Forty years ago, on September 9, 1971, prisoners
protesting medieval conditions rebelled at Attica, a maximum-security prison in
upstate New York. Four days later the state launched a violent assault on the
prisoners that left ten hostages and twenty-nine inmates dead. Both the
uprising and its bloody suppression should serve as a warning about our
country’s rush towards incarceration and the brutality of our prisons.
For me, the story of Attica is also a story about justice—the
importance of fighting for it, especially for disfavored people, even against
terrible odds. I began working at the Center for Constitutional Rights two days
prior to Attica’s uprising, and within days joined with lawyers from the
National Lawyers Guild, who fought to defend the prisoners and hold the state
responsible. The justice we sought was sometimes deferred, often denied, and
occasionally won over nearly three decades.
[img_assist|nid=131|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=170|height=145]Failure and Success
See the PNL website for a related article by SPC intern Eunji Kim. |
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From one perspective, we failed. The legitimate
complaints of the inmates—their “demands” including such basic human rights as
access to adequate food and medical treatment, religious freedom, and an end to
segregation—remain unfulfilled at Attica and elsewhere. Not a single state
official was ever prosecuted for his role in the killing, wounding and beating
of Attica’s prisoners during and after the uprising.
From another perspective, we succeeded. Under duress,
then-Governor Carey shut down all of the prosecutions of Attica’s inmates for
their part in the rebellion, and pardoned those convicted. Though he ignored
the recommendations of the commission he had appointed, which included looking
at the conduct of state officials, the state ultimately was forced to pay. In a
civil damage case that took twenty-seven years, Elizabeth Fink and other Guild
lawyers eventually won a twelve million dollar settlement on behalf of Attica’s
inmates.
The Power of Truth
Our greatest victory may be the establishment of a
more accurate historical record. In 1971, the papers were filled with false
reports about how the inmates had killed the hostages, slitting their throats
and castrating some. The only criminal investigations they were concerned with
involved allegations against the inmates, which involved charges ranging from
assault to murder, and resulted in sixty-two serious indictments. While the
press was evading the real story, I was interviewing inmates in the prison’s
hospital ward. My main memory is one of shock—shock at seeing almost crippled
black and Latino men lying there recounting stories of near escapes, bullet
wounds, and the famous gauntlet that many were forced to run—stripped naked—over
broken glass while guards beat them with clubs.
Today, “Attica” is synonymous with racism and prisoner abuse.
The record now shows that over 2,200 inmates, 63 percent of whom were black or
Latino, were held in a facility meant to hold 1,200 and patrolled by 383
guards, all white. It’s now a given that physical as well as mental abuse and
racism were common.
We would do well to heed Attica’s lessons. America’s prison
population is now almost 10 times larger and still filled with the same people
who suffered Attica’s overcrowded, subhuman conditions — mostly low-income
black and Latino men. In fact, the United States has the highest incarceration
rate in the world—743 per 100,000 as of 2009. That’s about 20 percent higher
than any other nation. While Americans represent only five percent of the
world’s population, one-quarter of the world’s inmates are incarcerated here.
Much Work to be Done
Conditions in US prisons remain far too like the ones
that contributed to the uprising at Attica and its brutal suppression. Just
this past May, the US Supreme Court deemed conditions in California’s
overcrowded prisons bad enough to constitute a violation of the Eighth
Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Six weeks later, prisoners in
Pelican Bay’s “Security Housing Unit” went on a hunger strike to protest being
confined in cement cells with metal doors for more than twenty-two hours a day,
with no real access to natural light or human contact.
Forty years ago, Attica forced some unpleasant truths into
the spotlight: that most jailors and officials are white, while most
incarcerated people and scapegoats are people of color; that institutional
power all too often prevails over civil and constitutional rights, especially
for the most vulnerable among us; that people stripped of their humanness will
eventually rise up. These are lessons we ignore at our peril.
