffalo. It was state-of-the-art, terrifying, and encased in a gray thirty-foot-high wall, a mile in length. A castle of despair. This outer wall is two feet of solid concrete, too tall and thick to need barbed wire. All around are twelve guard towers, built like castle turrets. The main structure of the complex is a 2x2 grid with four yards, prison cells at the perimeter. In the center point is a control area called “Times Square”. The prison had been designed to house 1,200 souls, but by the Seventies, it was horribly overcrowded, with 1,000 more people inside than it should have had.

Serving time in Attica was serving hard time. You’d spend something like 14 hours each day locked in your cell, get a single shower a week, one roll of toilet paper a month, and you were expected to earn your keep: a quarter an hour wages for slave labor, which even in 1971 was beyond bad. I don’t want to imagine what this place smelled like.

Most of the inmates were African American or Latin American, from the urban areas, and the guards were nearly entirely white and from the vast farmland nowheresville that is Upstate New York. Attica became one of those great American confluences of race and labor problems. Many of the prisoners were Muslim and received no accommodations for their faith. All the inmates were subject to vast levels of abuse, including sexual abuse. Also, the food was bad, the medical care was bad, this was dehumanizing to the point of being illegal even by 1971 standards. Not that anybody could do anything about it, because they had very limited access to the outside world. Attica kept increasing the repression as prisoners became more vocal of their displeasure. Prisoners had no legal services, censored communications, no training or education opportunities, not even a library. When prisoners sent requests for relief, the warden, Vincent Mancusi, just cracked down harder to stop any political activity.

Oh, you remember around 2010 we realized that solitary confinement was like… nightmarish and actively a form of torture? Yeah, this is 1971, you’re going in the Hole in Attica.

Every few years there’s a moment when reactionaries get furious about how “good” prisoners have it and then subject them to sub-human treatment again. “Oh my god, they get to eat food?? How dare they be allowed to ever have a normal life again??” This is a cycle that will repeat forever thanks to our rotten political and media cycles. Usually, it is a clue that the person you’re talking to is a complete asshole, who has never read any research on what violent prison conditions actually do to people and societies at large. You can probably distrust anything else they have to say. Pay attention to what happens in New York under Governor Hochul, as opposition makes her weasel back the unfinished criminal justice reforms. The only force in society worse than a police union is a prison guard union.

Anyway, back to our story. Attica sucks and is part of a reckoning the entire country is undergoing as part of the civil rights movement. The prisons across the NY State penitentiary system were feeling all that energy, prisoners were often part of the leftist movements outside. There was a wave of riots across NYC’s jails and in Auburn Correction Facility (in picturesque Finger Lakes Wine Country!). In Manhattan's jail, The Tombs, five guards were held hostage for eight hours on August 10th, 1970, until the mayor negotiated a peaceful settlement. But the city failed to live up to its promises. Several rioters were subject to brutal reprisals once the jails went back to order. So if prisoners do not surrender easily in the future, remember why.

Many inmates who saw these smaller events were sometimes shipped off to Attica to relieve the pressure of the prisons they were in already. There is the example of an Anti-War bomber named Sam Melville who was at The Tombs during the hostage situation and later would die at Attica. He had his own underground prison publication called Iced Pig (great name). By summer 1971, the correctional officers union was getting spooked and felt the situation would eventually explode. And while they took no responsibility for their part in that problem, they were right.

In August, news reached Attica that prisoner activist and Black Panther member George Jackson had been killed during an escape attempt at San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was the writer of Soledad Brother, a memoir about the justice system and its racist, capitalist origins. (I should read it one day.) He had been in jail since 1960 for robbing a gas station at gunpoint, then given an “indeterminate sentence”, meaning no set ending. For the crime of stealing $71 bucks, the state had condemned this man for over a decade of hard time. Finally, George Jackson with some compatriots tried a wild escape attempt using a smuggled gun, taking three guards and two white prisoners hostage. Jackson died after being shot in the back, all his hostages were murdered. Ugly story. More than half of Attica’s inmates engaged in a hungry strike in honor of their fallen hero on the 22nd. The riot would occur mere weeks later.

On September 8th, a fight broke out between two prisoners that ended with a few guards getting struck. Warden Mancusi demanded several inmates be locked away into solitary. Mancusi had become a hated figure in the prison, symbolizing all repression and censorship in the castle. One prisoner, William Ortiz, struck a guard with a can of soup, and was locked up in his cell. The next day, Thursday the 9th, the prisoners were agitated that Ortiz would be punished severely. At 8:20 AM, it all exploded. There was a fight as Ortiz's section marched off to the yards, the prisoners managed to break through into the central Times Square section of Attica, and soon they were tearing open the other three wings of the prison. There were 127 guards at the facility this morning, but there had been no plan to fight back against a full rebellion. And they had just lost the core of the structure.

By noon, individual actions and a state police response had recaptured a good deal of Attica. The prisoners lost the mess hall and kitchens, which meant very little food and very few supplies. Half the yards were in government control, the whole exterior concrete wall, and half the prisoner population were still in cells. The other half of the Atticans were, for now at least, free. The rebels largely focused on their side, B and D blocks, with a camp built in D Yard. They had 42 officers and other staff as hostages, forcing a stand-off that would last for days.

William Quinn, a guard who had taken severe injuries in the opening melee, was carried over to the administration building on a mattress, where prisoners begged for him to get medical attention. He'd pass away two days later - the only guard to be murdered by the prison population. Three other prisoners would be killed in the various chaos, but all the other dead to come would die from bullets. The prisoners of Attica had no guns. Important detail for later.

During the next four days, leading to Monday morning, the prisoners did as much as they could to make their D Yard village livable. They also dug trenches and built fortifications. Most of the hostages were well-taken care of, though their lives were bargaining chips. The Atticans organized a list of about 33 demands, mostly simple things like better food, access to legal council, ending censorship. They also had more ambitious goals like a labor union, that the hated warden Mancusi be fired, and all prisoners be given amnesty for the uprising. The state officials laying siege to Attica would make other claims like the prisoners were demanding to be flown out of the country. NY State Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald visited the prisoners and agreed to many compromises, then went on the radio and made a different statement. The prisoners realized he was a liar, and they never trusted Oswald again. Now they wanted to speak directly to the Governor, Nelson Rockefeller.

Governor Rockefeller never appeared at Attica. He stayed far away from this toxic situation. This was a media circus and there is a lot of footage of interviews with prisoners if you want to watch it. I recommend the Attica documentary from 1974, by Cinda Firestone. Many of those men would be dead within days.

Early Monday, at 8:25 AM, Commissioner Oswald demanded the Atticans release their hostages and surrender. He'd compare what happened next to being akin to Truman deciding to drop the A-bomb. Oswald did not mention that this was the last warning or that it would be enforced with infinite violence. Eight hostages were led up to the catwalk by the rebels in mock execution to show they were serious. That's when the State of New York retook Attica. At 9:46 AM, state troopers, Attica guards, and various local law enforcement opened fire with rifles, shotguns, and even a couple AR-15s. Clouds of gas filled the prison, which meant many shooters had no idea who they were firing at. Some ringleaders though may have been targeted for execution specifically. Within minutes dozens of people were dead, hostages and prisoners alike. Several prisoners died trying to surrender. Hundreds of men had been shot, 8 hostages were killed immediately, one died later, and 29 inmates were dead. The state claimed the hostages had been murdered by the Attica rioters, but almost immediately coroners reported that this was a shameless lie. Everybody had been killed by bullets, by the authorities.

The work of recapturing Attica was not quite over though. The prisoners had surrendered but their spirit had not been broken. Many had to strip naked and crawl through glass and mud and their own latrines. Or they were forced to run the gauntlet. There sure were a lot more bruises appearing days after the battle was over, doctors noticed.

Warden Mancusi retired in 1972 at least.

In 1976, the new Governor, Hugh Carey, pardoned everybody involved with Attica's uprising. He announced that the “book was closed”. The full report of what life was like in that prison was classified for decades. New York State made some major concessions, such as allowing these guys to have daily access to soap and toothpaste, or granted them their right to practice their religion. Still in the 1980s and 90s, when politicians wanted to look "tough on crime", a lot of these positive changes were reversed. The prisoners were demanding a way back to civilization and to be treated as people. Instead, they were treated as easy targets by cynical politicians, with mandatory minimums, ending education access, and much much worse overcrowding.

Every single day the American prison system is home to some appalling injustice, and this is supposed to be completely normal. We wonder how we got to Alligator Alcatraz. A state fetish for violence only leads to… well, lots of good times and puppies for everybody? Right?

New York had about 12,000 people locked away in cells in 1972. That peaked at 70,000 in 1999, now down to about 32,000. Attica is still open and still being used as a prison. It will celebrate its 100th anniversary soon.