September 13: The Attica Uprising

A prisoner takeover of Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum security penitentiary in western New York, was crushed on this date in 1971 when Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller sent in more than 1,000 state troopers, National Guardsmen, and local police. Forty-three people, including ten hostages, were killed and eighty were wounded during the assault, which was followed by reprisal beatings and torture that yielded decades of lawsuits. In January, 2000, Liz Fink, attorney for the Attica Brothers Legal Defense, announced an $8 million settlement of the class-action suit she and former inmate Frank “Big Black” Smith had overseen on behalf of the abused prisoners. “The amount is inadequate,” she told the journal Justice Matters, “because of what happened at Attica. In a closed yard where nobody had any guns, the state fired 2,500 rounds of ammunition over a period of sixteen minutes. They used ammunition and weapons outlawed by the Geneva convention, and they blew these people away.” The U.S. prison population has grown from about 300,000 in 1972 to more than 2.2 million today, with people of color, particularly African-American men, subjected to incarceration rates and discriminatory consequences that amount to what Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crow.”
“Attica itself changed the entire nature of prisons for about ten years, until Reagan came in. All of the programs that exist are due to the Attica riot — all the educational programs, the inmate grievance programs, inmate liaisons, etc. . . . People have to understand that prisons now are all about warehousing people, it’s about genocide. ” —Liz Fink