Attica Prison riot

• 1. Introduction

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  The Attica Prison riot of September 1971 left 43 men dead at a New York state prison, the highest toll in the history of United States prison riots. During the uprising, a declaration from the inmates' side insisted: "We are men! We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such." That sentence explains much of what the men inside said they wanted. Nearly all of the dead were killed not by prisoners but by law enforcement gunfire, in a state operation that ended four days of tense standoff. How did a prison reach the point where more than a thousand inmates seized it? Who sat across the table from them, and who stayed away? And why did the state send in armed troopers when talks had come so far?

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• 2. Conditions Inside

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  Historian Howard Zinn described Attica as a place where prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day locked in their cells. Mail was read and reading material restricted. Families visited through a mesh screen. Zinn also listed disgraceful medical care, an inequitable parole system and racism everywhere.

  The prison had been designed for 1,200 men, yet its population had climbed to 2,243. Crowding sharpened every other grievance.

  Among the incarcerated men, 54 percent were African American, 9 percent were Puerto Rican and 37 percent were white. Sources disagree on whether every guard was white or whether one nonwhite guard served in a mostly white corps. Guards often threw away letters written in Spanish to or from Puerto Rican prisoners. Black prisoners were steered into the lowest-paid jobs and faced regular racial harassment.

  Geography added a second divide. Most of the men came from urban areas, including metropolitan New York, while most of the guards came from the surrounding region. The era also handed prisoners a language for their anger. The Black Power Movement and the New Left helped them understand and criticize their imprisonment, and a growing culture of activism pushed some to join movements for radical social change inside and outside the United States.

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• 3. The Fuse

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  In 1970, a year before Attica, rebellions broke out across New York City's jail system. They struck the Manhattan House of Detention, the Brooklyn House of Detention, two Queens branches at Kew Gardens and Long Island City, and the Adolescent Remand Shelter on Rikers Island.

  At the Manhattan House of Detention, inmates held five guards hostage for eight hours. They let them go after officials promised to hear grievances and to take no punitive action. The promise did not hold. Officials shipped the main ringleaders to various state prisons, where many were brutalized, held for months in solitary confinement and charged again.

  Between the 2nd of November 1970 and the 9th of June 1971, inmates and authorities at Auburn Correctional Facility were locked in an ongoing confrontation. Several participants in what became known as the Auburn prison riot were later transferred to other state prisons, Attica among them.

  In July 1971, a group of Attica inmates handed Commissioner of Corrections Russell Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller a list of 27 demands. They asked for a better diet, better guards and rehabilitation programs, above all education. They also wanted religious freedom, the right to political activity and an end to censorship. The commissioner took no action. Warden Vincent Mancusi answered by adding restrictions on reading materials and personal belongings.

  In August 1971, George Jackson, an author and prominent member of the Black Panther Party, was shot and killed at San Quentin State Prison in California. He died during an escape attempt in which three guards and two white inmates were also killed. His writings had urged prisoners nationwide to become politically active. That made him one of the first targets of an FBI program aimed at activists in prisons, which later grew into the Prison Activists Surveillance Program. Many Attica inmates had read his books. The day after his death, at least 700 of them joined a hunger strike in his honor.

  On Wednesday the 8th of September 1971, two inmates fought during their recreation break, and a correctional officer stepped in. The remaining inmate was told to return to his cell, an argument followed, and he hit the officer. A second inmate struck the same man, Lieutenant Richard Maroney, before Lieutenant Robert Curtiss moved to calm things down.

  That evening, Warden Mancusi ordered the two fighters, Leroy Dewer and Ray Lamorie, taken to solitary confinement. When officers came to 5 Company to collect them, other prisoners shouted and threw things. One inmate, William Ortiz, hit an officer named Tom Boyle with a can of soup. Ortiz was ordered confined to his cell, a status called keep lock.

  On the morning of Thursday the 9th of September, the men of 5 Company still wanted to know what would happen to Ortiz. Officer Gordon Kelsey told them he did not know and tried to carry on with the routine. On the way to breakfast, some inmates opened Ortiz's cell door and he walked to the mess hall with them. Command staff decided to send all of 5 Company back to their cells after the meal, but they did not tell every officer. When officers led inmates toward the recreation area, both sides were surprised to find the doors locked. The inmates feared punishment, a melee broke out, and the chaos spread to nearby companies.

  By noon, officers and police held about half the prison. The other half belonged to 1,281 of Attica's roughly 2,200 inmates, including D-yard, two tunnels and the central control room known as Times Square. Several guards and inmates had been hurt in the first outbreak. Officer William Quinn died of his injuries in hospital two days later. The men also held 42 officers and civilian employees as hostages.

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• 4. Inside the Yard

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  Frank "Big Black" Smith, born on the 11th of September 1933, was chosen as head of security to keep outside negotiators safe. The inmates elected leaders, named medics and security teams, and began drafting what officials would have to grant before anyone surrendered.

  Elliott James "L.D." Barkley, aged 21, became a forceful voice. He was an ardent orator who spoke to fellow inmates, to journalists' camera crews and to viewers at home. He was only days from his scheduled release. He would be killed when the prison was retaken.

  The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands gathered the prisoners' complaints and addressed itself to the "sincere people of society". It listed 33 demands, among them better medical treatment, fair visiting rights, better food, religious freedom, higher pay for inmate jobs, and professional training. It also asked for newspapers and books, daily showers, toothbrushes and an end to physical abuse. Five elected inmates held the power to negotiate: Donald Noble, Peter Butler, Frank Lott, Carl Jones-El and Herbert Blyden X. The document also named "vile and vicious slave masters" who oppressed the prisoners, including the New York governor, New York corrections and the United States courts.

  The inmates asked for outside observers who understood prison conditions, and officials persuaded many to come. Tom Wicker, an editor at The New York Times, was there. So were James Ingram of the Michigan Chronicle, State Senator John Dunne, who headed a legislative Prisons Committee, and State Representative Arthur Eve. Congressman and attorney Herman Badillo came, as did civil rights lawyer William Kunstler. Clarence B. Jones, publisher of the Amsterdam News and a former adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., joined them, along with representatives of the Young Lords.

  The prisoners asked for Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, but he declined. They also asked for the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale spoke to the inmates briefly on the 11th of September and did not stay long. Some believed he inflamed tensions.

  Commissioner Oswald negotiated with the prisoners and observers, and he agreed to the great majority of the demands. He refused amnesty for the men involved and refused to fire the warden. Kunstler said the prisoners had already given up on removing the warden. He said several formulas for amnesty were under discussion with the commissioner hours before the attack. In his words, "if we had been allowed to continue, everyone would be alive and the matter would be settled today."

  Governor Rockefeller never came to the prison or met the inmates. He sent Almerin C. O'Hara, a retired National Guard major general who headed the Office of General Services, as his personal liaison. Oswald and members of the observers committee telephoned Rockefeller and begged him to come and calm the situation. He refused. Some analysts later argued that his absence kept matters from getting worse, since he was unwilling to compromise.

  After that refusal, Oswald and Rockefeller agreed that Oswald would order the State Police to retake the facility by force. That decision was later criticized.

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• 5. The Assault

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  On the night of Sunday the 12th of September 1971, officials drew up plans to retake the prison. Observers urged Oswald to make one last appeal to the inmates, and he agreed. He was told not to phrase it as an ultimatum, because Rockefeller did not want the inmates to know the assault was beginning.

  At 8:25 on the morning of Monday the 13th, Oswald told the inmates to release the hostages and accept the offered settlement within the hour. He did not say that negotiations were over. He even told them, "I want to continue negotiations with you." The inmates rejected the offer. Rockefeller still seemed opposed to their demands, and the mood in the yard darkened.

  The inmates had prepared for an attack. They had dug trenches, electrified metal gates, built crude battlements from metal tables and dirt, and fortified Times Square. After Oswald left, they brought eight corrections officers onto the catwalk above the command center, ringed by inmates with homemade weapons. Surviving inmates said they meant the hostages as insurance and did not intend to kill them.

  Shortly afterward, Oswald gave the order. Of that decision he later said, "On a much smaller scale, I think I have some feeling now of how Truman must have felt when he decided to drop the A-bomb."

  At 9:46 a.m., tear gas fell into the yard. Hundreds of State Police troopers, Bureau of Criminal Investigation personnel, deputy sheriffs, park police and correctional officers then fired into the smoke. Troopers used shotguns loaded with buckshot, which wounded and killed hostages and inmates who were not resisting. Attica's own correctional officers were allowed to take part. The commission Rockefeller later set up called that decision "inexcusable".

  The prison was reported fully secured at 10:05 a.m. By then law enforcement had shot at least 128 men and killed twenty-nine inmates and nine hostages. The last of those hostages, Correctional Officer Harrison W. Whalen, died of his wounds on the 9th of October 1971. The full toll also counts Officer Quinn, fatally injured by inmates in the first outbreak, and three inmates killed by fellow inmates before the retaking. The commission judged the assault the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War, apart from Indian massacres in the late 19th century.

  Survivors alleged that leaders were singled out. A doctor who treated them said many ringleaders were approached by guards and shot systematically, some with their hands raised and some lying on the ground. Assemblyman Arthur Eve testified that Barkley was still alive after the prisoners had surrendered and the state had regained control. Another inmate said officers searched for Barkley, shouting his name, and shot him in the back. Sam Melville, who helped draft the demands and was known in the prison as a radical, was allegedly shot with his hands in the air as he tried to surrender.

  In the first hours, Oswald and Rockefeller stated that inmates had slit the throats of many hostages. The media widely reported it. Less than 24 hours later, official medical examiners confirmed that every hostage had died from bullets fired by law enforcement. Rockefeller still claimed the prisoners had "carried out the cold-blood killings they had threatened from the outset". The Special Commission found that officials failed to quickly refute the early false reports.

  Troopers and prison officers then took reprisals. Inmates were made to strip naked and crawl through mud, broken glass and the prisoners' hand-dug latrines. State officials also subjected prisoners to sexual violence and rape. Others were forced to run the hallways naked between lines of enraged officers, who beat them and shouted insults and racial slurs. Leaders such as Frank Smith faced extra punishment, including repeated beatings and solitary confinement. Several days later, doctors treating wounded inmates reported evidence of more beatings.

  At Auburn Correctional Facility and Clinton Correctional Facility, men who had once been held at Attica and had joined political organizations suffered similar violence.

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• 6. Reckoning and Records

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  A Prisoners Solidarity Committee newsletter dated the 30th of September 1971 counted 13 reported rebellions since Attica. That figure doubled the year's total up to then. Protests and riots reached prisons in New York, Massachusetts, Indiana, Michigan, West Virginia and Georgia. Rallies supporting the prisoners were held in New York and as far away as Los Angeles and Norman, Oklahoma. Several rallies backed Governor Rockefeller instead. Activist Angela Davis and musician John Lennon wrote works supporting the inmates and condemning the official response.

  At 7:30 p.m. on the 17th of September, the Weather Underground exploded a bomb near Oswald's office in the Department of Corrections. Its communique called the prison system an example of "how a society run by white racists maintains its control".

  In November 1971, Rockefeller created the New York State Special Commission on Attica, naming Robert B. McKay, dean of NYU Law School, as chair. Known as the McKay Commission, it published its report in September 1972. The report criticized Rockefeller, the Department of Corrections and the State Police for the retaking and for failing to protect inmates from reprisals.

  In October 1971, Robert Fischer was appointed Special Deputy Attorney General to lead the Attica Task Force, later succeeded by Anthony Simonetti. Within four years, 62 inmates faced 42 indictments containing 1,289 separate counts. One state trooper was indicted, for reckless endangerment.

  In May 1975, two former inmates were convicted in the death of William Quinn. A published account noted that only faltering evidence linked them to the actual beating. Charles Pernasilice, who was Catawba Indian, received up to two years for attempted assault. John Hill, who was Mohawk, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life. Supporters alleged the trials were unfair and that the men's ethnicity contributed to their prosecution. At the sentencing, Hill's lawyer William Kunstler said, "I'm not going to give the impression to the outside world that there is justice here."

  Also in 1975, task force prosecutor Malcolm Bell sent Governor Hugh Carey a report. It alleged that his superiors were covering up evidence of crimes by law enforcement and blocking a full investigation. After the report leaked, Carey appointed Judge Bernard S. Meyer to investigate. The Meyer Report, released in December 1975, found no intentional cover-up. It did find serious errors of judgment, including important omissions by the State Police in gathering evidence.

  Only the first of the report's three volumes was made public. In 1981, the State Supreme Court ordered the other two sealed permanently. The Forgotten Victims of Attica, a group of injured officers and families of officers killed, pushed for the state to release its records. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said he would seek release of volumes 2 and 3, totaling 350 pages. After redactions, 46 pages came out in May 2015. They hold accounts from witnesses and inmates describing torture, burning and sexual abuse of inmates by prison authorities. In 2021, the 50th anniversary, survivors, families, historians and lawyers were still pressing for every record.

  In December 1976, Governor Carey announced he was "closing the book on Attica". He pardoned inmates who had pleaded guilty to obtain reduced sentences and commuted the sentences of the two men convicted at trial. He also dismissed pending disciplinary actions against 20 law enforcement officers.

  Civil suits could still go forward. Surviving inmates and families of the dead sued New York for civil rights violations during and after the retaking. After decades in court, the state agreed in 2000 to pay $8 million, which was $12 million minus legal fees. In 2005, the state separately settled with surviving employees and the families of slain employees for $12 million. Frank "Big Black" Smith argued for compensation for both groups, inmates and officers alike.

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• 7. Reforms and Reversal

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  After Attica, the New York State Department of Corrections added showers, soap, medical care and family visits. It introduced a grievance procedure that let inmates report staff actions violating published policy. It created liaison committees in which inmates elected representatives to meet prison officials. It funded Prisoners Legal Services, a statewide network of lawyers assisting inmates, and it opened access to higher education and gave inmates more religious freedom.

  Those gains did not last. During the "tough on crime" era of the 1980s and 1990s, many were reversed. The 1994 Crime Bill eliminated all Pell Grants for prisoners, which defunded higher education behind bars. Every university-level program in prisons ended, and no other educational options replaced them.

  Crowding worsened as well. New York's prison population rose from 12,500 at the time of the uprising to 72,600 in 1999.

  In 2011, a man incarcerated at Attica was brutally beaten by guards. For the first time in New York State history, correction officers were criminally charged over a non-sexual assault of an inmate. In 2015, the guards pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of misconduct to avoid prison time. News stories on the case quoted current and former inmates describing Attica's reputation as "a facility where a small group of correction officers dole out harsh punishment largely with impunity".

  Anthropologist Orisanmi Burton reads the post-Attica reforms through counterinsurgency theory. He argues that the temporary improvements were designed to fracture the organizing taking place inside prisons. In his view, they opened a split between the prison population's reformist wing and its revolutionary and abolitionist wing.

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• 8. Attica in Memory

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  The first historical account of the uprising, published in 1972, was Attica: The Official Report, written by the Special Commission. Richard X. Clark, a former prisoner and Nation of Islam member, published a firsthand account, The Brothers of Attica, in 1974. Tom Wicker, the New York Times editor who had been an observer, published A Time to Die in 1975. Malcolm Bell, the prosecutor turned whistleblower, wrote The Turkey Shoot: Tracking the Attica Cover-up in 1985. Another observer, Clarence Jones, released Uprising: Understanding Attica, Revolution and the Incarceration State in 2011, with Stuart Connelly.

  Historian Heather Ann Thompson published Blood in the Water in 2016. It draws on interviews with former inmates, hostages, victims' families, law enforcement, lawyers and state officials, plus large archives of previously unreleased materials. Deanne Quinn Miller, daughter of the guard William Quinn, published The Prison Guard's Daughter in 2021, with Gary Craig. In 2022, Joshua Melville, son of the slain inmate Sam Melville, published American Time Bomb. In 2020, Big Black: Stand at Attica appeared, a graphic novel co-written by Frank "Big Black" Smith. It made the American Library Association's list of top ten graphic novels for adults that year.

  In October 2023, the University of California Press published Burton's Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. Burton stresses the revolutionary, internationalist and abolitionist sides of the rebellion, which he says earlier accounts largely ignored. He is critical of Thompson's book, arguing that it leans too heavily on state records and gives Attica as the state saw it. He treats the 9th of September 1971 as the culmination of a year of rebellions in New York City jails and state prisons, hence the phrase "The Long Attica Revolt". He also argues that prison management began borrowing from counterinsurgency practice, psychological warfare, behavior modification and mind control experimentation.

  Burton notes that many Attica prisoners distrusted reform itself, seeing prisons as sites of revolutionary warfare. In 1972, an inmate named Joseph Little told a government panel, "I'm not for no penitentiary reform. I'm for abolishing the whole concept of penitentiary reform."

  In the 1975 Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon, Al Pacino's character shouts "Attica! Attica!" at the reporters and police gathered outside his hostage crisis. The line ranks number eighty-six on 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes. In 1977, John Travolta's Tony Manero quotes the chant in Saturday Night Fever.

  Documentaries began early. Cinda Firestone's Attica, made in 1974 and restored in 2007, assembles surveillance and news footage with interviews. In 2012, PBS aired Criminal Injustice: Death and Politics at Attica, a 60-minute Emmy-nominated film. Brad Lichtenstein's Ghosts of Attica came out in 2019. In 2021, HBO Max released Betrayal at Attica on the 1st of August. Stanley Nelson's Attica premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 9th of September, the 50th anniversary. Fictionalized television movies include Attica in 1980, Against the Wall in 1994 and The Killing Yard in 2001.

  Television series have echoed it too. In the final episode of Orange Is the New Black season 4, prisoners chant "Attica! Attica!", and all of season 5 is devoted to a rebellion that parallels it. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Past Tense" drew on Attica for its Bell Riots.

  Musicians answered quickly. Archie Shepp's 1972 album Attica Blues is dedicated to the riots. John Lennon recorded "Attica State" in 1972. The British band 10cc released "Rubber Bullets" in 1973. Charles Mingus included "Remember Rockefeller at Attica" on his 1975 album Changes One, and Nas referenced Attica in 1996. In July 1972, boxer Muhammad Ali recited a poem on an Irish television interview, imagining what Attica's prisoners would have said before they died.

  In 1972, composer Frederic Rzewski wrote two percussion pieces connected to the uprising. "Coming Together" sets a letter that Sam Melville wrote in 1971. The second, shorter piece, "Attica", sets the words inmate Richard X. Clark spoke on leaving the prison: "Attica is in front of me now."

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