The Attica Prison Uprising, 50 years ago today

Our season premiere!

Without further ado, subscriber!

I present the first episode of Season 3, chronicling the Attica Prison uprising of 1971. It’s been 50 years since the stunning rebellion, and still the consequences are unfolding:

You can also watch the full episode on Instagram and a preview on Twitter.

Today’s story comes from Blood in the Water by Heather Ann Thompson, a remarkable piece of scholarship.

Next time on Skipped History...

We’ll complete the two-part series on Attica. Although Part 2 doesn’t have a happy ending, I’m pleased to report that my family cat will make his first appearance on the show.

Next week, for paying subscribers, I’ll write about healthcare at Attica. The prison had just two doctors for Attica’s 2,000+ prisoners, and neither of them was exactly McDreamy. If interested, sign up below!

Otherwise, see you in two weeks with our concluding episode on the uprising. The transcript of today’s episode is below!

Cheers,

Ben

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This week’s transcript

Hello, I’m Ben Tumin, and welcome back to Skipped History! The weather may be hot, but this season will be even hotter than the weather... still got it! Today’s story is the first of two parts about the Attica Prison uprising of 1971. I read about it in Blood in the Water by Heather Ann Thompson.

Let’s jump right in—to prisons! With over two million people incarcerated today, the US has the largest prison population in the world, but that wasn’t always the case. In fact, the prison population only began to spike in the early 1970s. Why? Well, there are a number of answers to this question, and we’ve explored one or two before, but over this two-part series I’d like to zoom in on a particularly shocking explanation overlooked until recently: Attica.

Located in upstate New York, Attica is a typical small town—until you drive a mile to the south. There lies the Attica Correctional Facility, one of New York’s most notorious maximum-security prisons. Still, in 1971, hardly all of Attica’s 2,243 prisoners, most of whom were Black or Puerto Rican were hardened criminals. For example, 21-year-old Elliot LD Barkley, from Brooklyn, landed in Attica for violating parole by driving without a license. 19-year-old twins James and John Schleich were also in Attica for parole violations, with John originally being convicted for “unauthorized use of a motor vehicle'' and James getting caught “cutting a hole in a lady’s convertible top,” aka unauthorized construction of a sunroof. No good deed goes unpunished! 

And “unpunished” is an understatement because the conditions at Attica weren’t exactly humane. The prison suffered from severe overcrowding, with men crammed into tiny cells for 15-24 hours a day. Whether in the freezing cold winters or the scorching hot summers, prisoners were permitted one shower per week, one roll of toilet paper per month, and had to work menial jobs that rarely earned them more than six cents a day if they wanted to afford luxury items like toothpaste. Meanwhile, inmates received an insufficient amount of food to meet standards determined by federal guidelines, and if they violated scores of rules governing daily behavior like talking on the way to the mess hall, they could be subjected to punishments like indefinite confinement in their cells. And on top of that, aside from the occasional game of chess, Attica’s prisoners were bored: the prison had no newspapers, few books, nothing at all to read in Spanish, and only provided magazines like Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home, and House Beautiful—although, in the prison’s defense, it was just too expensive to provide magazines even more relevant to prisoners’ lives like Elevator World, Private Islands, Sheep!, and my personal favorite, Miniature Donkey Talk.

According to one person who later interviewed over 1,600 of Attica’s prisoners, the bottom line was that, by the 1970s, “almost all inmates including the acclimated ones” were “frustrated.” And the same could be said of prisoners at the Auburn Correctional Facility, another maximum-security prison in upstate New York. Fed up with many of the same conditions faced by prisoners at Attica, one day in June 1970, a group of Black inmates refused to work, blocked entrances to the prison yard, took 50 corrections officers hostage and issued a list of demands for reforms like more Spanish-speaking corrections officers and better medical care. Prison officials said okay you can talk to someone about your demands if you peacefully surrender, which, after six hours, the prisoners did. But instead of negotiating with the prisoners, guards proceeded to beat them, six were charged with criminal indictments, and the “militant troublemakers,” as Commissioner of New York’s Department of Corrections, Russell Oswald, called them, were sent to solitary confinement—in Attica, which didn’t do much to ease growing tensions there.

A year later, a group of five Attica prisoners sent their own list of demands to Oswald, calling for improvements in living and working conditions. “We hope that your department don’t cause us any hardships in the future,” they added, “because we are informing you of prison conditions. We are doing this in a democratic manner...” 

But New York State officials weren’t so keen to negotiate with them, either, as they knew that would upset the guy at the top: New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller. A lifelong Republican with presidential aspirations, he’d watched throughout the 1960s as Richard Nixon stole his political thunder. To steal some of it back, Rockefeller promised that he, too, would get “tough on crime.” And a Cold War warrior to his core, Rockfeller viewed rising prisoner agitation as part of a larger leftist plot, just “one more step toward the ultimate destruction of the country.” It's hard to deny his logic: first, you give prisoners sufficient toilet paper, toothpaste, and vegetables, next you’re reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and from there it’s a short step to providing quality healthcare to every citizen who, freed from crippling medical debt, will kill you in your sleep (hypothetically).

Still, Oswald, who had a record as a reformer, promised to at least meet with prisoners to review their demands. It became a high-stakes meeting for two reasons. First, conditions in the prison had continued to worsen. For example, as the summer of 1971 wore on, anyone even caught with a copy of the list of demands was put in solitary confinement. Second, on August 21st, George Jackson, a prisoner in California’s San Quentin State Prison, known for his writings on the brutality of the US penal system, was shot while trying to escape. For Attica’s prisoners, the significance of the death of someone as famous as Jackson was clear: guards “could get away with killing inmates.” In solidarity, the next day, Black, white, and Puerto Rican prisoners staged a “spiritual sit-in,” refusing to eat anything at breakfast. With unrest mounting and more visible than ever, prisoners waited with bated breath to see what reforms Commissioner Oswald would agree to at the meeting in September.

On the day of the meeting, they were disappointed. In the wake of Jackson’s death, Oswald himself had become more militant, writing to Rockefeller that displays of “convict unity” was proof “that anything can happen when dealing with the kinds of idealists and fanatics housed in our facilities.” So instead of attending the meeting, Oswald left a taped message for prisoners in which he apologized that “an emergent situation” had come up—one can only assume he had double-booked himself to have a talk with a miniature donkey—and the only reference he made to prisoners’ demands was that his staff would “continue to review” them. 

Unsurprisingly, Attica’s men felt betrayed, and as tensions reached a boiling point, an inmate named Sam Melville wrote to his attorney, “For Christ’s sake, do something.” But by that point, it was too late.

Tintl matbosh.

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