Most of the prison protests in the wake of the Attica rebellion and in support of those wounded and dead took place in states other than New York. On September 15, about sixty men at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, initiated a lunchtime protest, having “got the idea from the riot in New York.”26 Prisoner protests also erupted on that day at the Cuyahoga County Jail in Cleveland and in Baltimore’s City Jail, where 180 inmates tried to take a hostage and “barricaded themselves in the Baltimore Jail cafeteria…in an apparent show of sympathy for inmates at Attica.”27 That same day in Detroit, Michigan, a phalanx of 1,140 guards at the Wayne County Jail seized 150 weapons after FBI tip-offs that there was a planned rebellion.28 At Massachusetts Correctional Institution–Norfolk, 783 men began a four-day strike for prison reform that soon spread to a facility in Walpole.29 Female prisoners also erupted in solidarity with the men at Attica. Sixty-six women at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, launched a four-day rebellion, which they described as having started out as “a memorial service for the dead inmates at Attica.”30
In October 1971 there was an uprising at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Pontiac, a rebellion in a county courthouse jail in Dallas, Texas, a hostage-taking protest in a maximum security prison in Rahway, New Jersey, a hunger strike by 330 inmates at the Maine State Prison, and over the next months many other upheavals in jails and prisons throughout the country. The year 1971 ended with a dramatic ten-hour rebellion on December 28, launched by men in the New York City Jail system who were “demanding changes to detention rules.”31 This protest ended peacefully after city officials agreed “to automatic bail review after 30 days detention and [to] set a limit of 90 days for detention.”32 News of what had happened at Attica reverberated through prisons as far away as Europe. In Paris prisoners took hostages in their own Attica-inspired rebellion.33
COs were so terrified of prisoner rebellions after Attica that their unions again began to speak out loudly about the issue of workplace safety. The leadership of the main union for all state correctional employees in NY, AFSCME and its Council 82, believed that it had been DOCS policies that had led to the situation at Attica in the first place. As AFSCME president Jerry Wurf put it, “We believe that it is the obligation and the duty of government—in this case the state of New York—to provide secure and humane penal facilities,” and yet, “the state prisons are mostly crowded, decaying relics of penal theories discarded long ago.”34 Indeed, he went further, the uprising there “happened only after reasonable requests from the inmates were ignored by the state administration. It happened after unheeded warnings by members of our union who work at Attica, who could see and hear evidence of impending trouble.”35
Union officials were insistent that they meet with the governor about what Attica meant for them. They currently were “in negotiations with the state on several broad demands for changes in the prison system formulated by members of Council 82,” and in their view the uprising at Attica only strengthened their arguments for “New York to bring about immediate and widespread change in the state’s ill-administered prison system.”36 Five of the ten hostages killed at Attica had been members of AFSCME and, as far as their union was concerned, “the most tragic thing about the bloody riot and massacre…is that it could have been avoided. If the state had listened to warnings from correctional officers, if administrators had shown a modicum of sensitivity in providing for the inmates—if the state had just listened, the revolt might never have occurred.”37 So bad were tensions between the union and the DOCS following the Attica retaking that Oswald felt compelled to report to the governor, “The negotiations so far have served more as confrontations and have not resulted in any purposeful outcome to date.”38
State officials failed to deliver a satisfactory response to the union’s complaints about safety issues and, on September 22, “the union representing New York State’s 8,000 prisoner workers, reacting to the Attica Prison revolt, said today that they would lock all convicts in their cells Oct. 7 unless Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller implements immediate reforms.” The union president pointed out, “We’ve been discussing these demands for 18 months with the administration and had nothing but lip service….I guess it takes 40 men who did not need to die.”39
After Attica, prison employees’ wives also began to speak out about the need to take workplace safety seriously. These women had formed a statewide organization that planned on lobbying legislators to address their husbands’ safety needs and to inform the public just how dangerous a job these men did.40 Commissioner Oswald was particularly disturbed by this group’s activities because he did not feel that they represented him at all favorably. The “information they pass along to various news media and legislators after these meetings,” he told the governor, “does not reflect what I have considered to be a good relationship.”41
The few African American correction officers working in the state system were also concerned about the problems at Attica, but they saw them from a different vantage point. A number of them became vocal that “the causes and lessons of the Attica uprising have been grossly misunderstood by white officers and policymakers.”42 In short, they felt that the DOCS was “moving in the wrong direction” in its desire to clamp down harder on inmates when it was such treatment that led to Attica in the first place.43 They also expressed concern about the treatment that black guards received from their white co-workers. As one black CO observed nervously, since Attica, “he can feel a question hanging in the air when he is among white officers: ‘Whose side are you on…our side or the inmates’ side?’ ”44
The reality for the prisoners who had survived the assault on Attica prison on September 13 was that few from the Department of Correctional Services, or from the state more generally, were on their side. While it appeared from its announcement of Robert Fischer’s appointment that the governor’s office was organizing to go after those who had initiated the rebellion at Attica, it was doing virtually nothing to protect the men who survived it—the many still badly wounded from being abused—or to supply them with the medical care they desperately needed.45 And a full month after state officials had regained full control of Attica, none of the men huddled in their cells had been allowed to contact their family members.
And so, the men at Attica tried their best to smuggle out word of their condition to their loved ones. As soon as some modicum of calm had returned to the prison, they began to circulate a tattered red spiral-bound notebook from cell to cell. In it, men wrote down the names and addresses of their loved ones and penned a brief message to them, in the hope that someone, somehow, would be able to get this notebook out of Attica and to any one of these addresses.46 One prisoner, identified only as “James,” wrote down the address of his sister, Ethel Walker, and next to it he scrawled, “Sis, I am alright as of now and I hope that things work out for the best.” Charles Halley wrote to his mother, Lenora Halley, “We are OK.” A note to Gladys Harris said, “Okay and in good health now. Call wife, etc.”47 The book was filled with similar missives reassuring family members that the prisoners were alive and in decent health. Even though several of these men were in fact still injured and suffered beatings on a regular basis, they didn’t want their families to worry more than they already had.
But none of these notes reached their intended recipients. In one of the many abrupt, violent sweeps of the prison that took place in the days after the rebellion, state troopers confiscated the notebook. As the members of the Goldman Panel observed the moment they got into Attica, raids such as this meant that the prisoners routinely suffered “the loss of personal property which it has taken months and years to earn, collect or create.”48 The troopers and guards who had been placed in charge of the prison in the hours, days, and weeks after the retaking seemed to take particular satisfaction in ruining prisoner property. As one National Guardsman noted in disgust, COs and troopers had fun tossing prisoner belongings in the air and smashing them for sport, “like you used
to toss a ball in the air and hit it when you were a kid.”49
Personal items, furniture, and other debris lined the cell blocks after the retaking. (Courtesy of Corbis)
A particularly egregious problem that continued at Attica, as noted by the Goldman Panel, was that state officials were not acting quickly enough to replace the prisoner eyeglasses and dentures that had been smashed by correction officers and troopers. As the panel had pointed out, these were needed for “eating and seeing” and, therefore, “involve fundamental human rights.”50 By Vincent Mancusi’s own count at least seventy-eight prisoners were in need of new dentures “in connection with the problem of…dental prosthetics that were lost or destroyed during the riot.”51 Mancusi ultimately was forced to call upon the University of Buffalo School of Dentistry to replace the many dental appliances and dentures that had been destroyed as a “result of the September incident.”52 He was also pressured by the Goldman Panel to contact several optometrists to deal with “the backlog of requests for glasses.”53
Beyond damaging prisoner belongings, troopers and COs had also worked hard to destroy anything in the prisoners’ cells that they worried might be used against them. Particular attention was paid to the legal papers that had painstakingly been gathered by the prisoners over the years. These papers, literally thousands of pages of writs of habeas corpus, appeals, and legal briefs that the men in Attica had written out by hand, often in triplicate, were confiscated, thrown haphazardly into boxes, and hauled off to a Quonset hut at the barracks of NYSP Troop A.
At the end of September 1971 a portion of the more than two thousand prisoners still at Attica were allowed to receive visits from family members. Unsurprisingly, what the “more than 200 visitors [who] streamed through Attica prison’s iron gates to spend an hour with inmate relatives” heard on that first visit was deeply upsetting. Dorothy Trimmer, for example, “emerged weeping” over her son Wayne’s account of having been “savagely beaten about the genitals and elsewhere and…forced to walk over broken glass.”54 When pushed to account for such stories, Walter Dunbar maintained that “correction officers in some instances firmly prodded inmates who were lagging as they were moving back to cells. To the best of my knowledge, no inmate received any physical force from Correction officers other than prodding.”55 He circulated this party line among the COs themselves in one of the prison’s internal “Fact Sheet from Attica” publications.
Prisoners’ families at Attica on the first day they were allowed to visit after the retaking (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)
In the first days after the retaking of Attica, a great many of the prisoners were transferred to other prisons, but none of their families were told that such a move was taking place. According to memos written between officials at Attica and other penal institutions around the state, on September 17, 1971, “A draft of 70 inmates is scheduled to leave Attica…for transfer to Green Haven [and] similar transfers were made on Tuesday and Thursday for Clinton and Great Meadow.”56 By Friday the 17th, 217 of Attica’s inmates had been transferred out of that prison and another 150 were scheduled to go to Green Haven after that. Ultimately, by September, the last day of the transfers, 780 men had been moved out of Attica to other prisons around upstate New York.57
But even the men who had been transferred to other prisons were not exempt from continued harassment. Though none of the prisoners who had been moved were leaders of the rebellion, they were treated as radical agitators by those who ran their new facilities. Administrators at Great Meadow had to acknowledge that “some men have bullet wounds, burns, abrasions,” but when these men asked for medical care, these same prison officials insisted that the men were troublemakers and that their injuries were “nothing too serious.”58
The men who had been sent to Great Meadow were so upset that their injuries were being ignored and that they were being mistreated by guards that eighty-two of them launched a hunger strike within weeks of their arrival.59
Guard and trooper treatment of the Attica men who had been transferred to Clinton apparently was even worse than it had been for the men moved to Great Meadow. On October 29 the Legal Aid Society of Albany filed a $1.5 million class action suit against “Rockefeller, Oswald, and numerous Clinton guards and administrators” and sought a restraining order from Chief Judge James T. Foley of the Northern District Court against various abuses.60 According to the suit, the men at Clinton were “frequently beaten, gratuitously tear-gassed and threatened, harassed and subjected to racial slurs as a matter of routine.”61
By October, with lawsuits like this one, and with numerous citizens and even several congressmen calling for a closer look at what had gone so wrong at Attica more than six weeks after the retaking, it was clear that this controversy wasn’t going to go away. Top officials in the Rockefeller administration recognized that it was time to get stories straight regarding exactly what had happened there.
29
Ducks in a Row
Governor Rockefeller could see that the nation’s attention on Attica was simply not dissipating and he was determined not to appear the villain in this story. To his core, he believed that rebellions such as the one he recently had put down at Attica were ominous warnings that the American way of life itself was under attack. As he first articulated it to one of his speechwriters, “Today there is a relatively new political problem, centering on the well-organized national effort of revolutionaries, within and without the prisoners, to wreck the penal system as one more step toward the ultimate destruction of this country.”1 In another draft he put his views even more pointedly: “I declared last Monday that ‘the tragedy (at Attica) was brought on by the highly-organized, revolutionary tactics of militants….Unfolding events since then have given me no cause whatsoever to alter that estimate; to the contrary.”2
This was the view from the top, as well. President Nixon made it clear that he too saw Attica as part of a broader threat of black revolutionary foment, and so did members of his administration.3 Vice President Spiro Agnew penned a piece in The New York Times entitled “The ‘Root Causes’ of Attica,” which not only suggested that this rebellion had been caused by extremists bent on violence but that to imagine that the lives of felons were “of equal dignity with legitimate aspirations of law abiding citizens” was “absurd.”4 Attorney General John Mitchell had long held the view that radical groups were but breeding grounds for “violence-prone militants who seek only to destroy” and who have “no constructive objective; their sole aim is to disrupt. Their leaders brag about being revolutionaries and anarchists.”5
That the nation’s most powerful politicians viewed Attica as part and parcel of a revolutionary plot to destabilize the nation as a whole would have profound consequences for how officials, both state and federal, handled the official investigation into what happened there. When Rockefeller appointed Robert Fischer, head of the Organized Crime Task Force, to lead the state inquiry into the rebellion as well as the retaking, he was without question hoping to shape the scope of the investigation. In his words, he wanted the investigation “to determine the role that outside forces would appear to have played—including the role of certain individuals in persuading prisoners to hold out for completely unattainable political demands.”6 Basing the investigation in the Organized Crime Task Force unit would ensure a great deal of funding for it—as well as experience dealing with criminal conspiracies, in which he felt sure that Attica radicals had engaged.
Still, Rockefeller was no idiot. He was aware that in the blink of an eye Attica could become all about state wrongdoing. There were so many dead bodies following the retaking, so much ugliness during the rehousing, and so many accusations about prisoners being executed as well as beaten. Therefore, it was vital that he and his staff have a chance to debrief those who’d been on the ground at Attica before any investigations (not only Fischer’s, but any of the others that would surely be undertaken) got under way.
To make sure he was on top of all relevant
information related to both the uprising and the retaking, the governor called a meeting for the morning of September 24 at his Pocantico Hills mansion.7 As his attorney Michael Whiteman recalled, “The purpose was to get people to sharpen their recollections,” especially because they were “likely to be questioned.”8 By 10:00 a.m. that day a large group had assembled around a table in the pool house of the estate. Those present at the meeting included the governor, his personal secretary, Ann Whitman, Robert Douglass, attorney Michael Whiteman and his assistants Harry Albright and Eliot Vestner, Howard Shapiro, Norman Hurd, General Buzz O’Hara, General John C. Baker, press secretary Ronald Maiorana, speechwriter Hugh Morrow, Russell Oswald, Walter Dunbar, Anthony Simonetti, and Major John Monahan.9 According to Rockefeller, William Kirwan, the head of the New York State Police, who had been absent during the Attica uprising and retaking, was also there, as was Chief Inspector J. C. Miller of the NYSP.10 Detailed notes were taken, later read into a tape recorder, and then formally typed up.11
Three more of these “debriefing” meetings were held at the Rockefeller estate, described by Russell Oswald as “three long weekend meetings,” all of which were, according to Oswald, secret, and were intended, according to Robert Douglass, to nail down “our own executive chamber chronology.”12 In each of these meetings, one on October 25 from 9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., another on October 30 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and the final one for many hours on November 8, Rockefeller and his staff met not only with members of Fischer’s office, but also with high-ranking officials from the New York State Police.13 The very last meeting, however, was perhaps the most comprehensive and most problematic since it included both Major John Monahan and Captain Henry Williams of the NYSP—the two who had carried out the retaking that had killed thirty-nine men and wounded eighty-nine others and, therefore, whose men presumably face charges filed by Fischer’s OCTF investigation into Attica—usually referred to as the “Attica investigation.” These potential indictees were now at the home of the governor of New York working with the head of the Attica investigation to get a formal narrative of what had happened at Attica secured. Also there to help do this were other members of the State Police who had firsthand knowledge of exactly what had gone down in D Yard on the 13th. These included one trooper who had taken a series of 35mm slides from the roof of C Block during the assault, and another from the Office of the Counsel to the Governor who was there “to view a video tape, film and photographs and ask questions related to the role of the state police at Attica.”14
Blood in the Water Page 31