In addition to paving the way for the prisoners eventually to “get better food and medical care,” the Attica uprising also led to their visiting hours and other privileges being “substantially increased and improved,” as well as to their “employment opportunities” being expanded.11 Following the rebellion Inmate Liaison Committees also were established. These were bodies elected by a vote of the prisoners, intended to help “channel grievances, communications and suggestions from the inmate population to the correctional authorities.”12 The state of New York seemed to take CO training more seriously as well. The Department of Correctional Services, for example, decided to hold a comprehensive “Orientation Training for Correction Officers” at the New York State Police Academy in Albany on December 6–23, 1971, which covered subjects as varied as “Types of Inmates,” “Attitudes in Supervision,” “Interpersonal Dynamics,” “prejudice,” and “minority cultures.”13 Thanks to the Attica rebellion, numerous existing grassroots efforts to push for prison reform were newly energized in New York. In November 1971 a large conference was held in Binghamton called “After Attica—What?” and, as important, entirely new prisoner rights organizations were founded, such as Prisoners’ Legal Services.14 Numerous other, older organizations that had long been advocating to humanize New York’s prisons, such as the Osborne Association and the Fortune Society, were also galvanized by Attica. Thanks to their efforts, New York’s criminal justice system as a whole became less repressive in the wake of the uprising.
But though Attica reflected the extraordinary power and possibility of prisoner rights activism, at the same time, Janus-like, it also reflected, and helped to fuel, a historically unprecedented backlash against all efforts to humanize prison conditions in America.
One cannot overestimate how much it had mattered—not just to New Yorkers’ views of civil and prisoner rights activism, but also to the views of countless other Americans—when state officials stood outside Attica in the immediate aftermath of their assault on the prison and told outrageous tales of prisoner barbarism. The rebellion had been front-page and television news for an entire week and when state officials told the nation that the prisoners—those who had claimed to be clamoring only for better treatment—had slaughtered innocent hostages, many were naturally horrified and disgusted. Activists and protesters, many concluded, had simply gone too far. Indeed, to countless white Americans in particular, Attica suggested that it was now time to rein in “those” black and brown people who had been so vocally challenging authority and pushing the civil rights envelope. It appeared, now, that they weren’t legitimate freedom fighters, they were instead just dangerous thugs.15 As one Time magazine reader put it in his October 1971 letter to the editor, “Governor Rockefeller did exactly the right thing. And now let’s not have the courts get lenient with these murderous convicts.”16
Importantly, it wasn’t just disenchanted citizens that took this message from the events of 1971. So too did policymakers. The Attica uprising prompted the American Correctional Association (ACA) to conduct a major study of prisons, one that was disseminated widely, which concluded that there was in America by 1971 a “New Type of Prisoner.”17 This new type of prisoner was not only to blame for the ugliness that had happened at Attica, reported the ACA, but he was a regular presence in, and a major threat to, “a majority of prisons and jails in the nation.”18 And, lest there be any doubt about why the nation now faced the threat of this more militant convict, it was because these men had spent the 1960s acquiring “a knowledge—superficially and otherwise—of history, race problems, street fighting and the vocabulary of radicalism” and they now believed they were “a victim of racist society.”19 Most alarming, according to the ACA, this “new breed of politically radical young prisoners” believed that they were “in a ‘Holy War’ against racist oppressors,” which, the organization emphasized, did not bode at all well for the law-abiding citizens of this nation.20
This particular understanding of Attica and what it suggested about prisoners would inform how officials across the country dealt with the incarcerated from that year forward. While some enacted reforms in the immediate aftermath of the uprising, other prison wardens and commissioners of correction in California, Connecticut, Vermont, and West Virginia all loudly spoke out against ever again negotiating with prisoners. Force, they insisted, was now a must.21 In fact, some intimated, simply asserting more authority might be insufficient when it came to dealing with this new breed of militant black prisoner. Perhaps there now needed to be an entirely new sort of penal facility for these men.
No sooner had the smoke cleared over Attica than New York’s commissioner of correctional services, Russell Oswald, was pitching exactly this idea to Governor Nelson Rockefeller. According to media reports, Oswald proposed isolating “up to 500 of [the] state’s 16,000 inmates to forestall rebellions” in so-called “maxi-maxi” facilities. He argued that there were “certain individuals” who couldn’t be allowed to move about in an “open institution.”22 They needed “segregation and intensive help.”23 As Fred Ferretti of The New York Times summed it up: “The ‘more militant people, the aggressive people’…would be concentrated ‘so they won’t spread their poison’ to other inmates.”24 Other departments of correctional services across the country agreed with Oswald’s assessment that there was a crisis brewing thanks to black militants in the prisons, and at least one prison administrator was confident that “in the atmosphere that existed in the wake of Attica…‘we will be able to do it.’ ”25
That Attica had directly, albeit unwittingly, helped to fuel an anti-civil-rights and anti-rehabilitative ethos in the United States was soon clear to people paying attention to electoral politics across the nation. Any politician who wanted money for his or her district had learned that the way to get it was by expanding the local criminal justice apparatus and by making it far more punitive. The tougher on law and order a district was, the more dollars would come its way.26 As Republican state senator John Dunne put it bluntly, “As a result of Attica, the public attitude is that we’ve got to get tougher. That means we’ve got to put more people in prison. We have not reached the point where as many people as should be in prison, are there.”27
Dunne had no idea how right he was about the public’s expectations. Notably, for all of the Rockefeller administration’s nods to prison reform funding in 1972, the following year Governor Rockefeller added to his reputation of being tough on criminals by passing a set of drug laws that were more draconian than anything that had ever before been on the books.28 Legislation was enacted that, for example, “created mandatory minimum sentences of 15 years to life for possession of four ounces of narcotics—about the same as a sentence for second-degree murder.”29 These 1973 drug laws were subsequently duplicated across the country, in ever more punitive iterations, over the next two decades. By 1978, for instance, Michigan had passed a so-called “650-Lifer” law that automatically gave life sentences to anyone caught with 650 grams of cocaine. And seemingly overnight, any crime—not just drug crimes—could net someone extraordinary penalties.
Indeed, in the 1980s and the 1990s, politicians passed scores of laws at both the state and federal level that criminalized acts that had previously been legal, as well as passing countless mandatory minimums and so-called truth in sentencing laws that ensured substantially more prison time for any act that was now, or had always been, considered illegal.30 And by 1990, Republicans were trying to pass a tough-on-crime federal bill that, among other things, would “reduce the number of ‘aggravating factors’ that are needed for the courts to impose a death penalty.”31 Tellingly, when a less draconian bill was also proposed, the president of the National District Attorneys Association tried to undercut any support for it by saying that the bill looked “like it was drafted by the ‘Death Row PAC’ at Leavenworth or Attica.”32
This district attorney need not have worried that anything less harsh would pass. Not only did the Republicans triumph that year but
plenty of Democrats also wanted to get even tougher on crime. In 1994 Democrats and Republicans again banded together to pass an even more devastatingly punitive piece of legislation, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act was the most comprehensive “tough on crime” bill in American history. Among other things, it earmarked $9.7 billion to fund the building of more prisons. By 1995 the U.S. prison population had topped one million, and was still growing at an unprecedented rate.33 The fact that so many of these people now in prison had been arrested because they were drug addicts, mentally ill, poor, and racially profiled concerned few if any politicians, whether in a statehouse or in Washington, D.C. Then, to make sure that this now enormous group of the incarcerated did not resist their deteriorating conditions of confinement via the nation’s legal system as they had done so effectively both before and after the Attica uprising, in 1996 legislators passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA).
The PLRA was a deadly blow to American prisoners. So many prisoner rights victories of the twentieth century had been made possible by the ability of the incarcerated to access federal courts to protect their Eighth Amendment right not to endure cruel and unusual punishment. This new law made it much harder for prisoners to protect themselves legally. For example, it required proof of an actual violation before any decree or injunction could be issued, and it also severely curbed the discretion of the federal courts to render decisions with implications for the system as a whole, and the law actually required them to take the public’s safety into consideration when rendering any decision. The act additionally placed a cap on attorney fees and required that a panel of three judges agree before any prisoner could be released from confinement as a result of a lawsuit.34
By the time the twenty-first century began, America’s War on Crime and War on Drugs had criminalized the nation’s poorest neighborhoods—its already most marginalized black and brown communities—to such a degree that the nation descended into an internationally unparalleled crisis known as mass incarceration. While the lies told at Attica—how it had been spun—did not, in some linear way, cause mass incarceration, they had certainly fueled it.35 Importantly, although the War on Crime had begun six years before Attica, America’s dramatic spike in incarceration rates began directly after that rebellion had been quashed.
And, notably, in the age of mass incarceration, the word “Attica” no longer connoted struggle and resistance in the popular imagination—as it had years earlier in the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Attica State” or in Sidney Lumet’s blockbuster film Dog Day Afternoon. Rather, by the 1990s, “Attica”—when it showed up in the lyrics of rappers like KRS-One and Zack De La Rocha, or in an episode of The Sopranos, or even in the kids’ cartoon SpongeBob—had come to mean the worst-of-the-worst criminal.36
America by the early twenty-first century had, in disturbing ways, come to resemble America in the late nineteenth century. In 1800 the three-fifths clause gave white voters political power from a black population that was itself barred from voting, and after 2000 prison gerrymandering was doing exactly the same thing in numerous states across the country.37 After 1865, African American desires for equality and civil rights in the South following the American Civil War led whites to criminalize African American communities in new ways and then sent record numbers of blacks to prison in that region.38 Similarly, a dramatic spike in black incarceration followed the civil rights movement—a movement that epitomized Attica. From 1965 onward, black communities were increasingly criminalized, and by 2005, African Americans constituted 40 percent of the U.S. prison population while remaining less than 13 percent of its overall population.39 And just as businesses had profited from the increased number of Americans in penal facilities after 1870, so did they seek the labor of a growing captive prison population after 1970. In both centuries, white Americans had responded to black claims for freedom by beefing up, and making more punitive, the nation’s criminal justice system. In both centuries, in turn, the American criminal justice system disproportionately criminalized, policed, and forced the labor of incarcerated, disenfranchised African Americans in ways that wrought incalculable damage both in and outside of America’s penal institutions.40
Attica’s prisoners knew this long history well. This was their history. And this is why they refused to give up until they had effected truly meaningful prison reform. These prisoners felt, just as the state did, that a great deal was at stake in 1971 when they took over the Attica Correctional Facility. If they didn’t speak out and demand to be treated like human beings, and if the power of the state to determine the workings of this nation’s criminal justice system was allowed to be absolute, the American penal system would eventually be too punitive and inhumane to bear.41
And they were correct. A close look at the state of New York in the three decades after Attica’s prisoners were silenced clearly shows just how much worse things eventually became. Whereas there were 12,500 prisoners locked in the state’s penal facilities in 1971, already so many that facilities like Attica were severely overcrowded, thanks to “changes in sentencing polices and parole release rates,” that number more than doubled by 1982.42 By the close of the 1990s, 72,638 prisoners were locked up in New York prisons, doing enough work for the state prison industries, Corcraft, to generate $70 million of revenue between 1998 and 1999 alone.43 As the twenty-first century dawned, there were nearly 74,000 men and women, overwhelmingly black and brown citizens of that state, locked in New York penal institutions—all of whom could still be forced to work and none of whom could vote to change the system.44
It was clear by the close of the twentieth century that many of the post-rebellion calls for change to New York’s prison system had been rolled back the instant that prisoner activism—and thus pressure on the system—was quelled.
Little more than a decade after the Attica uprising, the prison was again in the grips of a serious crisis.45 By 1982, Attica was so overcrowded that any prisoner programming that still existed fell far short of the number of people who wanted to access it. Once again, there were too many prisoners for the medical care that was available in the facility and that care was, once again, of “poor quality.”46 In fact, there were again so many serious problems at Attica in areas such as “medical care, food service, recreation, visiting, and access to court and legal materials” that many there worried that there might be another explosion.47 Although there was an Inmate Liaison Committee that could voice concerns to the administration, by the 1980s, prisoners knew that this group had no real power and so they refused to pretend that it did. The superintendent reported that year “that so few prisoners were even interested in running for an ILC position that he cancelled the last election and selected anyone who nominated himself to serve.”48
At Attica in the 1980s, as before, prisoners who could not be heard eventually lashed out. This time, though, the response was to place them in segregation, and to make that placement far more punitive than it had ever been before. By 1982 “the physical size of this area had more than doubled during the past year and now holds some eighty prisoners,” according to the Correctional Association of New York. Worse, prison officials had constructed twenty brand-new segregation cells that were “completely encased by Plexiglas” and that had only small holes for ventilation, which left those imprisoned in them gasping for air and sweltering in the hot summer months.49 Furthermore, prison officials as well as members of the new correction officers union, NYSCOPBA, had begun clamoring again for the “establishment of a so-called maxi-maxi unit at Attica or a separate maxi-maxi facility.”50 Their model, Great Meadow Correctional Facility, already had one of these, a so-called Involuntary Protection Unit (IPU) for “troublesome” prisoners.51
Life was so difficult for Attica’s prisoners who landed in its Special Housing Unit (formerly known as HBZ, now called SHU) that one of the mentally ill men incarcerated there killed himself on June 3, 1985. A lawsuit was filed on behalf of the men in that unit against the correction of
ficers, who, the suit insisted, had hounded and taunted this man until he was driven to suicide. In this complaint, which landed on the docket of Judge Michael Telesca, prisoners said that there had been numerous “instances of physical force inflicted by SHU correction officers, the utilization of strip cells [cells in which the prisoner is allowed no clothes or bedding] for punishment purposes, the denial of adequate medical care and adequate physical exercise facilities, unsanitary living conditions, inadequate portions and unsanitary preparation of food, the improper use of Plexiglas shields on the fronts of many SHU cells, inadequate access to the law library and legal research materials, and denial of the right to free exercise of religion.”52
Forty years after the uprising of 1971, conditions at Attica were worse than they had ever been. According to the Correctional Association of New York, by 2001 “the Department of Correctional Services had cut over 1200 programs providing services to inmates that were there in 1991.”53 By April 12, 2011, there were 2,152 men crammed into this facility, the vast majority of whom were African American and Hispanic, and an overwhelming 21 percent of Attica’s prison population that year had been “diagnosed with some level of mental illness.”54 According to the Correctional Association of New York, which surveyed Attica’s prisoners, there was still “a noticeably high level of intimidation and fear throughout the facility…[and] we received numerous letters describing threats and retaliation for participating in the CA survey.”55 Furthermore, the association noted, “Attica inmates had the highest ratings of all CA-visited prisons for frequency of physical assaults, verbal harassment, threats and intimidation, abusive pat frisks, turning off lights and water, and retaliation complaints—inmates also complained that retaliation materialized in the form of some officers not letting inmates leave their cells for meals.”56
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