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<font size=4><b>REMEMBERING ATTICA<br>
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By Dennis Cunningham, Michael Deutsch, & Elizabeth Fink <br><br>
Prison Legal News<br><br>
<br>
This year, September 9th will mark the 40th anniversary of the rebellion
at Attica State Prison in upstate New York. As one of the prisoner
leaders, L.D. Barkley, announced to the world, the rebellion was “but the
sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.” The sound
of Attica was heard cloud and clear, but the fury at the time was
reserved to the assault force: several hundred violently angry white
state police and prison guards, who carried out the massacre that ended
the rebellion on September 13, 1971, with 43 men dead. The fury of
the oppressed themselves has been a work in progress since that
time…<br><br>
L.D. was one of many politically aware prisoners in New York and
elsewhere who identified with the struggle for liberation world-wide,
with consciousness growing out the civil rights movement, the urban
uprisings of the 60’s, and the ideology and practice of Malcolm X and the
Black Panther Party. Much of it was given voice in the writings of
George Jackson and Eldridge Cleaver, especially “Soledad Brother” and
“Soul on Ice”, whose searing indictment of injustice, racism, and cruelty
in the prisons in California echoed across the country, and inspired
resistance. A Manifesto demanding reform and urging resistance had
come out of California’s Folsom Prison in 1970 and made its way around
the Country and into Attica, and the prisoners there had delivered one of
their own to NYS authorities, which was ignored, several months before
the rebellion. George Jackson was assassinated at San Quentin on
August 21, 1971; a few days later the prisoners at Attica staged a
surprise protest at breakfast, during which nobody ate and nobody
talked. The guards were stunned at the unanimity of it, and
unnerved.<br><br>
A number of the prisoners had been involved in previous, smaller
rebellions in the Tombs jail in New York City and at the state prison at
Auburn,. Various chapters of political groups on the outside had
formed inside, including the BPP and the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and
the Black Muslims had large, organized contingent at Attica, as in all
the prisons in the state at that time. Political literature flowed
freely, and the groups were often able to gather in the exercise yards
and various work and other locales in the institution. Grievances
against the guards, the administration and the system were many, and
widely shared, especially on the part of the Black and Latino prisoners,
who came mainly from New York City, and almost all the rest from other
big city environments like Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester. The entire
staff at Attica at the time was white except for one Puerto Rican
officer, who worked in a watchtower and had no contact with prisoners;
and the surrounding rural area of Western New York State which they came
from was mostly what some call “up South”, to denote the level of racial
antipathy and outright bigotry endemic in the local population, and thus
the prison work force.<br><br>
At the same time, there was a strong and growing belief among the
prisoners that they had clear-cut rights under the Constitution, that
guaranteed fair and decent treatment, and freedom from discrimination;
that, despite years of peaceful petition and advocacy, their rights were
largely ignored by the prison administration; and that many kinds of
nastiness and brutality they experienced from the white guards were a
matter of policy. Many prisoners had come to feel that something
had to be done.<br><br>
**
**
**
**
**<br><br>
That morning of September 9th, a Thursday, after rumors that two
prisoners had been beaten when taken to the hole the night before, a
fight broke out between a handful of prisoners and guards in a hallway,
when a door by which they would go to the yard after breakfast was
locked, and they objected. A large number of other prisoners soon
filled the corridor, and managed to break open a gate to the central
connecting point between the cellblocks, “Times Square”, leaving large
sections of the prison open, and hundreds of prisoners loose inside the
institution. Staff members began to retreat to the administration
building, but many were taken hostage by groups of prisoners and finally
brought together in one of the four big, open exercise yards, D-Yard,
inside the square of huge, three story cell blocks that formed the main
prison, where hundreds of prisoners were now congregated. There it
was quickly established that the hostages, guards and civilians, would be
cared for decently, and protected at all costs, and the large,
disciplined Nation of Islam contingent took responsibility for guarding
them, in a protected circle in the middle of the yard, while the
prisoners gathered in the far corner.<br><br>
The prisoners quickly began to organize themselves into groups, to form a
representative council and begin to talk things over, and decide
things. There were roughly 1280 prisoners in the Yard.
Several injured staff members were carried on litters to a distant gate,
beyond a ‘no-man’s-land’ zone where there had been rioting, so the
authorities could get them to the hospital. Thirty-nine guards and
civilian employees remained in the hostage circle. The prisoners
began to assemble a list of specific demands, and to listen to speeches
from each other about the grievances they all shared. They soon had
make-shift society set up, to provide protection, food, water and shelter
for the hostages, distribute rations and water, and keep order among the
large disparate crowd of men.<br><br>
The prisoner leadership formulated and announced a first list of 28
demands. Leading points included replacement of two notoriously
vicious and incompetent prison doctors, and better medical care
generally, an end to prison censorship, and slave wages, and for fairness
in the parole process. The leadership put out a call for
independent observers to come to the prison, to intercede for them, and
bear witness to the merits of their grievances, and the good faith of
their desire to negotiate a peaceful settlement. They asked that
the nation’s leading civil rights advocate of the day, William Kunstler,
come to the prison and act as their attorney. They named other
prominent citizens they knew were concerned with prisons or prisoners in
some way: State Assemblyman Arthur O. Eve, perhaps the one public figure
in the state of New York who had previously expressed public concern
about the conditions and treatment of prisoners at Attica; New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker, who had written about problems in the prisons; New
York State Senator John Dunne, head of the Senate Committee which
supposedly oversaw the administration of the prisons, publisher Clarence
Jones of the Amsterdam News, Congressman Herman Badillo, and many others,
on a list that grew and grew. Most of them came; as many as 50 were
there at various times in the five days. Kunstler arrived and went
inside, to raucous welcoming cheers from this eager, charged-up crowd of
new clients.<br><br>
The authorities first planned to go in immediately, with state police
forces that were being assembled, and guards, to recapture the yard; but
instead, and to his short-lived credit, the state Corrections
Commissioner, Russell Oswald, came from Albany to negotiate. With
several members of the press, and TV cameramen, Oswald and his assistant
Walter Dunbar went into the Yard and sat down at the table with a council
of prisoners; they talked about the demands. Oswald agreed to
several of them and promised to study others, and discuss them outside
and return. They were accompanied by television cameras, and the
spectacle of prisoners controlling part of the prison and publicly
negotiating for humane treatment with the Commissioner of Corrections,
captured the attention of the American public.<br><br>
When Oswald came outside the prison, however, apparently not realizing
that the prisoners would see him on television, he denounced them for
refusing to release the hostages immediately; they saw him, and saw and
heard that he showed a different face, and betrayed their trust.
The observers committee went inside and another day passed in discussion
of grievances and remedies, and terms. A new set of three demands
emerged as the prisoners’ terms for ending the standoff: Point One:
That the Warden, Mancusi, be replaced; Point Two, That prisoners who
wished to, be removed and deported to “a non-imperialist country”; and
Three: That there be an Amnesty, for all those involved in the rebellion,
from prosecution for crimes alleged as part of it. Needless to say,
this was much tougher to negotiate. Oswald did not come back inside
the Yard after he was denounced. He met with the Observers, but
held out little hope of compromise.<br>
Over the weekend a guard who had been hit in the head in the early stages
of uprising, when the big gate broke and prisoners surged into
Times Square, died from his injuries. Now, hypothetically at least,
everyone in the riot was responsible under the felony-murder rule, where
the felony was the riot; so now, amnesty became the primary issue.
The guards and state police, waiting outside day after day, full of
hostility since the beginning and bombarded by false rumors, were now
seething; and the Observers felt a massacre would take place if a
settlement was not reached. They urged Governor Nelson Rockefeller
to come to the prison and meet with them, give assurances against mass
prosecution, and particularly to see the state of high emotion the police
forces were in, spoiling for the attack. Several urged that he
replace the officers with National Guard troops, who had also called out
and were ready and much more prepared to carry out a re-taking; but he
wouldn’t. He did give an order that the prison guards stay out of
the assault force, but it was ignored.<br><br>
The Governor declined to come. He told the Observers on that Sunday
he felt it would do no good, that there was an impasse, and he had no
choice but to order an armed assault on the yard, to rescue the hostages
and put down the rebellion. They convinced him to wait at least
until the next day, so that people at home on Sunday would not see it on
TV and start riots of their own.<br><br>
After three days of fitful negotiations, during which the hostages were
safely guarded by the Muslim prisoners, and the prisoner negotiators,
aided by the outside observers, attempted to reach a resolution that
would insure meaningful changes, and amnesty from reprisals and
prosecutions, Governor Rockefeller moved to re-take the D-Yard by
force.<br><br>
Tom Wicker, Sen. Dunne, Congressman Badillo and Clarence Jones, who had
been friends with Rockefeller for years, all warned him urgentlybased on
their harrowing passage each day through the masses of heavily armed,
white prison guards and state police waiting just outside the walls,
their racist rage fueled by false rumors of inmate atrocitiesthat an
attack would result in a “bloodbath”. Conventional wisdom and plain
common sense dictated waiting until prisoners would tire of holding out,
so that some compromise for peaceable surrender could be arranged, but
the Governor ordered the state police to prepare to attack.
Rockefeller still harbored presidential aspirations, and obviously did
not want to appear soft on prisoners, or law and order generally; it was
an opportunity for him to make hay politically, and he seized it.
His only, wholly self-serving “concession” was to postpone the assault
from Sunday to Monday morning. As Congressman Badillo lamented
bitterly afterwards, “What was the hurry? There’s always time to
die.”<br><br>
**
**
**
**
**<br>
That Sunday it rained all night; by morning D-Yard was a sea of mud and
everyone was soaked, cold and miserable. Commissioner Oswald made
one last demand for surrender over the P.A. system. Some prisoners
took some of the hostages onto the “catwalk”, the one- story roof over
the long corridors which divided the interior yards, crossing at Times
Square. They stood spaced out on two sides, blindfolded, each
guarded by a prisoner with some apparent stabbing device held at the
neck. Then an National Guard helicopter flew low over the Yard; and
some prisoners believed it was Rockefeller, come at last. Instead
it blew a huge cloud of military-grade CS gas into the mass of men and
mud; Oswald and the police commanders were told by General O’Hara, the
National Guard commander, the CS would “put them on the ground”, to
defeat resistance, and it did. Within seconds every one of the 1300
men in the yard was face down in the mud, gasping for breath; then the
shooting started…<br><br>
Marksmen on the high roofs opposite D-Yard quickly felled everyone on the
catwalkkilling two of the hostage shields themselves, and several of
their “executioner” escortsas helmeted squads broke over and through the
barricades the rebels had built on the far catwalks. One shield hostage,
Attica guard Michael Smith, shot four times in the gut by the attack
force, said his life was saved when the prisoner holding him, Donald
Noble , put his own body in the way of the shooting, to shield him.
Michael Smith said he never understood why his own people kept shooting
at him, or in truth, why the assault was necessary at all. He had
appeared on a TV broadcast the day before in which several hostages had
urged the Governor to come to the prison and get things settled
peacefully, another plea the Governor
spurned.<a name="_ftnref1"></a>[1] <br>
As the squads came out on the catwalks above the D-Yard, several with
long guns took up positions along the length of the roofs and began
shooting into the mass of men huddled in the mud, clearly oblivious to
the presence of the hostages in the middle of the yard, several more of
whom died in that barrage. The “turkey shoot” lasted some fifteen
minutes, from when the snipers opened fire to when the supposed covering
fire ended, and the squads of guards and state police swarmed down
ladders into the Yard. More than four thousand rounds were fired,
many of them dum-dum bullets. One hundred-eighty-nine of the
1300-odd men in the yard were hit, of whom 39 were killed, 29 prisoners
and 10 hostages, counting those on the catwalk, by rifle and shotgun
fire. Several more of both were maimed for life, because of
the denial and delay of medical care. Many who died had been left
to bleed to death, lying in the mud. No records were kept of which
officers fired which weapons, and they made a point of mixing them up
afterwards and then bulldozed all the evidence into a dirt pile in back
of the prison, so that the killers could not be traced.<br><br>
White revolutionary Sam Melville, the alleged “Manhattan bomber”, was
murdered in cold blood, with his hands in the air in surrender, by State
Police Detective Vincent Tobia, who hurried along the catwalk, stopped,
aimed down, and fired a shotgun into his chest from 15-20 feet awayand
later testified proudly that he had done it. The firebrand and
prisoner spokesman L.D. Barkley was also killed, with credible evidence
that he was seen alive after the retaking, but later executed. The
issue was never resolved.<br><br>
Some three dozen ambulances had been mustered outside, but they were
reserved for the hostages, whether or not they were injured. No
medical care had been planned for the prisoners and the National Guard
was forced to step in, without advance preparations or any adequate
supplies. More than an hour after the shooting stopped , Warden
Mancusi called Dr. Worthington Schenk, the head of emergency services at
Meyer Memorial Hospital, the big city hospital in Buffalo and told him
they had a problem he should come look out. With no idea of the
massacre he was about to encounter, Schenk got two residents and drove
the 45 miles to Attica. Only when he got there did he see the
horror before him and call back to Buffalo for emergency medical
services. Meanwhile at least six prisoners had died needlessly,
while scores lay in agony for hours waiting for medical care.
.<a name="_ftnref2"></a>[2]<br><br>
After the shooting stopped, the officers on the ladders were joined by
many more coming through the tunnels, as a small state police helicopter
circled overhead, with a loudspeaker booming repeatedly, “Surrender to an
officer. You will not be harmed”. The officers quickly began
clubbing the gasping, unresisting men to their feet, including many who
were wounded, and driving them across the yard to a doorway in one of the
tunnels, across the tunnel and out the door opposite into the adjacent
A-Yard on the other side. They had to go up five or six steps to
the door, across the tunnel, then back down. Inside and out they
were met with more officers, who beat them and tore their clothes off,
took away glasses, watches, false teeth, etc, then put them naked in a
long snaking line that wound slowly through the yard leading into the
other tunnel, next to A-Yardwhich led into the A Cellblock, its cells
now emptied to hold themwhere a gauntlet awaited them. Those who
were considered leaders, the prisoner negotiators, spokesmen and security
men were singled out for prolonged abuse and isolation.<br><br>
As they waited in that long line which many people have seen in the lurid
photographs that became hallmarks of that day, listening to the cries of
those who preceded them into the tunnel, and the shouts and curses of the
officers who lined the tunnel with rifles and axe handles, beating them,
another preliminary torment was also enacted upon them. There was
one prisoner everyone knew as Big Black (Frank Smith), a maximum leader
during the days in the Yard, chosen as the over-all chief of security,
and head of the escort squad that protected Oswald and Dunbar, and then
the Observers, when they moved in and out of the yard. Mostly a
smalltime hustler from the streets of Brooklyn, he had been in Attica for
several yearsbasically because of rotten lawyering, and conflict
of interest, whereby he got a sentence three or four times longer than
what he should have hadbut he had not become involved in any of the
political activities or groups which had developed there, except as
audience. A large, dark-skinned man, very direct but with a ready,
friendly smile, he coached the cellblock football team, worked in the
laundry, and was on good terms with everyone, all groups; everyone
respected him, even the police. But they changed their attitude
during the five days, as he stayed at the center of things, directing the
security force, and turned up repeatedly at the gate where the visitors
came and went..<br><br>
Now as the smoke cleared and the huddled men started struggling up,
officers came through the crowd shouting for “Big Black! Where’s Big
Black?”. They found him, beat him and stripped him, and took him across
into the A-Yard. There they laid him on a steel table near the door
where the curving line fed into the gauntlet, with the middle of the back
of his head at one edge lengthwise, a and the other end reaching to
mid-thigh. They beat him more, especially in the groin and
testicles, cursing him loudly, and stubbing out cigarettes on his
body. Officers stood above him on the catwalk and would hold empty
shell casings in the flame of a lighter until they were too hot, then
drop them on his body. They put a football under his chin and made
him hold it against his chest, and told him that if it fell he would be
castrated, or shot. They left him there for the others to see,
keeping it up for more than five hours, as the line slowly snaked past
him into the tunnel.<br><br>
Inside the tunnel the floor was strewn with broken glass for some 50
yards, to the A-Block gate, and both sides were lined with officers with
ax handles, 2x4s, baseball bats and rifle butts. The naked
prisoners had to run, or, when they were tripped or knocked down, stumble
and crawl the length of it, being struck and jabbed repeatedly over the
whole distance, by violently freaked-out, cursing, sworn peace officers
of the State of New York, all white men. Inside the cellblock they
were herded up the stairs and into the cellsfour or five men stuffed
into single cells, including many who needed medical attention.
There they remained, naked, ill fed, and often terrorized through the
night by officers who came in with flashlights and threatened to shoot
them, frequently cocking and dry-firing rifles, shotguns, and pistols at
them, and promising much more death and mayhem to come, for the next
3-4-5 days.<br><br>
Big Black was finally taken off the table at about four in the
afternoonafter about five hoursand over to the hospital, outside the
main building. There he was put in a small room with several guards
armed with clubs who resumed beating and kicking him, on the floor, until
a National Guard medical officer chanced to open the door and found him,
and that was the end of it. Twenty years later he broke down
weeping on the witness stand while describing this day, in the
class-action civil rights trialdespite having told the story many
timeswhen the memory hit him full force; he was the first of several
witnesses this happened to in the trial.<br><br>
Afterwards, a news photographer found and recorded a pair of
inscriptions, in separate hands, written with a white marker on a dark
steel wall, that told the story. The top one said: “Attika
fell 9-9-71. Fuck you pig.” Just underneath that, it said:
“Retaken 9-13-71. 32 Dead Niggers.”<br><br>
**
**
**
**
**<br>
The prison officials falsely announced to the world that the dead
hostages had been killed by prisoners slitting their throats, and
emasculating one of them, which they said they had seen, and which left
them “no choice” but to attack. When autopsies showed that all
hostages died from gunshot wounds from the lawmen’s weapons, state
officials denounced local pathologist John Edland as a communist, and
tried to discredit his findings. As Mark Twain said, A lie will
travel half-way around the world before the truth gets its boots on:
three years later, when the Erie County population in and around Buffalo
was polled in preparation for jury selection in the first criminal
trials, it was found that fully a third of the public still believed that
the dead Attica hostages had been murdered by the prisoners.<br>
The truth could not be suppressed however, and the massacre, one of the
two or three largest slaughters of Americans by other Americans since the
Civil War,<a name="_ftnref3"></a>[3] was acknowledged in an official
investigation, the McKay Commission Report.<br><br>
There had been no plan to rescue the hostages, they were simply
sacrificed at the altar of race hate, and, in aid of Rockefeller’s
political ambitions, the need to make it clear that resistance would not
be tolerated. The U.S. Court of Appeals denounced the so-called
“re-housing” of the prisoners after the assault as “an orgy of
brutality”.<br><br>
To add insult to the grave injury, many of the surviving victims of the
massacre and torture at Attica were later indicted by a local grand jury,
made up of friends and neighbors of the prison guards, and run by a
Rockefeller intimate, Robert E. Fischer, a former judge now appointed as
a special attorney general, with a large task force of lawyers and
ex-state police cops as investigators, which looked into alleged crimes
by the prisoners, and studiously ignored those of the police and state
officials. A later state investigation uncovered intentional
killing of unarmed prisoners by the state assault force, but was
suppressed, andwith the exception of one hapless trooper, who was
indicted for “reckless endangerment”, for discharging his shotgun twelve
times to “keep up the noise”, as he put itno charges were ever filed
against the police.<br><br>
Sixty-two prisoners were indicted in December 1972, charged with more
than 1400 felony counts all together, more than half of which carried a
life sentence upon conviction. Lawyers and activists from all over
the United States came to Western New York to defend them. Attica
Brothers Legal Defense (ABLD) was born, combining the legal defense with
investigation of the crimes of the State actors, public education, and
fundraising, and justice for the Attica Brothers became a nation-wide
political issue. The main demand was to drop the charges, and jail
Rockefeller and the police killers. Hundreds of people demonstrated in
Buffalo, where the trials were to be held; thousands participated in one
great march in September, 1974, when the first frame-up trials were about
to start. Many of those who came to work for ABLD, including the
authors of this article, had their lives dramatically changed by the
Brothers’ example of militancy and courage, and the reality of how far
the State was willing to go to suppress the rights and righteous protest
of prisoners. In all, five trials (involving eight Attica
Brothers) were held with four acquittals and one
conviction.<br><br>
A national political campaign was initiated, under the leadership of Big
Black, whose experience at Attica had transformed him into a committed
activist. Dozens of lawyers and young people volunteered, organized
and demonstrated, forcing official investigations which exposed the
planning and cover-up of the killings and torture. In late 1974 a
young lawyer on the special prosecutor’s staff, Malcolm Bell, quit in
disgust after his efforts to develop cases against officers were
repeatedly blocked by the higher-ups. He went to the New York Times
with his story, and soon a big expose appeared on the front page, telling
the world what everyone involved in the case knew well: that the special
investigation was a completely one-sided fraud. An investigation of
the investigation was launched, and, ultimately, a new governor, Hugh
Carey, was pressured to give amnesty to the indicted Attica Brothers, and
clemency for two who had already been convicted calling the Attica
prosecutions the “darkest day in the history of New York
jurisprudence.” Twenty years and tens of thousands of work-hours
later, despite the concerted efforts of the state officials to delay and
defeat any public accounting for what was done, a class-action civil suit
on behalf of the Brothers in D yard was tried in federal court in
Buffalo. For the first time the full extent of the killing,
brutality and denial of medical care inflicted on the men of Attica was
publicly exposed.<br><br>
The jury found that the rights of the class members were denied in the
assault, and by the brutality inflicted upon them after the prison was
retaken, but split, and hung, over whether any of the four officials on
trial were responsible; they assigned blame for the beatings in the yard
and the tunnel, and other tortures done that day, to just one assistant
warden, Karl Pfeil, the only one of the four who was part of the planning
and then personally oversaw the brutality in the yard and the
tunnel. They hung again on responsibility for the torture as to the
other three defendants: Commissioner Oswald, who had died; Major Monahan
of the State Police, commander of the assault force, also deceased; and
the Warden himself, Mancusi. At a subsequent trial for damages
another jury returned an award of $4 million in damages for Big Black,
and a third verdict awarded $75,000 to David Broesig, selected as an
example of someone who suffered the average level of harm common to all
prisoner class members not singled out for special vengeance after the
assault.<br><br>
Refusing to resolve the case, the State appealed the liability verdict;
and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, still beholden to the legacy of
Rockefellerand obviously determined to protect the State of New York
from liability for the tens of millions of dollars the two damage
verdicts showed that the Brothers were entitled to, and to block the
sensation of so much money being paid to rebellious convictsrefused to
recognize the legal validity of the class of prisoners, and set the jury
verdicts aside. Faced with the impossibility of returning the
Square One with 1200-odd individual cases, as ordered by the Court, and
the likelihood of further prolonged delay, uncertainty, and clearly
impossible expense, the Brothers still involved in 1999 bowed to an
inadequate settlement, for a total of 12 million dollars including
attorneys fees for a quarter-century of legal work. This meant that
most of the survivors got paid a few thousand dollars, which, in light of
the two damage awards, was a wretched pittance for what they went
through.<br><br>
**
**
**
**
**<br>
For a time, the horrific events at Attica, followed by several other less
publicized prison uprisings and riots elsewhere, fueled nation-wide
efforts for prison reform. Programs for prisoners and ex-prisoners were
instituted throughout the country and for the first time people began to
be sympathetic to the rights of prisoners, and to realize the importance
of realistic efforts at rehabilitation. Prisoner rights legal programs
were established in almost every state and many prison reform and
watchdog groups sprung up. It was a period of political militancy
and unrest throughout the country, and there were the beginnings of
awareness in many sectors of the population that prisoners were subject
to widespread mistreatment and abuse by their captors. Even the
federal courtsoften as a result of prisoners acting as their own
lawyershad begun to recognize for the first time that prisoners had
constitutional rights, to due process prior to discipline and parole
denial, first amendment access to literature and mail, and freedom from
cruel and unusual punishment in the form of deplorable prison
conditions.<br><br>
But it didn’t last. Before long the renewed emphasis on prisoner
rights, and prison reform, began to evaporate in the heat of the nascent
‘war on drugs’especially in New York, with the infamous Rockefeller Drug
Lawsand “tough on crime” politics generally. In the mid 1970’s a
series of decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the protections
earlier envisioned as guarantees of prisoners’ welfare, and dignity, and
instead sanctioned supposed due process rules, which prison officials
could satisfy by simply creating bureaucratic procedures and paper
records in dealing with complaints and disciplinary actions, which in
fact rarely if ever were decided in prisoners’ favor, and never when it
was the prisoner’s word against the guard’s.<br><br>
And, rather than implement programs of rehabilitation, prison technocrats
throughout the country began to develop special solitary confinement
unitscontrol unitswith sensory deprivation cells, where they isolated
people they identified as activist and politically aware prisoners.
Public support for reform and rehabilitation waned, and Attica for many
was just past history. Then, as time went on, mandatory sentencing,
increased penalties for drug crimes, gang proscriptions and an epidemic
of “three-strike” laws and other sentencing “enhancements”, resulted in a
virtual incarceration explosion in America. Dozens, really hundreds
of new prisons were built, all over the country, replete with every
phenomenally complex, expensive, high-tech electronic security and
surveillance system and device that anyone could invent, especially if it
could be sold to government in large quantities. From 1972 until
the present the total U.S. prison population increased from about 400,000
to more than 2,300,000 today, as the prison-industrial complex has
blossomed into big business, with big corporate profits.<br><br>
During that time, the upswing in popular consciousness flowing from the
disgrace and vanquishing of Nixon, and the end of the Viet Nam waras
well as response to earlier events like the shootings at Kent State and
Jackson State, along with Atticasoon leveled off in Gerald Ford’s
“stagflation”, and the weirdness of the Carter presidency, suddenly blown
up by the hostage crisis in Iran. Then came an election in
whichbesides being snookered by Reagan agents in a secret deal with the
Iranians to hold the hostages until after the election, to deny him the
campaign triumph of bringing them homeCarter was simply
over-matched. More to the point, Reagan and his ad agency handlers
ran an overtly racist campaignbrazenly kicking it off in Philadelphia,
Mississippi, site of the notorious slaughter of three young civil rights
workers in 1964, and denouncing “welfare queens” and supposed
freeloadersappealing shamelessly to the prejudice of white working-class
people in cities filled with “Reagan Democrats”, and trumpeting the
politics of anti-communism and crime, while building the atmosphere of
fear and selfishness in which those politics would thrive; as they
did. The backlash had arrived.<br><br>
From there on“We’re going to move this country so far to the right you
won’t recognize it,” crowed the Congressman-turned-Reagan Budget Director
David Stockman, as he began to engineer the first of the preposterous tax
cuts for the rich people and big corporations that led to the Country’s
present evident bankruptcygovernance was more and more a matter of
conscious stage management. The perfect actor was in the
presidential role, and he set a tone of truculence, and unyielding,
moralistic harshness, with unmistakable racial undertones, that was
perfectly adapted to the emerging uses of mass incarceration. As
the American population came to identify more and more as the “Me
Generation”, and activist elementsbeleaguered by FBI
“counterintelligence” (COINTELPRO) and kindred programs of repression all
over the countrylargely drifted into the by-ways of identity politics,
administrators of growing bureaucratic empires in state prison
departments systematically set aside what federal judge Marvin Frankel
once identified as an “elementary” understanding, that “people are sent
to prison <u>as</u> punishment, not <u>for</u> punishment.”<br><br>
Finally, the larger trend was sealed with the awful story of Willie
Horton, by the ghastly, successful, racist exploitation of it in the 1988
presidential campaign of George Bush the elder (first former head of the
C.I.A. to become president)and to a important degree, just about every
campaign for high office thereafter. The 'lock-em-up & forget
'em' mentality became an article of faith across the political spectrum,
and has flourished.<a name="_ftnref4"></a>[4] Rehabilitation,
education and training programs wilted, everywhere, with the supposedly
excessive costin the growing “big government is the problem” atmosphere
always the cover story. In reality, prisons old and new were
filling up with drug offenders, and alleged members of “criminal street
gangs”, who were growing up on streets where the would-be revolution of
the 60s and 70s was now played out, and a flood of illicit drugs played
in; apparently a great deal of it by the CIA and associated
instrumentalities of capitalist culture. The politics that had been
rife in the prisons at the time of Attica gave way to internal red–blue
rivalries among both Latinos and Blacks, and inter-racial conflicts,
often systematically promoted and manipulated by jailors who were well
aware that ‘if they’re fighting each other , they’re not fighting
us…’ With such an approach, the prison system became the focal
point for a much-heightened level of social control of populations,
especially Black and Brown men, who were increasingly crowded out of a
shrinking labor market, as whole industries continued to be dismantled,
exported, and made obsolete.<br><br>
Outside, anti-drug propaganda and legislative scourgings of drug and gang
defendants suffused the public sphere. The Supreme Court did its
part with one anti-human ruling after anothermeaning decisions where the
iron law that power corrupts people was studiously ignoredgranting the
jailors and wardens more and more arbitrary power and discretion over the
intimate daily lives of convicts, shrinking further and further the
process of any accountability for, or recourse from, the many perverse
ways they used that power, and teaching the lower courts to defer to
prison officials whenever possibleagain barely showing even the
slightest awareness of the likelihood that the power they conferred would
be abused. In the midst of this transition, the Control Unit
paradigm continued to gain strength.<br><br>
Possibly the first control unit as such was established in what was then
the federal maximum security institutionthe notion of “maxi-maxi”, now
morphed to “supermax” was just coming into playat Marion, in downstate
Illinois, also a substantially “up South” region. Prisons had
always had solitary confinement units for punishing rule violations, but
the idea here was different, namely, that certain prisoners had to be
permanently separated from the general population, because of their
supposed influence on other prisoners. At Attica before the
rebellion, prisoners overtly involved in prison and political issues or
organizing were just beginning to be recognized, and grouped together
dealt with together; indeed it was just such a grouping, from a certain
tier, “5th Company”, including Sam Melville and L.D. Barkley and several
others killed on the 13th, that started up with the officers in the
tunnel when they found the door locked, and brought on the riot. At
Marion, authorities decided that certain prisoners associated with
protest inside, or political causes on the outside, or both, men
respected by other prisonersas well as some whose resistance was more
directly acted out should be subjected to programs of “behavior
modification”, in the form of prolonged isolation, with basically
uncertain terms for release, whereby they could be conditioned to
submission, so to speak; which is to say, broken.<br>
<br>
The idea caught on. The courts, predictably, accepted it;
determining that as long as the prisoner was let out of doors for an hour
or so each day, or maybe every other day, he could be kept locked up
alone all the rest of the timeor at least until he would be deemed by
officials to have satisfied some gobbledegook standard or prescription
for correct conduct, or had served a peremptory minimum term, perhaps
fixed by the government shrinks who now began to appear in profusion, to
certify the supposed need for this new regimen in general and in each
case. All the officials had to say was that confinement in the unit
was not intended as punishment; and they were quickly learning how to
pronounce whatever formulaic justifications and rationales the courts
said they needed to hear…<br><br>
Soon isolation units were being established in prisons everywhere, and it
was not long before they were being specially constructed in new
prisons. An early refinement was construction of isolation cells
which each had its own adjacent outdoor space, to eliminate the need to
move prisoners outside their cells. These were “dog pens” were similarly
cramped (usual cell size would be 6x8 feet, the little yards maybe 6x10)
with nothing but high, blank walls and a patch of sky, which the sun or
moon might or might not ever pass over. The front doors of the
cells would be solid, maybe with a pattern of small holes for
ventilation, and a meal slot, openable from outside only, where the food
is shoved in on a tray, and where you have to back up and stick your
hands out behind you through the opening, to be cuffed and chained,
before you can ever come out for any reason. Many cells are painted
white entirely, and some are reputed to have rounded angles at the tops
of the walls, so the eyes are deprived even of the tiny stimulus of a
ceiling line. Usually a light is kept burning all the time.
In the SHU at Pelican Bayan isolation unit inside an isolation
prisonyou’re permitted your “appliance”, a small-screen TV which also
picks up (and is sometimes rigged by staff to <u>not</u> pick up), one or
more local or regional radio stations; and you have a small space
for property, including the boxes of your transcripts and legal
materials (if these have not been confiscated).<br><br>
These units came to be all the rage in U.S. “penology”, especially as
gangs and supposed gangs began to proliferate during the 1980’s; and
before long whole prisons were being designed and built for long term
solitary confinement, based on so-called “classification”, and typically
located as far as possible from population centers, to discourage
visiting and promote the feeling and pressure of isolation. The
federal government built one in the Colorado mountains, at Florence;
Illinois put theirs at Tamms, all the way at the other end of the state
from Chicago, and California put one as far away from Los Angeles as they
could get; about 780 miles north, at Pelican Bay. Again, many of
the locations chosen were distinctively “up South”…<br><br>
And if you build it, you have to keep it full, to justify the trouble and
expense; so you have to have a steady supply of dangerous characters you
can classify as in need of segregation from the others, in long-term
lockdown; “the worst of the worst” is the ominous description always
used. As the prison population swelled in the 80’s and 90’s, and
the great red vs. blue gang rivalries developed on the streets and
inside, prison officials more and more used supposed “validation” of gang
membership as the criterion for assignment to “special housing units”,
and, like other political figures, used propaganda about the supposed
menace of the gangs, and the difficulties and dangers of dealing with
them, to encourage and maintain public indifference to what prisoners
were going through inside.<br><br>
SHU isolation obviously falls short of the vile regimen of dogs,
nakedness, hoods, and the rest, ordained by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and
worked up by the Army and the CIA at Abu Ghraib, Bagram and all those
places they had for prisoners taken in the U.S. wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Nevertheless, particularly in light of the manifest
intention to degrade and break those subjected to it, and the
institutional as well as individual disposition to de-humanize them, it
absolutely qualifies as torture under both U.S. and International
Law. Particularly with respect to alleged gang members who are
locked down, there is the added feature that the regimen of enforced
isolation and sensory deprivation is explicitly designed to extract
information, in the form of so-called “de-briefing” of information about
the gang and other gang members, which brings it still more solidly
within the legal definition of
torture.<a name="_ftnref5"></a>[5] Indeed in California and
other places, de-briefing, and the Catch-22 the demand for it creates for
prisoners marked by authorities as gang members, and confined in the SHU
on that basis, has become a burning issue within the larger issue of
long-term confinement generally. De-briefingin which the prison
“intelligence” officers will insist that your betrayal of the gang and
gang members be so abject and complete that “they will never accept you
back”puts a target for vengeance on your back for life, as everyone
knows, and also greatly endangers your whole family on the outside; and
most prisoners understand that, regardless of the promises they make,
sooner or later the police will leave you exposed; and the likelihood is
you’ll be in solitary again until then. It is not a realistic
optionas the authorities well know, much as they also know that after
years on end in the SHU there’s nothing much a prisoner can know about
gang action that’s of any use at allstill that is the impossible hoop
they hold up for these men to jump through. Some have been confined
the whole time the tormentarium has been open; 20 years, and even before
that. No wonder there were no scruples at Abu Ghraib…<br><br>
**
**
**
**
**<br>
Most recently, first in Georgia, then briefly in Ohio, and now in
California just this summer (2011), prisoners held in long-term isolation
units were driven to the point of mass hunger strikes; and prisoners in
the SHU at Pelican Bay were able to organize theirs despite their
concerted isolation. The PB strike plan drew unified support across
racial lines inside, a remarkable development, and accomplishment, which
apparently helped the message to spread to other prisons up and down the
state. The strike was planned ahead for weeks, and for once there
was strong, effective support outside, resulting particularly in broad
coverage in the press, usually so oblivious to conditions in the
prisons.<a name="_ftnref6"></a>[6] The brothers who initiated
it said they were hoping maybe three or four hundred people at Pelican
Bay would participate, then after about two weeks more than six
<u>thousand</u> prisoners, in at least 12 institutions statewide, had
refused meals in support of the strike and its core demands; including an
end to the de-briefing requirement.<br><br>
After three weeks, an assistant commissioner came from Sacramento and sat
down at a table with prisoner representatives, and also allowed them to
hold a conference call with a team of outside negotiators that had formed
to help and intercede for them. Some token concessions were made
regarding living conditions, along with a promise that the need and
possibility for changes in the SHU system would be discussed within the
state administration, and further talks would then be held.
Believing they had made real progress, especially in gaining public
attention and getting a promised hearing on SHU conditions and policies
scheduled in the State Assembly, the prisoners agreed to accept these
assurances, in good faith but without illusions, and see what would
happen. The four strike leaders sent out this message:
<dl>
<dd>We’ll see soon enough where the CDCR is really coming from.
More important is the fact that while the Strike is over, the resistance
and struggle to end our subjection to human rights violations and torture
in the SHU is just beginning!! We’ve drawn the line on this, and
should the CDCR fail to carry out meaningful changes in a timely fashion,
we will initiate a class action suit and additional types of peaceful
protestwe will not stop until the CDCR ends illegal policies and
practices in the SHU.<br><br>
<dd><i>We’re counting on all of our outside supporters to continue to
collectively support us, and carry on shining a light on our resistance
in here. This is the time for change in these prisons, and the
movement to do so is growing across the land. </i> <i>Without the
people’s support outside, we can not be successful!! </i> <u>All</u>
support, no matter the size and content, comes together as a powerful
force; we’ve already brought more mainstream exposure about these SHUs
than ever before, and our time for real change to this system is
now!!! (emphasis added)
</dl>
<br>
It is true that, in keeping with the increasing dog-eat-dog reality of
American life in general, street gangs in many places, and drug dealers
everywherein the predictable chaos arising from the country’s failure to
learn from its experience that prohibition doesn’t workdisrupted society
and often preyed on their own communities. But the fact is, a
substantial majority of prisoners are jailed for non-violent offenses,
and are themselves victims of a racist system that denies them
opportunities for education, and any real chance at all for decent
jobs.<br><br>
Moreover, most prisoners will be released at some time, despite the huge
sentences so heedlessly put on so many of them. If they don’t
receive education and training in prison, and instead are maltreated,
disrespected and hopelessly idle and bored; and then there are no jobs
upon their release, the cycle of crime and incarceration will obviously
continue; as it has. To our enormous cost in all ways.
Currently, almost two-thirds of prisoners who get out commit another
crime within three years of release. In California, huge numbers
are returned to prison for the most minor, non-criminal infractions of
parole conditions, as a matter of policy, decreed by the State’s
punishment overlords. Only now, because of the tax-debt-budget
crisis fomented in the political sphereand in California, certainly, the
recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a lower court order,
after many years of litigation, that the State must move or release some
30,000 prisoners, almost one-fifth of its total, to relieve
over-crowdingis there renewed impetus to look seriously at who is sent
to prison, why and on what terms, and what happens to them when they’re
released.<br><br>
Despite the difficult climate, prisoners continue to organize and protest
inside; and, finally, hopefully, as the depredations of the rich classes
on the society as a whole awaken the conscience of more and more people,
especially youth, there is a rejuvenation of support groups on the
outside. The recent protests embodied in the hunger strike and its
public support, following earlier work inside and outside challenging the
gouging of prisoners and their families by phone companies, in cahoots
with ‘corrections’ officials, are examples that show that the
spirit of resistance is still alive.<br><br>
It should be clear to us, however, that a prison reform movement
based on the fiscal needs of different governments will not bring about
real change. Unless we begin to de-construct the whole system that denies
real opportunity to so large and growing numbers of people, and transform
the class-based and racist enforcement structures of the criminal justice
system, prisons will continue to be used as warehouses, and torment
centers, for those who are expendable in the larger political economy,
especially those who act out their resentment or resistance in any
way. We need a movement that demands an end to discrimination and
exploitation, as well as draconian prison sentences, conditions and
treatment, and fights for equal opportunity, education and decent
jobs. Prisons should be reserved for only the truly dangerous,
always with the goal of rehabilitation and release, and with adequate
resources provided to bring both about in positive ways.<br><br>
We do well to hearken back to the revolutionary spirit that motivated the
Attica rebellion: a demand for justice led by those who are
oppressed. But we must remember as well the message from the
Brothers at Pelican Bay:<i> Without the people’s support outside, we
cannot be successful!! </i>As Big Black said: <i>Wake Up
America! Nothing comes to a Sleeper But a Dream!<br>
</i> <br>
********************8<br>
Dennis Cunningham, Michael Deutsch, and Elizabeth Fink, along with Joseph
Heath, were staff attorneys at Attica Brothers Legal Defense in Buffalo
throughout the criminal trial phase which ended in February, 1976.
They continued as lawyers for the Attica Brothers in the civil suit that
was begun in 1974 and finally ended in 2001.<br>
<br><br>
<br>
<a name="_ftn1"></a>[1] Michael Smith remains a
stalwart witness for and friend and supporter of the surviving Attica
Brothers, four decades afterwards, and will be present in NYC to join in
the 40th anniversary commemorations. <br>
<br>
<a name="_ftn2"></a>[2] The famous pathologist Michael
Baden reviewed the autopsy reports and testified in the trial in 1991
that Sam Melville and L.D. Barkley, both wounded in the lungs, both might
well have been saved if they had received timely medical attention when
the shooting stopped.<br><br>
<a name="_ftn3"></a>[3] More people were
slaughtered by the U.S. Army at (the first) Wounded Knee, for example, in
1890, and at Sand Creek, Idaho, in 1875; and as many or more probably
also died in the race riots at Tulsa in 1921…<br><br>
<a name="_ftn4"></a>[4] In the 90’s Bill Clinton,
the hustler president, aiming as he did so often to beat the
reactionaries at their own game, flogged and then signed the so-called
Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), which basically
shut down federal relief from wrongful convictions of state prisoners;
and the Prison Litigation Reform Act, in reality a litigation suppression
act, which put huge, really malicious and legally perverse impediments on
civil rights lawsuits by prisoners, and lawyers trying to represent
them. <br>
<br>
<a name="_ftn5"></a>[5]<a name="art2"></a> The
Geneva Convention Against Torture states: PART I ,
Article 1, 1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term
"torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering,
whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for
such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a
confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a
third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with
the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting
in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising
only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
* * * * <br>
Article 2 , 1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative,
administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in
any territory under its jurisdiction. 2. No exceptional
circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war,
internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be
invoked as a justification of torture. 3. An order from a
superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a
justification of torture. <br>
U.S. Law, Title 18, Sec 2340 of the U.S. Code is more restrictive,
requiring infliction or threat of pain, or forced drugging or some
similar extension beyond simply “any act” by which severe mental pain is
inflicted…<br><br>
<a name="_ftn6"></a>[6] Indeed the mighty New York
Times itself has granted coverage, and, belatedly as to PB but in terms
that were admirably straight from the shoulder, considering, demanded
that long-term isolation be ended. See, “Cruel Isolation”, NYT
editorial, August 1, 2011 NEED LINK In contrast,
the close-by supposedly liberal San Francisco Chronicle was happy to
banner-headline the low-life propaganda smear from the authorities, that
the always-handy-to-take-the-blame gangs were enforcing the strike; then
were silent on the whole affair when a peaceful compromise was reached,
obligating CDCR to consider real changes, and negotiate further, to end
the strike. That’s not news, in their commanding view,
meaning it’s not something positive about these supposed ‘worst of
the worst’who our state holds in such deep torment that they begin to
starve themselves in protestthat they have any interest in having their
readership learn about… See, “Gang ties alleged in hunger
strike” (full-page headline, Bay Area section, July 14, 2011)<br><br>
<br><br>
<br>
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