When a helicopter flew over the yard at Attica Correctional Facility on Sept. 13, 1971, five days into a takeover of the prison by its 1,300 inmates, some of the prisoners thought it held New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, come to help negotiate an end to the standoff.
They realized their error when the gas dropped.
The combination of CS and CN gas created a “thick, powdery fog” in the yard “that quickly enveloped, sickened and felled every man it touched.”
But while the gas subdued the prisoners, it was merely the opening salvo in a full-on sadistic assault that set the stage for days of death and bloodshed, weeks of torture, years of pain and decades of lawsuits, investigations and recriminations.
For her new book “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” Heather Ann Thompson tracked down long-hidden files related to the tragedy at Attica — some of which have since disappeared — to tell the saga in its full horror.
The book’s many revelations include how police had removed their identification prior to the raid and how prisoners were misled into believing negotiations were ongoing at the time. Thompson reveals that the state took its actions knowing its own employees, then being held hostage, would likely be killed. She lays out how officials as high up as President Richard Nixon supported many of these actions and how in the years following the riots, the state went to extraordinary lengths to try to obscure facts and protect offenders.
“I found a great deal of what the state knew, and when it knew it,” she writes, “not the least of which was what evidence it thought it had against members of law enforcement who were never indicted.”
The Attica riot was the culmination of a growing frustration at the time with conditions in America’s prisons, including severe overcrowding, virtual starvation, and an often complete absence of medical care. (Located in Western New York, Attica prison remains active, and has since held the likes of David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz and John Lennon’s assassin, Mark David Chapman.)
The corrections officers were often locals simply looking for steady work. They received no training on how to deal with caged, often violent men and were paid so poorly that many required a second job to make ends meet, yet each was expected to oversee anywhere from 60-120 prisoners at once.
Early in the summer of 1971, the commissioner of prisons received a list of demands from a prisoner group calling themselves the “Attica Liberation Faction.” The letter cited how the administration and prison officials “no longer consider or respect us as human beings,” and demanded 28 reforms including “improvements in the working and living conditions and a change in medical procedure.” The state’s reaction was to punish anyone found in possession of this manifesto with 60 days in solitary and to tighten prisoner conditions overall.
Soon, prison officials realized that traditional factions among racial and religious lines were breaking down, the men instead forging a new solidarity. On Aug. 22, the day after a prisoner in California was murdered, “most of the prisoners were wearing a strip of black cloth as an armband,” and ate their breakfast in unnerving silence. Attica’s officers began expressing fears to their families; some began “leaving their wallets at home in case anything ‘jumped off’ at the prison.”
A violent confrontation on Sept. 8, 1971, led prisoners to believe, incorrectly, that one of their own had been killed when they saw guards carrying his limp body to his cell.
The tension exploded on Sept. 9. After a prisoner in lockdown was released when a fellow inmate managed to flip the switch to his cell door, a group of convicts were locked in a passageway, known as A Tunnel, on the way back from breakfast. Believing they were about to suffer a fate similar to the prisoner from the day before, one attacked a guard, and several others immediately joined in.
“All of a sudden, it seemed to dawn on [the prisoners] that they were little more than sitting ducks locked in the tight confines of this ill-lit tunnel,” Thompson writes. “As prisoner Richard X Clark put it, ‘We expected the goon squad any minute.’ ”
Now petrified they were about to face harsh reprisals, the prisoners “began grabbing anything they could find to protect themselves.”
Some inmates hid in fear, while others saw a chance for revenge against guards or prisoners who had done them wrong. “Within mere minutes,” Thompson writes, “A Tunnel had disintegrated into a blur of flying fists, breaking windows, and screaming men.”
Many in other sections of the prison could see the melee, and others still could hear it. Word spread quickly, and throughout the prison, men were grabbing any potential weapon they could find and stripping guards of their keys. A guard named William Quinn, after surrendering his keys and nightstick, was “hit on the head with tremendous force by someone wielding what was later described as either a two-by-four or a ‘heavy stick.’ Quinn fell to the ground, where others set upon him and trampled him.”
Many prisoners went out of their way to protect guards who had treated them well. When one group of prisoners forced a guard named G.B. Smith to strip, another grabbed him, screaming “that this was his ‘motherf—ing hostage.’” As he whisked Smith away, he told him, “Don’t worry, I’m going to try to get you to the yard as easy as possible.” Meanwhile, more than 30 guards were held captive in the prison yard.
The events of the next four days, which Thompson relays in visceral detail, included strained negotiations that found a team of observers, including famed attorney William Kunstler and New York Times reporter Tom Wicker, attempt to assist negotiations between the prisoners and the state, and Rockefeller refuse to make an appearance that many later believed might have quelled the entire incident.
Despite Quinn’s treatment — he soon died of his injuries — the prisoners made attempts at good faith negotiations. But in the end, their greatest demand was for amnesty for their actions during the riot. Quinn’s death made this impossible.
State police and others in law enforcement arrived at the prison en masse on day one, hoping to retake it by force. On day five, Rockefeller gave the order, with President Nixon’s support, to overtake the prison. But it was clear to all, Thompson writes, that the retaking would almost certainly result in the deaths of at least some of the guards being held hostage.
The force that stormed the prison consisted of 550 uniformed members of the New York State Police plus hundreds of sheriffs, deputies and police from neighboring counties, many brandishing their personal weapons, eager to take a shot at prisoners who killed one of their own. State officials later said these officers arrived of their own accord, but the officers claimed they were invited.
One officer, Technical Sgt. F.D. Smith, later commented that, “an attitude of disgust was apparent among troopers and guards . . . a number of our people were heard wishing for ‘something to happen even if it’s the wrong thing.’ ”
As such, many of the officers removed their identification before entering the prison, allowing them to act with impunity. One officer, who arrived with his rifle, said he was told by a member of the state police to “‘pick a target’ and shoot to kill.” Many of the officers used “.270 caliber rifles, which utilized unjacked bullets, a kind of ammunition that causes such enormous damage to human flesh that it was banned by the Geneva Convention.” While the plan called for officers to clear one section of the prison after the gas was dispersed, there was little set in stone after that.
Once the gas was dropped, recapturing Attica was quick and easy. What happened after that was something else altogether.
“It was instantly clear that troopers and COs were no longer merely trying to regain control of the facility. This was already done,” Thompson writes. “They now seemed determined to make Attica’s prisoners pay a high price for their rebellion.”
What followed were acts of brutality so heinous they beggar the imagination. Officers were shooting indiscriminately, smashing in convicts’ heads with the butts of their guns and shooting them, then sticking gun barrels in their mouths for laughs. One prisoner was shot seven times, then handed a knife by a trooper and ordered to stab a fellow prisoner. (He refused, and the officer moved on.) Another was shot in the abdomen and leg, then ordered to walk. When he couldn’t, he was shot in the head.
Some of the black prisoners heard the N-word screamed at them as they were shot, or taunts of, “White power!”
“[The guards] received no training on how to deal with caged, often violent men and were paid so poorly that many required a second job.”
As this was happening, a group of prisoners formed a circle of protection around the hostages but were soon gunned down. Several guards found themselves staring into a fellow officer’s barrel, seconds from death, saved only by a last minute scream of, “He’s one of ours!” But in the chaos and savagery, both hostages and members of the rescue force fell victim to their fellow officers.
A half-hour after the operation began, 128 men had been shot; 29 prisoners and nine hostages had been killed. And the real chaos had just begun.
In the hours and days following the retaking, while Rockefeller touted the mission as a great success and the public was told the dead hostages had been killed by prisoners, Attica became a chamber of horrors.
Naked prisoners were forced to run gauntlets, beaten with batons as they ran. One 21-year-old inmate shot four times heard troopers debating “whether to kill him or let him bleed to death . . . as they discussed this the troopers had fun jamming their rifle butts into his injuries and dumping lime on his face and injured legs until he fell unconscious.” Prisoners were made to crawl naked on concrete through blood and broken glass, subjected to Russian roulette and even forced to drink officers’ urine.
For the victims of this abuse, no medical care was made available, in some cases for days or even weeks. One doctor was ordered not to treat a shooting victim with blood running down his face, and a guardsman was literally ordered to rub salt in another prisoner’s wounds.
Even Attica’s official physicians got in on the act. According to Thompson, when presented with an injured prisoner with a swollen neck, Attica’s Dr. Paul Sternberg “laughed and said, ‘Ha, ha, you swallowed your teeth.’ ” Either Sternberg or the prison’s other doctor, Selden Williams, was reportedly overheard saying of a prisoner, “That n—-r is a f—-r and he should have died in the yard so we won’t treat him.”
Meanwhile, thanks to a pliant press, the nation was initially convinced that all the savagery had come at the hands of the prisoners.
In many ways, even 45 years later, the ordeal at Attica has never really ended. As the truth emerged over the coming years, protests erupted around the country, the prisoners’ abuse becoming a symbol of a government and a system out of control.
Investigations that followed found police visiting many of the same prisoners who endured this torture, threatening them with abuse or indictments if they didn’t testify against their fellow inmates.
In 1976, Gov. Hugh Carey, overwhelmed by the complexities and the political minefield of it all, announced clemency and pardons for every Attica prisoner for cases related to the riots.
In 2000, a class action of prisoners won $12 million from the state and, perhaps more meaningfully, got to tell their tales of abuse on the record.
The judge’s order included a 200-page summary detailing the atrocities these men had faced. But even with this, their story feels something less than complete.
“Even though they had settled with the state, the state still would not admit to wrongdoing at Attica,” writes Thompson. “It wasn’t even close to justice. But it was the closest thing to justice that these men would ever get.”