Learning from the Slaughter in Attica

What the 1971 uprising and massacre reveal about our prison system and the liberal democratic state.
The inmates during a negotiating session on September 10 1971. An uprising born of panic and confusion triggered a...
The inmates during a negotiating session on September 10, 1971. An uprising born of panic and confusion triggered a cascade of paranoia that extended to the Nixon White House.Photograph from AP

Prisons are the bad conscience of the liberal imagination, a truth that tends to be most obvious to their most interested observers. Once, I got a letter from a death-row inmate in Texas, complaining that, in writing about incarceration, I had been insufficiently attentive to the French historian and theorist Michel Foucault. My correspondent seemed intimately familiar with Foucault’s argument that prisons are where the liberal state’s claim to superior humanity is at its most vulnerable. The eighteenth century’s pretensions to Enlightenment ended at the Tyburn scaffold, where wretches were publicly hanged for stealing a purse. The twentieth century’s pretensions to humanity end in mass incarceration and solitary confinement, where men are kept alive for years and subjected to procedural niceties while the state waits for the morning when it can paralyze and poison them. No “social contract” or “natural rights”: nothing but power relations, brutally enforced. We’re told that it is the sleep of reason that begets monsters, but what if reason, wide awake, is monstrous already?

Perhaps at some uneasy, half-conscious level, this sense that our moral self-definition is at stake when we talk about prisons explains why the riot at the Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, in September, 1971, remains imprinted in public memory. Having previously inspired a Morgan Freeman movie, it has now inspired a long, memorable chronicle, “Blood in the Water” (Pantheon), by Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan. Her book is dense with new information: much from survivors of the assault; much from assembled firsthand testimony, some of the most startling from recently released Nixon White House tapes. Though her sympathies are entirely with the prisoners, she extends humanity and individual witness to the guards, who were also, in their way, victims of the uprising and its suppression. And she extends the story past the killings: more than half the book is taken up with the exhausting but ultimately successful struggle, on the part of guards and inmates both, for compensation from the judicial system for their suffering.

As with so many academic historians, Thompson’s capacity for close observation and her honesty, which are impressive, are occasionally undermined by a desiccated political vocabulary that bears little relation to the reality of American life, then or now. Fifty years on, the glamour of sixties revolutionaries remains, while the messes they made seem forgotten. The Weather Underground, one of whose members, Sam Melville, was a leader in the Attica uprising and then died there, were not simply part of a “revolutionary organization committed to fighting racism and imperialism,” as she writes; they were violent, self-infatuated fools, who, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote when they were at their height, in 1970, offered only “a huge, unearned windfall for the forces of repression.” Nor were the Black Panthers, whose co-founder, Bobby Seale, made a brief, insipid intervention at Attica, quite the virtuous militants her account suggests. Malevolently and homicidally persecuted though they were by the F.B.I., the Panthers had become, under Huey Newton, mindlessly cruel and misogynistic gangsters, capable of acts of torture and murder that still haunt the memory of those who witnessed them.

What happened at Attica in September, 1971? A series of accidents in a creakingly worn-out prison turned a modest petition for decency into a full-fledged takeover—one as surprising to the inmates as to anyone else—that, after four days, ended in a reprisal riot by guards and state police that left thirty-nine people dead. Attica was a hellhole. The largest industry in a forsaken and impoverished upstate town, it was a place where urban blacks were locked up in bathroom-size cells to be guarded by rural whites. Although Attica was a high-security prison, predating the great incarceration crisis of the next decades, the population was the usual mixture of small-time thieves and mid-level drug dealers, mixed in with a handful of violent offenders and some imports from earlier prison riots.

It wasn’t that conditions in the Depression-era prison were, by prison standards, uniquely horrible. It was that they were systematically horrible; procedures designed to instill a minimal humanity had been allowed to degrade in ways that made every day a trial. The medical care, for instance, was so bad that the civilian staff of one of the cell blocks tried to take action against the indifference of the long-term doctors, one of whom was responsible for a prisoner’s death. These employees “debated a couple of options, including picketing the doctor’s private practice,” Thompson writes. As in any prison, the conditions often depended on the individual character of the keepers. Many of the younger correctional officers were broadly sympathetic to the prisoners’ plight. The twenty-two-year-old Mike Smith, for instance, was shocked by the practice of strip-searching the convicts. “He was fairly certain that he would have considered suicide had he been forced to undergo this ritual,” Thompson tells us. In July of the fatal year, a prisoner named Don Noble led a group that, with Smith’s active approval, drew up a petition of protest, whose “demands” were, for the most part, piteously simple and human—changes like providing showers in hot weather.

Then, on the morning of September 9th, a company of prisoners, being led back to their cells, sleepless and uneasy over a rumor that a prisoner had been killed by guards the night before, found themselves locked in one of the tunnels that connected their cell block to “Times Square,” the bleak central yard. Attica’s security depended on an aging, easily overwhelmed set of mechanical locks and levers, of a kind that one sees in Alcatraz movies. Thinking they had been deliberately trapped in the crowded tunnel so that the guards—the “goon squad”—would be free to retaliate against some of their number, the prisoners quickly found that the gate keeping them out of the yard could be broken with a homemade battering ram. It was an act propelled more by panic than by premeditation. Within minutes, a chain reaction of improvised insurrections and parallel mishaps—the antiquated phones made it impossible for the overwhelmed guards to make more than one call at a time; other inmates came into possession of a set of master keys to the other cell blocks—allowed about twelve hundred inmates to take possession of Times Square and the D cell block and yard. The prisoners armed themselves with knives and clubs and, within an hour, were in control of the prison in which they had been confined in fear the night before.

What’s striking about the uprising is not the collisions of intractable ideological positions but, rather, the sheer confusion, missed opportunities, personal squabbles, and absurd procedural wrangles that governed it. The saddest irony is that the New York State Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald, though later treated as one of the villains of the episode, was largely responsible for extending the occupation and allowing the prisoners the media megaphone that makes their voices still heard today. Oswald is a kind of caricature of the sixties liberal who infuriated conservatives (and often other liberals), someone so determined to do good that he can’t see past his own folly. He was a committed prison reformer—shortly after accepting the job, he had written a memo to Governor Rockefeller saying that having men locked “twelve or more hours a day in their cells is unacceptable to them and me.” And yet he managed, in four days, to enrage the inmates, exasperate his colleagues, and, probably, prevent the forces of order from taking back the prison when it still could have been done in a more or less orderly way. Since any imaginable modern state in any imaginable circumstance was always going to feel duty-bound to retake a prison after a mutiny, a forcible reconquest needed to be done either quickly or not at all: had it happened the next morning, when state troopers stood ready and the prisoners hadn’t yet dug in, it might have been much less violent. Trying to placate everyone, he only exacerbated everything.

Still, Oswald emerges as a genuinely tragic figure, a man of good will and integrity overcome by events. He had, Thompson says, rejected proposals to launch an assault, committing himself instead to talks with prisoners. He arranged for members of the press to come to D Yard and record the negotiations. It is odd to think that, with all the increase in media attention, we are actually far more media resistant now than we were then: no one would let a camera crew inside a yard during a prison hostage-taking today.

The prisoners, meanwhile, tried to impose order using whatever small means they had, and, to an impressive degree, they succeeded. There were some genuine Hectors, reluctant heroes, who knew that taking part in a mutiny would be bad for their own long-term interests—i.e., getting out of jail—but who felt compelled to head off what threatened to become mere anarchic violence in the yard. One was Roger Champen, a former drug addict serving twenty years for armed robbery, who had managed to teach himself (and then other inmates) criminal law. At first, he wanted no part of the rebellion, but then, Thompson says, he “realized that order had to be established soon or else this situation was going to escalate into something scary.” Among the many ironies of Attica is that the spokesmen for the prisoners were often not the leaders of the uprising but those trying to minimize its costs to their fellows.

Nobody knew at the time that the worst and most paranoid elements in the national government were hysterically focussed on what was, after all, a small rebellion in a remote rural prison, one where the inmates had no guns and every conceivable long-term advantage lay with the authorities. The F.B.I., under the ever-crazier J. Edgar Hoover, worried that Oswald’s reluctance to order an assault meant that the State of New York had, in the words of an internal memo, “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of the prisoners,” the majority of whom, it took pains to note, “are black.” The Nixon White House, addicts of toughness as only timid men can be, became inflamed with the desire for a “tough” solution.

Thompson’s book demonstrates one thing for certain: no matter how badly you think of Richard Nixon, you have not thought badly enough. Here is the President of the United States, on the released tapes, muttering alcohol-fuelled racial imprecations to his yes-men. “You see, it’s the black business,” he says of Attica. And then, after the bloody end, confides, “I think this is going to have a hell of a salutary effect on future prison riots. . . . Just like Kent State”—where four protesting students were gunned down by the National Guard a year earlier—“had a hell of a salutary effect.” What got passed from White House to statehouse to the Big House was the Nixon Administration’s conviction that an insurgency was afoot, and that the Attica takeover was part of a large, well-organized movement toward armed rebellion. Why, given that the great majority of Americans were not merely hostile but vengeful toward the militants, Nixon and his followers came to believe that the country was on the brink of chaos is one of the mysteries of the period. (The most potent reflection of this belief lay in the Watergate affair, where the paranoia of the Nixon White House was so extreme that it launched a campaign of criminal sabotage and espionage against an opposition party already unpopular and divided.)

Inevitably, the paranoia of the powerful met the manic fantasies of the militants. Despite having neither a base nor a popular program, the militants indulged a revolutionary rhetoric of violence—Bernardine Dohrn actually endorsed the murders committed by the Manson family—and they should not have been surprised when the authorities took the rhetoric for reality. Most of the radicals took it for granted that their threat of armed revolution was no more serious than Mick Jagger’s dream of being a street-fighting man. For the prisoners, though, the rhetoric of sixties revolution rang with a special pathos, given the extremity of their situation, as when the inmate orator Herbert Blyden promised the other prisoners that “the world is hearing us! The world is seeing our struggle. . . . And we are the vanguard! . . . Standing here for all the oppressed peoples of the world.” It was still bravado, but in this case brave.

After the early violence—there were incidents of rape and even three murders among the prisoners—the inmates organized themselves into surprisingly efficient security and administrative units, with inmate members of the Nation of Islam essential to this enterprise. (They took specific responsibility for the welfare of the forty-two hostages.) The prisoners also asked, and Oswald quickly agreed, that a committee of “observers” be assembled to witness any negotiations and, presumably, endorse an agreement. This turned out to be the worst possible solution, since the observers, predictably, became the negotiating team, but one that lacked authority to negotiate, experience in negotiation, internal unity, or any procedure to follow. Though made up mainly of prominent radical names of the time, it included Tom Wicker, the Times columnist, apparently because he had written sympathetically about the activist George Jackson, shot dead in a California prison a month earlier.

To get a sense of what was at stake at Attica in fully realized detail, Wicker’s extraordinary account of his four days among the observers, “A Time to Die,” is indispensable. With its intermingling of personal confession and public significance, it is a real masterpiece of the first wave of the nonfiction novel, as good, in its more sober way, as Mailer’s “Armies of the Night.” Wicker turns himself into a character in the drama, seen from the outside as “Tom Wicker”: an archetypal Southern liberal, whose career, superficially in support of civil rights, has involved a steady resistance to racial fact. He becomes every decent liberal who is forced to confront the foundations of his own society—violence directed by whites against a black underclass. The drama of Attica becomes the culminating point in the protagonist’s experience of racial division, expressed with an unsparing detachment that the conventional first person might not have allowed.

In a searching and prescient passage, he suggests that at the heart of the rebellion and the violence it provoked was a whole history of diabolized “blackness.” White fear was the key: “White fear fixed itself upon the literal presence of black human beings. Black people, to whites, were the symbolic representation of the evil in man and thus were also the handy instruments by which white people could hold themselves symbolically innocent of that evil.” Wicker concludes, “The heart of the matter was the fear of blackness.”

Negotiations tend to be remarkably consistent in form, whether the subject is Iranian nukes or prisoners’ rights. Both sides arrive with obviously ridiculous demands; the act of meeting marks the rejection of those demands but also shows that there is enough good will for a deal to be made; the shape of the agreement swiftly appears; and then, often, the two sides get trapped in tiny details pointing to the tribal instincts that brought the conflict on in the first place. Certainly the negotiations at Attica took this shape. After the clear nonstarters were off the table—in their first manifesto, the prisoners had asked for mass transportation to a “non-imperialistic” country—the potential deal at Attica was arrived at quite quickly: amnesty for the mutineers and a promise to look into their previous petition in exchange for an end to the uprising. But the meta issues of perception remained unsolved: both sides had to give; neither could be seen to fold. The authorities could not be seen to offer an amnesty, even if they were, in effect, offering an amnesty. They offered not to “initiate any criminal complaint . . . of any kind or nature relating to property.” In theory, this left the prisoners liable for crimes that didn’t relate to property, but, as all present believed, this could be taken as a merely linguistic distinction—“something close to amnesty without men like Oswald having to admit that it was amnesty,” as Wicker writes.

At that point, on the third day of the takeover, two bad things happened. One of the guards who had been injured in the original takeover died of his wounds; and the radical lawyer William Kunstler, one of the observers, let the prisoners know that this had happened, which persuaded them, probably wrongly, that any amnesty offer wouldn’t be honored. (A conviction for the killing, given the mob scene at the start, would have been perilously difficult to achieve—trying later, the state failed—and the authorities must have known this perfectly well.) At the same time, the outside pressure to storm the prison was growing, not only from the Rockefeller statehouse but from the families of the correction officers being held hostage. Wicker recalls how, trying to convey information about the hostages to their families and the press, he was, understandably, met by rage. “What about my son?” Steven Smith, the father of Mike Smith, who had been taken hostage in D Yard, said. “We have to go in and bring those people out. Wet-nursing those convicts won’t do it!”

During the night of September 12th, the authorities decided to act. Oswald, still convinced that he could have negotiated a settlement had it not been for the presence of “Maoists” imported from elsewhere in the prison system, drafted a final offer to be read to the prisoners in D Yard, deliberately “not phrased as an ultimatum,” Thompson notes, though that is what it was. The prisoners were not fully aware that the state had come to the end of the line, and, having no chance to act on that understanding, voted down Oswald’s offer (“If they had said, ‘Either release the hostages or we’re coming in shooting,’ ” one inmate observed afterward, the vote might have gone the other way.)

Then the prisoners, sensing a crisis, blindfolded several of the guards and forced them up onto the catwalks, knives visible at their throats. Wicker and Thompson both insist that the blindfolded guards were in little real danger, that the prisoners were bluffing, and that there was no way that they would, in fact, have murdered their hostages. Yet it wasn’t clear that the authorities could have known this, or, really, that the prisoners themselves could have known. To insist that it was mere theatre is to be more certain than anyone can be about how men with knives pressed to the throats of men they have long had reason to hate would act in extremis. Thompson does establish that, on the fateful catwalk, Mike Smith and Don Noble, the guard and the prisoner who had tacitly collaborated on the July petition, “made a solemn pact that if anything happened to either of them they would find the other’s family members and make sure they knew how much they were loved.”

There are sins of omission but there are also virtues of patience. Many of the wisest things we do, in life and in politics, are the things we don’t. Affairs not started, advice not given, distant lands left uninvaded—the null class of non-events is often more blessed than the enumerated class of actions, though less dramatic. One of the things that the Obama Administration gets too little credit for not doing is not intervening when militia types occupied a federal building in Oregon—even though it was a clear case of the government ceding to violent seditionists. It looked weak. But the powerful waited out the powerless, and the affair ended with minimal violence. Time, in such cases, is almost always on the side of the state. Avoiding Atticas and Wacos is not that hard when you are more worried about losing lives than about losing face.

The evidence suggests that neither Rockefeller nor Oswald anticipated that the retaking of the prison would be as brutal as it was—more brutal than anyone could have imagined. Just before ten in the morning, on September 13th, a National Guard helicopter dropped tear gas into the prison yard. Then some five hundred and fifty New York State Police troopers, augmented by more than two hundred sheriff’s deputies—and with the Attica correction officers unconscionably mixed in—entered the prison and mounted the catwalks. Armed with shotguns deliberately loaded with wide-arc buckshot and .270 rifles loaded with unjacketed bullets, of a kind banned by the Geneva Conventions, they started shooting, firing at everything they saw. “The bullets were coming like rain,” one hostage recalled.

The firing was at first mostly indiscriminate, striking hostages and inmates alike. Sometime afterward, it turned into a manhunt: the enraged correction officers and troopers sought out those whom they thought of as ringleaders and executed them. Several of the dead among the leaders were seen alive well after the prison had been retaken. Some were shot as many as twelve times, at close range. One prisoner, William Maynard, told Thompson about trying to carry his friend Jomo, who had been shot several times, to safety. A correction officer ordered him to stop and raise his hands. As Maynard struggled to do so, the officer shot him in his forearms. Then, Maynard recounts, he “loaded up his gun and shot Jomo six times right on top of me and kicked me in the face and says both the niggers are dead and went on.” Even the thirty-nine dead did not end the violence, as the guards forced the inmates to strip naked and then tortured them for most of the rest of the day and night. “Any prisoner who troopers or CO’s considered to be a leader was chalked across the back with a large white X,” Thompson writes. As each one was made to run a gantlet of clubs, the officers would call out, “You want your amnesty? Well, come and get it.” The vengeful officers played Russian roulette with the inmates, and then forced them to drink the guards’ urine. One inmate, Frank (Big Black) Smith, who had been visible in the uprising, lay wounded on a table for many hours, made to clutch a football beneath his chin, and warned that if it dropped he would be killed. When he was released, he collapsed and the guards battered him repeatedly in the groin and anal region as he pleaded for mercy. Mike Smith and Don Noble, hostage and mutineer, were both shot and severely wounded in the takeover, though both survived.

In a curious way, the psychology of the (almost exclusively white) troopers and guards, more than the ideology of the inmates, seems most haunting now, as part of the permanent picture of American fixations. The inmates were doing what anyone would do in their situation: having seen a protest turn unexpectedly into a revolt that was sure to be short-lived, they desperately improvised a way to keep their dignity and be heard, to avoid the worst punishment and get some small reforms. Their occasionally overblown rhetoric was the act of men who, stripped of dignity, try to reclaim it. But the troopers and guards retaking the prison were indulging an orgy of racist violence neither ordered nor wholly explicable. There was no need for them to conduct a massacre to reassert their authority. They had all the firepower; the prisoners were armed only with homemade knives; the guards had control of the yard within minutes. Nor were they, so far as anyone can detect, under direct commands to kill. In an American tale already known fully to Mark Twain, a white ethnic proletariat could distinguish itself as superior only by its ability to be brutal to a still more subordinate class of color. When its members were denied their exercise of this “right,” they turned crazy and violent.

In social terms, what separated the guards from the prisoners was simply skin color and a gun. But pure racial assertion seems to have burned alongside something still more visceral. The horror story repeated most urgently among troopers and guards to justify the violence was that the prisoners had castrated one of the hostages. (They hadn’t.) This phantasm of emasculation was at the heart of the violence. A vast insult had been made to their masculinity, and the only way to avenge it was to kill, shame, and torment the helpless.

Thompson devotes the second half of her book to the efforts of the surviving inmates—and, indeed, some of the surviving hostages—to use the courts to get some recompense for what had been allowed to happen. The system “worked” only late, and lamely, but it eventually recognized that a wrong had been done and damages were owed. Attempts by the state to blame the inmates for the massacre failed in the courts; Big Black Smith eventually got a settlement. It should be said that it took thirty years. It should also be said that, in the history of mankind, only liberal democracies have ever done such things—held conscientious post-hoc court proceedings in which the state arraigns itself for its own injustices. The Tiananmen Square protesters are still waiting for their day in court, much less their recompense.

The uprising at Attica was, in the not very long run, one of the things that stopped prison reform dead in its tracks. The fear that Attica generated among prison administrators and the American public pointed the way to the supermax and permanent solitary, emboldening the most reactionary forces in the government to begin the program of mass incarceration that remains the moral scandal of our country. Prison reform doesn’t happen in response to violence in prisons. It happens in response to awakened consciences about the violence of imprisonment.

In broadly democratic countries, violence frightens the “masses” as they really are—i.e., the majority of citizens—much faster than reformers can persuade them to change. Nonviolent episodes of protest are extraordinarily efficient in creating social change in democratic states; violent episodes undo the good work of change with astonishing rapidity. As the Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow has shown, in an important new empirical study, the spectacle of urban violence probably did get Richard Nixon elected. (“In public opinion polls between 1950 and 1980, a majority of subjects identified ‘civil rights’ as the most important problem facing America at the same time that nonviolent black protest activity peaked,” he observes, “and, likewise, responded with ‘law and order’ when black-led violent protests were most active.”)

Impassioned liberals are not “centrists.” They are the radicals of reality, who believe in reason and reform not because they are too timid for revolution but because they are too ambitious for change. The notion that you need both a violent wing and a moderate one to bring about social change is the truly timid, “centrist” argument, designed to appease all the forces on “your” side rather than confront the facts about what works and what does not. We have seen in recent weeks how isolated anti-police incidents can, among the easily panicked, obliterate the memory of decades of dwindling violent crime. The panicked people will almost always be the majority—they are, in effect, the guards and their families, waiting outside the prison—and we cannot rhetoric them away. The Rockefellers, the “one per cent,” may indeed be served by fear and panic, but they are served because there are fifty-one per cent ready to let panic persuade them.

Evil exists. Prisons, punishment, segregation, exile: even the most enlightened state needs some way of sorting the truly dangerous from the sadly criminal and the sadly criminal from the merely unlucky. I eventually discovered that the erudite inmate who arraigned me for not attending to my Foucault had committed the most horrible crime of which I ever hope to hear. (In the midst of a custody battle with his estranged wife, he called her on the phone, had her hold the line, and then murdered their two daughters while she listened and they pleaded.) No sane society can survive if the state, however fair, however free, cannot enforce order and hold a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Prisons are the bad conscience of the liberal imagination not because they show the true, oppressive face of the liberal state but because they expose how fragile liberal proceduralism can be. The liberal democratic state sublimates revenge, just as it does heroism and altruism, into the integrity of institutions. No one is expected to be Jesus; no one is asked to be. If you do your job—at the D.M.V. or as a C.O. or a pfc.—equity and fairness are, achingly, protected. These institutional safeguards seem robust when they are in place, so much so that we mock them as “bureaucracy.” When the institutional integrity breaks down, catastrophes happen. Almost unknown to themselves, the inmates at Attica had heartbreaking, unstated confidence in the integrity of the institution: they knew that they would lose, and that they would have to go back to their cells, but they never thought that the officers of the state would come in with shotguns and explosive bullets to kill as many of them as they could. The line from the politician Herman Badillo that Wicker took for his title, “A time to die,” became unsought prophesy.

At moments of crisis, the integrity of our institutions turns out to depend, to an alarming degree, on the fragile integrity of individuals. Prisons are our vulnerable point because they reveal, under pressure, that procedures designed to insure justice have to be constantly reanimated by human will. The strangest and most gruesome scene in Thompson’s book is among the most heroic. On the day after the killings, the local medical examiners, John Edland and Richard Abbott, overworked at the best of times, had the nightmarish task of autopsying the bodies of dead inmates and hostages alike. They had directions, more or less explicit, to stick with the official story and tell the set tale—that the inmates, in a maximally brutal fashion, had killed the hostages. And yet they did their job. At 3 p.m., Edland stepped forward and told the world the truth: that all the dead had been killed by the gunfire of the advancing troopers and guards. It is an act of historical imagination to have recovered their unostentatious courage. It also requires, for us to see such acts as heroic, getting past the language of masculinity and assertion that had entrapped both the prisoners who took hostages and then the guards who would kill them. To call men of smaller official obligations, carried out in the face of intimidation, heroes is, perhaps, to change the meaning of what we mean by heroism. It may be time for that, too. ♦