Blood in the Water

I like to think I'm up on my U.S. history, but if you're like me, you may not know much about Attica except that Al Pacino shouts it in Dog Day Afternoon. I did know it was a prison uprising, but I did not know that it was handled extremely badly by the government, with almost all the deaths attributed to New York State Troopers, including hostages, 43 in all with many more wounded.

Heather Ann Thompson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Blood in the Water, contains everything you need to know about the riot. "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."

Prison conditions in 1971 were not ideal (have they ever been?). Two weeks after an inmate's death emotions came to a boil, and the prisoners were able to take control of the prison. "The two COs watching over the A Yard group, John D’Arcangelo and Walter Zymowski, felt their knees go weak as a group of prisoners approached them and snatched their rings of keys. These officers watched helplessly as the group went over to the door to A Tunnel and, after struggling a bit to open the lock, flooded into the already cramped space to join in the fracas."

Many of the prisoners had been radicalized by either Islam or the current political situation. A list of demands was drawn up. "Observers," neutral people who would make sure there was no funny business, were called in (these included newspaper columnist Tom Wicker and politicians such as Herman Badillo). Meanwhile, the state police gathered outside the prison walls, chomping at the bit to rush in.

The first quarter of the book covers the siege. Demands were argued over. Black Panther Bobby Seale was brought in to talk to the prisoners. Some demands were unlikely to be met, such as being allowed to go to another country, but the sticking point was general amnesty, since one of the guards died after the takeover. Eventually Governor Nelson Rockefeller had enough and the police, along with the National Guard, went in. It was carnage.

Rockefeller and the state spun it that the prisoners had committed atrocities, when actually they tried to save the hostage's lives. The state police just started shooting, killing hostages as well as inmates. Prisoners were also tortured, and medical treatment was slow or completely lacking.

The rest of the book is about the investigations and trials that happened, some of them all the way up until the 2000s. Prisoners were charged with murder. Some were convicted, some acquitted. Then, a man named Marcus Bell, who initially worked for the prosecution, realized that the state was lying and switched sides. A lawyer named Elizabeth Fink worked on a suit brought by the prisoners against the state of New York, and won.

That prisoners won money for a riot they started outraged the surviving hostages and the families of the dead, who received a pittance. Another lawsuit was launched, and anger by these families against the prisoners cooled when they realized they had a common enemy--the state. These families eventually won some money, forty years later.

Blood in the Water is a long book, and full of details. It wasn't a slog, but certainly the action of the first part is more interesting than the seemingly never-ending trials of the last part. Those with only a fleeting interest should be warned away (this would have been an ideal book to be abridged by Reader's Digest). But the book does have dramatic arcs. Some people stand out as characters, such as Frank Smith, known as "Big Black," a prisoner who was tortured who fought for years for restitution, organizing the legal efforts and eventually befriending Dee Quinn, daughter of a guard who was killed.

Thompson's subtitle is "The Attica Prison Uprising in 1971 and Its Legacy." The legacy is not improved conditions in prisons. Nothing improved and prisons today are overcrowded and guards just as brutal. Instead, Thompson writes, "The Attica prison uprising of 1971 shows the nation that even the most marginalized citizens will never stop fighting to be treated as human beings. It testifies to this irrepressible demand for justice. This is Attica’s legacy."