The story of the Attica riot that changed American prison conditions
Forty five years ago, the bloody rebellion captured the nation’s attention
“We’re saying that as prisoners it’s a new day,” said Greg Curry, an inmate at Ohio State Penitentiary, in told The Nation. “We’re not going to accept this anymore. We’re fighting for our basic human rights.”
Curry was referring to a nationwide prison labor strike planned for this week, but he sounded straight out of Attica. And in fact, the action is slated to begin on Friday, September 9th — the 45th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising. In particular, the prisoners are calling for an end to forced labor, which was a major demand of Attica rebellion.
This week’s action is meant to be nonviolent, but Attica was very different. Though born of long-standing frustrations, it was a spontaneous combustion — and a bloody one. Its legacy is complicated: On the one hand, it gave birth to the modern prisoners’ rights movement, emboldening generations of incarcerated people to assert their civil rights. On the other, if Attica had been successful, there would be little need for such a movement today.
In the years leading up to the riot, recalled former prisoner Joseph “Jazz” Hayden, “Attica was a stark place. You only had an hour a day of recreation and the rest of the time, it was something out of the 1870s.” Poor medical care, overcrowding, forced hard labor, brutality from guards and deplorable living conditions were among the prisoner complaints.
Among the prisoners, Hayden explained, were radicals who represented groups agitating for social change during a moment of intense national unrest, including the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. “We began to come together,” said Hayden. “When I got there [in 1969], political education classes were being conducted in the yards.”
In summer of 1971, a small group called the Attica Liberation Faction put together a list of demands called the July Manifesto, and sent it to the state prison chief Russell Oswald. Oswald responded only with a videotaped message. By early September, writes Heather Ann Thompson in her new history Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, “Most men at Attica were now at a breaking point. Just about anything might cause this place to explode.”
On September 9th, a group of prisoners found themselves trapped in a tunnel leading to the recreation yard known as Times Square. The day before had been dramatic — one prisoner had been isolated, and another was feared dead. Believing that the trap was intentional and that an attack by guards was imminent, the inmates broke down the door. The chaos sparked a takeover of Times Square, and then the whole prison.
“It was a spontaneous event,” Hayden says. “It came, and all the people in there who were politically conscious and awake and aware of the circumstances they were in, they took control.” Thompson echoes this assessment, saying in an interview with Jacobin, “It is a riot, I think, in the truest sense of the word, in those first few moments. But… this is where the political organization comes in, because this is the moment that it does become a rebellion.”
Though unplanned, Attica was from nearly the beginning an explicitly politicized conflict. The language spoken by prisoners was the language of revolution. They set to work voting on and adapting their list of demands, which read in part, “We do not know how the present system of brutality and dehumanization and injustice has been allowed to be perpetrated in this day of enlightenment, but we are the living proof of its existence and we cannot allow it to continue.”
The prisoners assembled a core group, which included Black Panthers, Nation of Islam members, a white Weather Underground member, and a member of the politicized Latino group Young Lords. They held prison employees hostage, including guards who were well-liked and sympathetic to the prisoners’ cause. They designated typists, organized security forces, and drafted a list of outside people they wanted to appoint as observers — non-incarcerated notables who they felt might be able to keep them safe by bearing witness.
At first, officials appeared willing to negotiate. But President Nixon and the FBI considered the state authorities’ patience with the prisoners a sign of weakness — a concession to radicalism — and pressured New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to end the riot without negotiation. On September 13th, New York State Police troopers stormed the prison and killed dozens of people, including hostages and inmates who were not resisting. All told, 43 people died in the Attica prison uprising — ten prison guards and employees, and 33 inmates. 39 were killed by troopers, including nine out of the ten hostages.
The riot was a watershed moment for prisoners’ rights, sparking a national conversation about the treatment of incarcerated people and the need for reform. It was the most media attention any prisoner struggle had ever received, and it brought the demands of the rioters, as well as details about prison conditions, into living rooms across the nation.
But it also sparked a terrible backlash, which perhaps eclipsed the positive effects of the uprising.
Officials tended only to harden their stance. Wardens’ and correctional officers’ associations banded together to demand harsher penalties for prisoners who challenged authority. Prison leaders across the country announced support for the forceful retaking of Attica. In a New York Times op-ed, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew compared prisoners to Nazi troopers.
The uprising reinforced the notion that inmates needed to be more aggressively contained — by ever-evolving means ranging from isolating architecture to riot gear. “The fear that Attica generated among prison administrators and the American public,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, “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.”
Many prisoners want the same things today that the men at Attica demanded: better access to lawyers, fairer parole hearings, protection from brutality by guards, the application of legal workplace standards, adequate living conditions, improved medical care, an end to punitive segregation, and so on.
But as the prison population has grown, so too have strategies for pressuring prison administrators, from coordinated work stoppages to hunger strikes. That’s why this Friday, 45 years after Attica, America’s prisoners won’t be taking anyone hostage. They’re simply putting the tools down and refusing to cooperate.
The question for the prisoners’ rights movement now is how to apply the right amount of pressure — to make headlines and force change without sparking an overpowering backlash, and without getting anyone killed.
