Yesterday, scores of men in Delaware’s largest prison, the Vaughn Correctional Center, took over one of the buildings in their facility. The prison, built in 1971 and known for its serious overuse of solitary confinement, is one of the state’s most severely overcrowded and punitive facilities.

Hoping to push the state to improve living conditions at Vaughn, the prisoners didn’t just take control of building C — they also took guards hostage. And to make the public aware of why they were protesting, they called the media:

We’re trying to explain the reasons for doing what we’re doing. Donald Trump. Everything that he did. All the things that he’s doing now. We know that the institution is going to change for the worse. We know the institution is going to change for the worse. We got demands that you need to pay attention to, that you need to listen to and you need to let them know. Education, we want education first and foremost. We want a rehabilitation program that works for everybody. We want the money to be allocated so we can know exactly what is going on in the prison, the budget.

Over the next few hours, the men in Vaughn released all but two of the hostages and let nineteen prisoners who wanted to, leave the building as well. Meanwhile, law enforcement had begun amassing outside of the prison.

At dawn, the police stormed the facility.

By 7 AM, the ground outside the prison was littered with prisoners laying facedown on the concrete with their hands behind their back. One of the hostages was on her way to the hospital. Tragically, the other was dead.

That’s all we really know. Reliant on information funneled straight through the prison officials’ PR machine, and with no access to the men inside, we have no idea what the fallout from this rebellion is or might be.

This lack of transparency is typical — and it has terrible consequences.

The history of prison rebellions in this country shows we should be very cautious when we have to depend on state officials to tell us what happened, or is still happening, in any penal facility experiencing unrest.

Take Attica. Just three weeks ago, guards placed the New York State facility under complete lockdown. According to corrections officials, this was in reaction to a series of fights that had broken out between prisoners there. The men in this facility remained under lockdown for several days — it’s unclear how many — and each undoubtedly had his small cell “tossed”: his property thrown about and destroyed as guards searched for “contraband.” According to Attica’s correction officer union, the lockdown was necessary “to get to the root of what happened.”

But there’s plenty of reason to doubt the guards’ account of the unrest and their subsequent actions, just as there are reasons to be very worried about what’s happening to the men at Vaughn right now.

Again, Attica is instructive. Forty-six years ago, Attica was the site of one of the most dramatic prison uprisings in American history. On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 men rose up in protest against the prison’s awful conditions. But rather than recognize the cause of the crisis, and work to address it, the State of New York sent in hundreds of troopers, who severely shot 128 men and killed 39 — prisoners and prison guards alike.

Today, in prisons across the country, the conditions that sparked the Attica uprising are even worse. Prisons are more overcrowded. Food rations are meager and, since meal services are often contracted out to for-profit companies, that food is sometimes spoiled and rotten. Medical care is substandard and, again thanks to privatization, is often legally negligent. Prisoners are kept for long periods of time in solitary confinement and face serious physical abuse — often accompanied by racial epithets and threats — from officers who already retain utter control over them.

So when we hear prisoners are on lockdown for fighting — rather than for revolting against deplorable living conditions — or when we witness another forcible retaking of a penal facility, we should be both skeptical and concerned.

Correction officials have a history of painting prisoners as violent thugs and insisting that authorities’ only aim is to restore order and safety for all. At Attica, prison officials have a long and well-documented track record of lying about the men in their charge and literally torturing those who dare to rebel.