Blood in the water The Attica prison uprising of 1971 and its legacy

Review by Choice Review

Thompson (Univ. of Michigan) has written a powerful, balanced account of the inhuman conditions that sparked the 1971 Attica prison riot, the agonizing days of negotiations when the inmates demanded to be treated as human beings, and the prison's armed retaking by New York State troopers and correction officers--despite both sides' wishes for continuing negotiations. A hail of bullets killed 29 inmates and 10 hostages, and wounded over 100 others. Following the retaking, surviving inmates suffered brutal physical, psychological, and racial abuse from both correctional officers and state police. Thompson's impeccable research and writing repulses and sickens readers as she recounts horrific descriptions of inhumanity. She chronicles the next 30 years as first inmates and then hostages or their families sought legal redress from a broken system. Throughout, New York State has remained steadfast in its refusal to accept responsibility. Whether one believes the inmates got what they deserved or that the armed assault was totally unnecessary, readers will find Thompson's objectivity beyond remarkable. Although conditions at Attica are worse today, the author remains hopeful as prisoners continue to struggle for humane treatment. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Duncan R. Jamieson, Ashland University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by New York Times Review

ATTICA. The name itself has long signified resistance to prison abuse and state violence. In the 1975 film "Dog Day Afternoon," Al Pacino, playing a bank robber, leads a crowd confronting the police in a chant of "Attica, Attica." The rapper Nas, in his classic "If I Ruled the World," promises to "open every cell in Attica, send 'em to Africa." And Attica posters were once commonplace in the homes of black nationalists. The one in my family's apartment in the 1970s featured a grainy black-and-white picture of Attica's protesting prisoners, underneath the words "We are not beasts." But memories of the 1971 uprising at Attica prison have grown hazy. I recently mentioned the word to a politically active Yale College student, who responded: "I know it's a prison where something important happened. But I'm not sure of the details." Heather Ann Thompson, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, has the details. Thompson spent more than a decade poring over trial transcripts, issuing countless requests for hidden government documents, and interviewing dozens of survivors and witnesses. The result is "Blood in the Water," a masterly account of the Attica prison uprising, its aftermath and the decades-long legal battles for justice and accountability. This is not an easy book to read - the countless episodes of inhumanity on these pages are heartbreaking. But it is an essential one. Isolated in the far western corner of New York State (Attica is closer to Detroit than to New York City, where almost half of its prisoners come from), the prison in 1971 housed nearly 2,300 men who were permitted only one shower a week and provided a single roll of toilet paper each month ("one sheet per day," went the saying). Men regularly went to bed hungry, as the state spent just 63 cents per prisoner per day for food. Puerto Rican prisoners suffered special discrimination; prisoner mail was censored, and since corrections officers couldn't read Spanish, they simply tossed those letters in the trash. Black prisoners had it worst of all, as they were relegated to the lowest-paid jobs and racially harassed by the prison's almost allwhite staff. Drawing strength from the civil rights activism of the era, Attica's prisoners lobbied to improve their living conditions. But all they got were vague, unfulfilled promises. After months of mounting tensions, on Sept. 9, 1971, a group of prisoners saw a chance to overpower an officer. The Attica riot was underway. Among the riot's first casualties was Correction Officer William Quinn, who was beaten so badly that he was almost unrecognizable to a paramedic who had known him for years. (Quinn would die days later.) But after a few hours of bloody chaos, a group of inmate leaders emerged to restore order. One of their first public statements came from L. D. Barkley, whose plain-spoken claim to humanity would inspire posters like the one in our apartment. "We are men," Barkley said. "We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such." Prison leaders quickly sought to negotiate with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and other state officials, conditioning their surrender on the granting of 33 demands. These included better education, less mail censorship, more religious freedom, fairer disciplinary and parole processes and, most controversially, amnesty for crimes committed in the course of the riot itself. Negotiations were led by a group of journalists, politicians and prison reformers, including the radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Shuttling between prisoners in the yard and state authorities gathered outside, the negotiators worked heroically toward a settlement. But Rockefeller was uncompromising, and after refusing to go to Attica to join the negotiations himself, he abandoned talks and ordered state troopers to "retake" the prison. I wouldn't have thought that Rockefeller - the sponsor of reviled mandatory drug sentences bearing his name - could suffer any more damage to his reputation on criminal justice matters. But Thompson methodically shreds him, depicting a craven politician thoroughly uninterested in the human consequences of his decisions. The savagery that followed the decision to retake the prison was both predictable and avoidable. The prisoners had no guns themselves, yet the troopers - untrained, unsupervised and out for vengeance - began shooting wildly upon entering. Among the first to die were corrections officers held as hostages, as well as the prisoners who had been guarding them. Thirty-nine people - 29 prisoners and 10 hostages - would be killed. The most sadistic crimes took place after state officials had full control of the prison. Prisoners were forced to strip naked and run through a gantlet of 30 to 40 corrections officers who took turns beating them with batons. One National Guardsman described seeing a gravely injured black man being attacked by a corrections officer. "They forced him to his knees, and at that point, the correction sergeant backed up a short distance and then ran forward and kicked the man in the face.... He immediately went limp and his head was hanging down, he was bleeding." Another Guardsman recalled watching medical staff join in the abuse. He saw a doctor "speaking to the inmates and saying: ?You say you're hurt? You're not hurt. We'll see if you're hurt.'" Instead of attending to their wounds, the doctor began kicking and hitting them. There are dozens more harrowing tales like these. And then there are the photographs, some depicting naked and abused prisoners, marched for sport before sullen, leering guards. Eventually I had to put the book down. To breathe. To wipe the tears. I couldn't stop thinking of slave narratives. Or of Ta-Nehisi Coates's claim that "in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage." Thompson dwells on these stories because she wants us to learn, and then never forget, what the state of New York tried to hide. The truth of what happened in that prison yard 45 years ago has been suppressed by flagrant lies (including Rockefeller's claim that the prisoners, not his own troopers, had killed the hostages), unwarranted secrecy (the state still refuses to release thousands of boxes of crucial records), and cover-ups (when a prosecutor got close to indicting some of the state troopers for their role in the killings, his superiors stopped him from going forward). "BLOOD IN THE WATER" comes out at an important time. Criminal justice reform is having something of a moment. But Thompson's tale is a cautionary reminder that we've been here before. The Attica uprising took place in the midst of an earlier period of activism, and had the potential to be a turning point toward better prison conditions. When these mostly black and brown men took over the yard and asked for things like better education, the state could have recognized the legitimacy of their demands. Instead they were slaughtered, the crime was concealed, and in the decades since, America has shown little regard for prisoner welfare. But Attica's tragic outcome doesn't undermine the significance of the resistance. As Thompson argues: "The Attica uprising of 1971 happened because ordinary men, poor men, disenfranchised men, and men of color had simply had enough of being treated as less than human. That desire, and their fight, is by far Attica's most important legacy." Just so, and "Blood in the Water" restores their struggle to its rightful place in our collective memory. JAMES FORMAN JR. is a professor at Yale Law School. His "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America" will be published next spring.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2016]

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Thompson (Whose Detroit?), a University of Michigan historian with expertise in mass incarceration, brilliantly exposes the realities of the Attica prison uprising, in which 43 prisoners and guards were killed. Writing with cinematic clarity from meticulously sourced material, Thompson describes the uprising and its causes as well as the violent retaking of the prison grounds by police and correction officers. These events form the backdrop for the decades-long tale of New York State's cynical, politically driven prosecutions of inmates caught in the uprising, and the state's parallel effort to suppress attempts to expose the criminal conduct of law enforcement during and after the suppression of the rebellion. Thompson unmasks the government misconduct that delayed reparations for both inmates and correction officer hostages who were killed or wounded by law enforcement during the chaotic events. The excruciating detail underscores the dangers of governmental abuse of power. As the long drama unfolds many heroes arise, including members of the truth-seeking press and the lawyers who doggedly helped the unpopular inmates to secure a $12 million settlement. The villains include venal prosecutors and politicians who engaged in a classic cover-up. Thompson's superb and thorough study serves as a powerful tale of the search for justice in the face of the abuses of institutional power. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Even after 45 years, the uprising at the New York State prison in Attica holds its fascination. In September 1971, the inmates took over the prison for four days until Gov. Nelson Rockefeller sent in troops to quell it. In the course of events, 43 inmates and guards were killed and many personal stories evolved. In contrast to the far shorter version by Tom Wicker (A Time To Die), Thompson's (history, Univ. of Michigan; Whose Detroit?) full-length account begins with the warning signs that were ignored, a day-to-day chronicle of the uprising, and for most of the book, details of the aftermath of political repercussions. Readers beware: it is a mammoth volume, with no letup of material. For the most part, Thompson is on the side of the inmates, but she does acknowledge that the guards were victims, too. Furthermore, she brings to light the most subtle forms of government corruption within the prison system. All in all, a dramatic retelling of a memorable event in our history and a cry for justice in the face of institutional authority. Verdict A must for anyone involved in the criminal justice system; also for the general reader interested in prisons with a lot of time on their hands.-Frances O. Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Introduction State Secrets One might well wonder why it has taken forty-five years for a comprehen­sive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written. The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberately kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.   Some of these materials, such as scores of boxes related to the McKay Commission inquiry into Attica, were deemed off limits four decades ago--in this case at the request of the commission members who feared that state prosecutors would try to use the information to make cases against prisoners in a court of law. Other materials related to the Attica uprising, such as the last two volumes of the Meyer Report of 1976, were also sealed back in the 1970s. Members of law enforcement fought hard to prevent disclosure of this report in particular. Although a judge has recently ruled that these volumes can now be released to the public, the redaction process that they first will undergo means that crucial parts of Attica's history will almost certainly remain hidden.   The vast majority of Attica's records, however, are not sealed, and yet they might as well be. Federal agencies such as the FBI and the Jus­tice Department have important Attica files, for example, but when one requests them via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), they have been rendered nearly unreadable from all of the redactions. And then there are the records held by the state of New York itself--countless boxes housed in various upstate warehouses that came from numerous sources: the state's official investigation into whether criminal acts had been committed at Attica during the rebellion, its five years of prosecuting such alleged crimes, and its nearly three decades of defending itself against civil actions filed by prisoners and hostages. In 2006 I was able to get an index of these files, which made clear that this is a treasure trove of Attica documen­tation: autopsies, ballistics reports, trooper statements, depositions, and more. It constitutes ground zero of the Attica story.   Everything that the state holds in these warehouses can also be requested via FOIA, but here as well it is difficult to get documents released. As this book goes to press, and after waiting since 2013 for some explanation of whether my latest FOIA request would net me important documents, I just received word that state officials will not be giving me those materials. I know the items that I requested are there, according to the state's own inventory, and I also know that I did not ask for any grand jury materials that would be protected, and yet my request is still being denied.   But thanks to so many who lived and litigated the Attica uprising, as well as so many others who took the time to chronicle or to collect parts of this history in newspapers, in memoirs, and in archives outside the control of the state of New York, I was still able to rescue and recount the story of Attica.   And, because of two extraordinarily lucky breaks I had while I was trying to write this book, the history you are about to read is one that state officials very much hoped would not be told.   First, in 2006 I stumbled upon a cache of Attica documents at the Erie County courthouse in Buffalo, New York, that changed everything. I had, for two years, been calling and writing every county courthouse and coro­ner's office and municipal building in upstate New York in order to find any Attica-related records that had not been placed under lock and key by the Office of the Attorney General or sealed by a judge. I had little to go on in these early years--I didn't have case numbers to search, I knew few names to inquire about. But one day I hit pay dirt. I was on the phone with a woman from the Erie County courthouse who thought that a bunch of Attica papers had recently been placed in the back room there. They had been somewhere else, but had been moved to the Office of the Clerk, per­haps after suffering some water damage. I headed to Buffalo. When I walked into that dim file room at the courthouse I was taken aback. In front of me, in complete disarray on floor-to-ceiling metal shelves, were literally thousands of pages of Attica documents. In this mess was everything from grand jury testimony, to depositions and indictments, to memos and personal letters. Most stunningly, though, I found in this mountain of moldy papers vital information from the very heart of the state's own investigation into whether crimes had been com­mitted during the rebellion or the retaking of the prison. In short, I had found a great deal of what the state knew, and when it knew it--not the least of which was what evidence it thought it had against members of law enforcement who were never indicted. I took as many notes as I could take, and Xeroxed as many pages as they would let me, and, finally, had much of what I needed to write a history of Attica that no one yet knew.   Then, in 2011, I had another incredibly lucky break. I had just pub­lished an op-ed in The New York Times on the occasion of Attica's fortieth anniversary when I received an email from Craig Williams, an archivist at the New York State Museum who wanted help making sense of a new trove of materials he had received from the New York State Police. Troopers had just turned over an entire Quonset hut full of items they had gathered from the prison yards of Attica immediately after the four-day standoff there in 1971--items that the state considered evidence in the cases that it might make against prisoners or troopers. I was thrilled to hear this, and soon headed to Albany.   When I got to the museum's cavernous warehouse, I was glad to be joined by Christine Christopher, a filmmaker making a documentary on Attica with whom I had been working closely. Together we just stood for a while, staring at rows and rows of cartons, boxes, bags, and crates of materials that had been removed from the prison forty years before. And what had been gathered and hidden away for those many decades turned out to be grim indeed. In one particularly mangled container lay a heap of clothing--the dirty, rumpled pants and shirt of a slain correction officer, Carl Valone. His clothing wasn't soiled merely with decades-old mud from Attica's D Yard. It was stiff and stained with blood. I had met two of Carl Valone's kids who were still desperate for answers regarding what, exactly, had happened to their father on September 13, 1971.   And this was just one box. Next to it sat another in which I found the now rigid, blood-soaked clothing of Attica prisoner Elliot "L. D." Barkley. Like Carl Valone, L. D. Barkley had been gunned down during Attica's retaking. I had met one of his family members too--L.D.'s younger sister, Traycee. She, like every one of the Valone kids, was also still haunted by Attica.   Although the detritus of Attica that the NYSP had saved in these many boxes revealed little new about why this event played out as it did, it was a harrowing reminder of its human toll. There was a dog-eared red spiral notebook filled with messages written by the prisoners who had survived the retaking, men who had hoped these pages could somehow be smug­gled out so that their families and friends might know that they were still alive. There were also cartons of torn and faded photographs of prisoners' loved ones, countless legal proceedings that the prisoners had painstak­ingly copied, and even their Bibles and Qurans--all of which had been ripped out of cells in the aftermath of the rebellion.   All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished, and all of the Attica artifacts that the New York State Museum had been willing to share have also been removed from anyone's view. But all that I learned from those documents back in 2006 can't be unlearned, and all of the boxes of bloody Attica clothes and heartbreaking letters written by Attica's prisoners that I saw back in 2011 can't be unseen.   And I have decided to include all that I have learned and seen in this book.   That said, this decision was agonizing. Although my job as a historian is to write the past as it was, not as I wished it had been, I have no desire to cause anyone pain in the present. I am well aware, and it haunts me, that my decision to name individuals who have spent the last forty-five years trying to remain unnamed will reopen many old wounds and cause much new suffering. That old wounds were never allowed to heal, and that new suffering is now a certainty, however, is, I believe, the responsibility of officials in the state of New York. It is these officials who have cho­sen repeatedly, since 1971, to protect the politicians and members of law enforcement who caused so much trauma. It is these officials who could have, and should have, told the whole truth about Attica long ago so that the healing could have begun and Attica's history would have been just that: history, not present-day politics and pain.   Of course, even this book can't promise Attica's survivors the full story. The state of New York still sits on many secrets. This book does vow, how­ever, to recount all that I was able to uncover, and by doing that, at least, perhaps a bit more justice will be done. Excerpted from Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy by Heather Ann Thompson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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