Attica at 40

In September 1971, the worst prison riot in U.S. history concluded with an all-white force of New York State police and Department of Corrections employees retaking the prison at a cost of 39 (28 inmates and 11 prison employees) shot to death.  What was initially reported out of Attica as the causes for the inmate takeover and the inmates’ behavior subsequent to the takeover to justify the rampant excessive use of force by the police was fully discredited. The simple fact is this:  39 men died in Attica as a result of Governor Rockefeller’s decision to retake the prison.  Don’t take my word, read the McKay Commission report issued years later.

This blog isn’t about Attica per se.  It is about the lessons we should have learned from Attica, but didn’t.  What happened at Attica forty years ago could happen again.  As the old adage goes “those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

When Americans reacted with revulsion to the photographs of conditions inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, it is hard to remember that for the men at Attica those same conditions existed.  And in the 40 years since the riot, conditions throughout America’s prison system are not noticeably better.

In 1971 there were approximately 400,000 men and women behind bars.  Today, there are over 2.3 million with another six million under supervision with parole or probation offices.  America spends roughly $70 billion annually to maintain its prison apparatus.  Another nearly $200 billion is spent sustaining courts, prosecution and policing.  The vast majority of those who go through the “criminal justice” system have committed non-violent offenses.

America, “The land of the free and the home of the brave” has created a massive gulag system that dwarfs any created by Stalin.  America oversees a massive criminal-industrial complex that makes millionaires out of the owners of CCA, GEO, Keefe Foods and Global Tel-link while exploiting the incarcerated and their families.

And what did the men at Attica riot over?  They believed that even while incarcerated the Constitution guaranteed fair and decent treatment, that abuse and brutality at the hands of a prison administration and all-white guard force was illegal.  They believed that inmates deserved basic medical care, an end to prison slave labor and wages, a fair parole process, and a grievance system to address their complaints.  Doesn’t sound so radical does it?

Within the last few months inmates throughout the California prison system engaged in a hunger strike to draw attention to the inhumane practice of long-term isolation of inmates, many of whom are merely under investigation.

As Fyodor Dostoevsky profoundly noted “a society is judged by how it treats it prisoners”.  Nothing, it seems, has improved in America’s attitude about the incarcerated since those fateful, bloody days in September 1971.

With the American economy in free fall, many states are revisiting their failed corrections paradigms that suck up millions of badly needed dollars.  Yet, politicians will still not be honest with the voters.  Candidates continue to be elected exploiting the lie that increased incarceration rates make citizens safer.  Virginia spends $1 billion annually to keep approximately 40,000 men and women behind bars.  On their release they are not better; they are not “corrected”.  Prisons are places of despair, hopelessness, abuse and violence.  And people of faith who allow such a system to flourish should be ashamed.

Has anything changed since Attica?  You be the judge.  As Prison Legal News recently stated:

“Prisons should be reserved for only the truly dangerous, always with the goal of rehabilitation and release, and with adequate resources provided to achieve those objectives in positive ways.”

Forty years and it seems like yesterday.