Attica Prison Rebellion

ATTICA PRISON REBELLION. The Attica prison rebellion was a five-day event in which nearly 1,300 incarcerated men rose up to attain human rights. Nearly forty were killed and eighty-nine more injured by the National Guard, the New York State Police, and prison guards. The rebellion marked an important chapter in the broader movement for prisoners’ rights.

Attica Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison in a small town near Buffalo, New York, of the same name. On the morning of September 9, 1971 a group of prisoners overpowered the guards, seized hostages, and began vandalizing the prison. The uprising quickly spread as prisoners shattered glass, ripped the telephones off the walls, destroyed the plumbing system, broke all locks, and set several fires.

Although it erupted spontaneously, the rebellion was the result of a long history of racism and abuse by prison authorities. Many of the guards maintained control over the prison population through physical brutality and intimidation, especially against Attica’s majority Black and Latino population.

Three months earlier, a group calling itself the Attica Liberation Faction presented a list of demands to Commissioner Russell G. Oswald and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The document chastised the Department of Corrections for subjecting prisoners to inhumane conditions. It demanded improvements to medical care, family visitation, prison conditions, and food; an end to racist and brutal treatment, and the right to form a union and earn minimum wage for their labor. This “Manifesto of Demands” emphasized that prisoners were attempting to win these reforms “in a democratic fashion.” They were trying to avoid violent means but their demands were largely ignored.

After the initial moments of the rebellion, more than 1,200 prisoners had gathered in D yard, one of the four major quadrants of Attica. They had approximately forty-two hostages under their control, many had been beaten badly, one of them would eventually die from his injuries. The prisoners decided that in order to get their demands met they needed to organize. They gathered the hostages together and used prisoners to protect them from further harm. They converted an area of D yard into a medical bay. They selected prisoners to prepare and ration food. They demanded the presence of the news media and outside observers to help them negotiate their demands. They held elections and selected two men from each of Attica’s four cellblocks to speak for the prisoners.

The Attica rebels understood themselves to be engaging in the broader social movements of the era through their unique position as prisoners. Attica was not a race riot; during the rebellion, long standing interracial animosity between the prisoners dissipated, and men of all races showed unprecedented unity and solidary. Many were organized into groups such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, which mirrored the politics and the style of these activist organizations in the outside world.

Over the next four days the Attica Brothers, a committee of several outside observers, and representatives from the prison administration engaged in tense negotiations. This resulted in a collection of prison reforms that New York Prison Commissioner Russell G. Oswald agreed to implement. Notably absent from the agreement was the prisoner’s demand for amnesty, which they hoped would protect them from being prosecuted for crimes committed during the rebellion. After seeing the amnesty demand had been taken off the table, the prisoners refused to surrender.

This decision turned out to be a grave miscalculation. Throughout the rebellion, hundreds of prison guards, local police, state troopers, and national guardsmen had gathered outside the prison, waiting for the order to regain control by force. New York Governor Rockefeller had been in regular contact with President Richard Nixon, and neither was committed to a non-violent conclusion. On the morning of September 13, 1971, outside observers entered Attica one last time to try to convince the prisoners that if they did not surrender the government was going to use force. Instead of taking the deal, the prisoners pulled out eight hostages and promised to slit their throats if the prison was attacked. Their ploy failed.

At 9:46 am on September 13, a National Guard helicopter released CS gas into D Yard. A heavily armed assault force then poured into D yard and indiscriminately fired more than 2,000 bullets into the mass of people. They killed twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages and wounded an additional eighty-nine people. In addition, hundreds of prisoners were subjected to intense forms of racial violence, torture, and medical neglect for weeks after the state regained control.

In the aftermath of rebellion, policy makers had an opportunity to radically rethink how criminal justice functioned in the United States. However, the rebellion was followed by decades of “tough on crime” rhetoric. After Attica, the US prison system became yet more repressive. The US State and Federal prison population increased exponentially, from 188,000 in 1968 to well over 2 million in 2018. Additionally, another 4.7 million people were on parole or probation and an estimated 65 million people had a criminal record.

The legacy of Attica remained relevant. In 2016 and again in 2018, prisoners throughout the country organized national strikes against what they called prison slavery. They chose September 9 as their start date in reembrace of the Attica rebellion. Many of their grievances were the same as those issued during the earlier rebellion: poor wages, poor prison conditions, brutality.

Burton, Orisanmi. “Diluting Radical History: Blood in the Water and the Politics of Erasure” 2017
https://abolitionjournal.org/diluting-radical-history-blood-in-the-water-and-the-politics-of-erasure

New York Special Commission on Attica. The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica. New York: Praeger, 1972.

Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in The Water: The Attica Prison Uprising Of 1971 And Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016.

Wicker, Tom. A Time to Die. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Company, 1975.