******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, August 19 2016
‘Blood in the Water,’ a Gripping Account of the Attica Prison Uprising
Books of The Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
Blood in the Water
The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
By Heather Ann Thompson
Illustrated. 724 pages. Pantheon. $35.
Not all works of history have something to say so directly to the
present, but Heather Ann Thompson’s “Blood in the Water: The Attica
Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” which deals with racial
conflict, mass incarceration, police brutality and dissembling
politicians, reads like it was special-ordered for the sweltering summer
of 2016.
But there’s nothing partisan or argumentative about “Blood in the
Water.” The power of this superb work of history comes from its
methodical mastery of interviews, transcripts, police reports and other
documents, covering 35 years, many released only reluctantly by
government agencies, and many of those “rendered nearly unreadable from
all of the redactions,” Ms. Thompson writes. She has pieced together the
whole, gripping story, from the conditions that gave rise to the
rebellion, which cost the lives of 43 men, to the decades of government
obstructionism that prevented the full story from being told.
Ms. Thompson’s book has already been in the news because she names state
troopers and prison guards who might have been culpable in these deaths.
But the real story here is not any single revelation, but rather the
total picture, one in which several successive New York governors are
called to account as much as anyone on the ground that week in September
1971 in Attica, N.Y.
The inmates at Attica Correctional Facility had not planned to riot.
True, some inmates considered themselves Black Panthers or Maoist
revolutionaries. Everyone knew about George Jackson, the Panther, prison
radical and author of “Soledad Brother,” who had been shot to death by
prison guards in San Quentin, Calif., earlier that year. In July, there
had been a strike in the Attica metal shop. In a prison sociology class,
inmates in a racially mixed group were reading Adam Smith and Karl Marx.
Conditions were ghastly. Inmates were underfed. Each got one bar of soap
and one roll of toilet paper a month and was permitted one shower a
week. Broken bones went untreated and prisoners lost teeth for want of
basic dental care.
But what finally turned Attica the town or prison into Attica the
uprising was a misunderstanding, not discontent. On Sept. 8, 1971, a
prisoner had been accused of hitting a guard. The next morning, after
more prisoner infractions and a miscommunication among guards, a group
of prisoners was locked in a tunnel connecting one part of the prison to
another. Believing themselves sitting ducks, with guards coming to beat
them up in reprisal, the prisoners attacked the guards in the tunnel
and, in some cases, each other.
When prisoners in other parts of the facility figured out what was
happening, they began to arm themselves — with two-by-fours, chair legs,
whatever. When the prisoners in the tunnel finally burst out, they found
the other inmates were taking over the prison.
From Sept. 9, when the uprising began, to its brutal end on Sept. 13,
about half the inmates gathered in D Yard. They created a society, good
and bad. They made some rules by consensus, elected leaders and listened
to speeches. They cooked and ate. Early in the riot one guard, William
Quinn, died after a blow to the head; he fell and was trampled. After
that, guards taken hostage were treated well. At least two inmates were
raped by fellow inmates. Some prisoners beat up their least favorite
guards. Others raided the dispensary for drugs to shoot up.
For some prisoners, this reversion to a state of imagined freedom was
nightmarish; for others, blissful. One prisoner, Ms. Thompson writes,
“watched in amazement as men embraced each other, and he saw one man
break down into tears because it had been so long since he had been
‘allowed to get close to someone.’” Another hadn’t seen the stars in 22
years.
The eyes of the nation were on Attica. The inmates invited observers
into the prison, including the radical defense lawyer William M.
Kunstler and Tom Wicker, a columnist for The New York Times. (Louis
Farrakhan declined an invitation.) The observers became de facto
intermediaries, relaying demands that included religious freedom, an end
to censorship of their letters, a healthy diet (“stop feeding us so much
pork”) and doctors who would actually treat them.
Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller rejected the prisoners’ demand that he visit.
In briefings at his Pocantico Hills estate, he took an approach that
mixed high-minded disdain with naïve optimism that the problem would
resolve itself.
On Sept. 13, a motley crew of New York State Police officers, National
Guardsmen and assorted volunteers moved to retake the prison. They
entered shooting. In the crossfire 33 prisoners were killed, along with
nine hostages (after Quinn). As autopsies later revealed, with one
exception, all the corrections officers who died were killed by bullet
wounds — in other words, by friendly fire.
Had it only painstakingly reconstructed the events of that week in 1971,
Ms. Thompson’s book would have been a definitive addition to a growing
shelf of Attica literature, from Wicker’s “A Time to Die” (1975) to
“Uprising,” a 2011 e-book by Clarence B. Jones. (There are several
documentaries, too.) But the uprising and its suppression barely get us
halfway through the story.
After Attica, the state convened numerous panels to investigate. There
were class action lawsuits. A special state’s attorney filed charges —
dozens against the convicts, none against the state police or the
corrections officers who tortured inmates after the uprising was put down.
Nor was the state interested in helping the widows of slain corrections
officers. The state connived to persuade these destitute young mothers
to accept small workers’ compensation checks and give up their right to
sue for damages.
Eventually there was mass clemency for both sides, a pittance of money
for guards as well as prisoners, and never, to this day, an admission of
wrongdoing by the state. The last monetary settlement came in 2005.
A book this long (571 pages, not including acknowledgments and
footnotes) and bleak could have been unbearable, but every time its
pages bog down, along comes a pick-me-up of an unexpected insight. How
many have thought about what dentures mean to the imprisoned? Ms.
Thompson lingers over “the prisoner eyeglasses and dentures that had
been smashed by correction officers and troopers” after the retaking of
the prison. As one of the investigative panels had pointed out, “these
were needed for ‘eating and seeing’ and, therefore ‘involve fundamental
human rights.’”
There are vivid villains and heroes. For every vicious guard, for every
Governor Rockefeller, who peddled the lie that prisoners had cut the
hostages’ throats, there is a Dr. John Edland, the medical examiner who
told the truth about who killed the hostages, or a Malcolm Bell, the
Wall Street lawyer who, seeking a little adventure, became a special
prosecutor, then blew the whistle on how his superiors were thwarting
cases against state troopers.
Ms. Thompson’s sympathies are with the prisoners. In her epilogue, she
draws a straight line from the trauma of Attica to the Rockefeller drug
laws, whose sentencing guidelines have caused the prison population to
mushroom up to the present. But she is just as concerned with the
undertrained, overworked guards. They knew what had caused Attica. After
the uprising, Jerry Wurf, president of the correction officers’ union,
called for more “secure and humane penal facilities” rather than the
“decaying relics of penal theories discarded long ago.”
And yet in 1971 the State of New York had only 12,500 prisoners, a
number that grew, by 2000, to almost 74,000. None of them can vote. But
they can still strike or riot, and it’s Ms. Thompson’s achievement, in
this remarkable book, to make us understand why this one group of
prisoners did, and how many others shared the cost.
Correction: August 18, 2016
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misstated the number of hostages killed during the Attica uprising.
There were 10, including the guard William Quinn, who died in the early
stages of the rebellion.
Mark Oppenheimer is the author of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American
Religion in the Age of Counterculture.” He hosts the podcast “Unorthodox.”
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
