Last month, inmates across the country embarked on what organizers have called the largest prison strike in U.S. history, an ambitious mass protest against prison labor and inhumane prison conditions. The strike, which was the culmination of a series of renewed efforts at prison organizing in recent years, kicked off on September 9, in tribute to one of the bleakest moments in the country’s history of incarceration, the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. On September 9, 1971, prisoners at the overcrowded prison seized an opportunity to gain control of the facility and took a number of hostages, inspired by earlier prison and jail uprisings and by the momentum of the liberation movements raging outside the prisons’ walls. But prisoners at Attica were mostly driven by growing desperation over unbearable conditions inside: constant abuse by guards, medical neglect, lack of showers and toilet paper. Four people — one guard and three prisoners — were killed in the early hours of the riot. Then, for the next four days, a group of leaders who emerged out of the initial chaos attempted to negotiate a peaceful surrender with state officials, demanding amnesty for actions conducted during the riot, as well as access to classes, religious freedom, and fairer disciplinary practices. Despite recommendations from all sides that he do so, New York state Gov. Nelson Rockefeller — who two years later shaped the future of New York’s criminal justice system when he signed his infamous drug laws — refused to visit Attica. Instead, on September 13, he ordered state troopers to “retake” the prison. By the end of the assault, 39 people — 29 prisoners and 10 hostages — had been killed by police, who entered the prison protected by a thick fog of tear gas and armed with state-issued weapons as well as personal guns and hunting rifles. Dozens of other inmates were injured and tortured in the hours that followed. But as the state regained control of the prison, officials told reporters waiting outside that prisoners had killed the hostages, sometimes embellishing those accounts with fabricated details that shocked public opinion, like when they said an inmate castrated one of the guards and shoved his testicles into his mouth. What followed was an enormous cover-up, as 62 prisoners and zero law enforcement officials were indicted over the massacre. The cover-up was partially exposed in subsequent decades, but the magnitude and callousness of it all is something we are just now beginning to fathom thanks to “Blood in The Water,” a monumental account of the uprising and its aftermath by historian Heather Ann Thompson, published earlier this year. Thompson’s book documents the Attica violence in painful detail: the circumstances leading up to the uprising and the lengths to which the state went to hide its responsibility. Thompson makes the case that the Attica massacre, and the lies that Americans were told about it, played a pivotal role in justifying the dehumanization of prisoners and providing political support for the mass incarceration binge the country embarked on in the decades that followed. While Attica continues to inspire resistance among prisoners, the uprising’s most lasting legacy has been one of exacerbated repression, as corrections officials stifled prison dissent and organizing and the general public turned its back to prisoners’ continuing demands for human rights and dignity.



Photo: Elizabeth Fink Papers



“Even though the extraordinary violence that took place in 1971 was overwhelmingly perpetrated by members of law enforcement, not the prisoners, American voters ultimately did not respond to this prison uprising by demanding that states rein in police power,” Thompson writes in the book. “Instead they demanded that police be given even more support and even more punitive laws to enforce.” “Even though the extraordinary violence that took place in 1971 was overwhelmingly perpetrated by members of law enforcement, not the prisoners, American voters ultimately did not respond to this prison uprising by demanding that states rein in police power,” Thompson writes in the book. “Instead they demanded that police be given even more support and even more punitive laws to enforce.” Today, Attica remains a prison rife with abuse rather than a monument to a massacre. Prisons nationwide are significantly more crowded today than they were in 1971, and they are often more punitive and less humane. The racial inequality that defined the prison experience then, and that essentially enabled the lynching that was the retaking of Attica, remains a defining factor of prison life and abuse. And today prisoners are once again rebelling, while states go to great lengths to silence them. As the current prison strike, barely noticed by the public or acknowledged by corrections officials, entered its third week, The Intercept spoke with Thompson about what’s changed in prisons since 1971, and what hasn’t. One of the running threads in your book is the state’s refusal — to this day — to open the books on Attica and allow the public to know what really happened 45 years ago. But accessing prisons remains incredibly challenging for the public today. Why is it so hard, for instance, to get accurate information on the current strike? It’s really an outrage. These are public institutions, and not only can the media not get access, but neither can the families of those inside. Neither can state senators — elected officials find it incredibly difficult to get information out of the prison system. It was not my intention to make my book so timely, but if you know anything about Attica you understand that what you don’t know is always much worse than what you might imagine. These prison strikes have been happening for days and corrections officials were denying them. Now corrections officials are reporting that there have been incidents, but we don’t know how many people are involved, we don’t know what the repression is. Frankly, the only reason we know about Attica today is that reporters and law students and lawyers didn’t give up. They just insisted, came back again and again and again, filing injunctions, beating down the doors, insisting that their state legislators come in, and that’s the only reason why we have any idea that basically 1,300 people were tortured as long as they were. It is unconscionable that prisoners in states across this country are protesting the conditions under which they live and are forced to work and the media cannot be told who they are, how many of them there are, what their demands are, and what the repercussions of their acts have been. The fact that we cannot get any of those questions answered by public institutions is outrageous and unforgivable given the support we give them. Some prisoners today are trying really hard to reach out to people outside, even to connect to the broader movement for justice that we have seen resurface in recent years. But even when they are able to get their story out, increasingly through social media, there seems to be limited interest in their struggle. Why? There’s no question that by the time Attica happened we were in the midst of a pretty deep social movement, that lots of young people took time off of their day jobs to tell prisoners’ stories and to demand prisoner justice. But that took a long time — there were prisoner atrocities going on for a very long time in many of these prisons. Martin Sostre had to file a federal suit to stop the solitary confinement he was suffering in Attica long before the uprising. The southern prisons were hell holes, they had nobody paying particular attention. I think we’re in the beginning of that movement again. I feel like that energy and that interest is starting again. But the fact that we have perhaps more access to prisoners through social media, you have to remember that that is being mitigated against by the fact that prisoners do far more time in solitary than they ever did. They are on lockdown in their cells far more than they ever were, and frankly, the punitive nature of the parole system and the sentencing rules mean that many of them get cut off. They have been away for so long that it’s only a core few who manage to keep their outside networks up. The Attica uprising came as a movement for prison justice was beginning to take hold. What happened afterward? The movement didn’t die out at all. However, what happened after 1971 is that the police retook Attica, they did all the killing, they did all the maiming, they did all the torture, but then the state stepped out in front of the nation and said that it was prisoners that killed the hostages. And when they did that, they gave the emotional fuel to this punitive system we have today. They had already started down that path but Attica turned people, the broader nation, against prisoners’ rights. And it made possible shutting down prisoner access to the federal court system, with the Prison Litigation Reform Act. It made possible the amount of solitary confinement that happens today. In the Martin Sostre case, in 1969, a federal judge said it was cruel and inhumane to keep someone in solitary for 365 days. We now hold people in solitary for 10 years or longer. Prisons became much more punitive, but that’s not because they managed to shut down resistance, they actually managed to “shut down” the prisoners themselves.

Photo: Knopf Doubleday