The Disaster at Attica

Inmates take over Attica prison.

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“If we cannot live as people, then we will at least try to die like men,” declared the prisoners’ spokesman. A thousand inmates had taken over Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971 and held 43 hostages for four days. Over those four days, negotiations for an end to the siege crumbled. On September 13 state troopers stormed the fortress in a bungled rescue operation and killed 39 people. It was the bloodiest prison uprising in American history. How was such a disaster even possible?

In 1971, over half the town of Attica’s nearly 2,800 residents worked at the facility, with white rural guards watching over a largely black and Latino urban population. The symbiotic relationship was an incubator of resentment and fear. “You have Harlem and the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy inside the walls, and they’re guarded by farmers who are scared as hell of them,” said one observer. The inmates had long complained of physical and psychological torture and abhorrent conditions. A state representative who had toured the prison had called it a “seething cauldron of discontentment that was about the erupt.”

The eruption happened on the morning of September 9, when a group of prisoners resisted returning to their cells and badly beat three guards, stealing their keys. The violence quickly spread as prisoners flooded “Times Square,” where the four corridors leading to the separate cell bocks intersected. They started freeing other prisoners, beating more guards, and taking hostages.

By early afternoon, all but cellblock D, where the hostages were held, was back under control of the prison authorities. In Cellblock D, a group of Black Muslims swiftly organized themselves to protect the hostages and stop the chaos. Russell George Oswald, the state’s commissioner of correctional services, showed up and was led into the prison’s yard by heavily armed prisoners. There he found a semi-functioning social order, and the hostages appeared to be in good condition, though badly shaken. He had been appointed as a reformer after riots in other New York prisons and work stoppages at Attica, but now more than a thousand prisoners regarded him suspiciously from under football helmets, their faces masked in sheets, weapons in their arms.

Over the next four days what unfolded was an exercise in incompetence and miscalculation. Negotiations stalled, brokered by an ever-changing ad hoc mediation team of more than 30 people formed in response to the prisoners’ demands. A macabre crowd formed around the jail—hysterical relatives, pushy reporters, and rowdy protesters. Oswald shuttled back and forth, harangued on all sides by those who thought he was compromising too little and those who thought he was compromising too much.

The prisoners’ main demand was full amnesty for their actions during the takeover. On September 10, William Quinn, one of the beaten officers, who had been ferried to safety during the riot, died. Both sides in the negotiations dug in their heels. Twenty-eight of the prisoners’ demands were granted, but they had been promised better conditions before. What they feared most was reprisals at the hands of their guards.

At the core of the situation was race. Oswald and the mediators simply couldn’t get the prisoners to believe they would be safe with their white guards. “If they’re shooting white college students, they certainly weren’t going to spare a group of black convicts,” one inmate said, referring to the gunfire at Kent State University the year before and summing up the racial arithmetic they all lived by.

Observers frantically pled with Oswald for more time, but on the morning of September 13 the hostages appeared on a catwalk with knives at their throats. Without warning, Oswald ordered an attack. Just after 9:30 a.m., a helicopter dropped tear gas, and a barrage of bullets rained on the yard. In less than ten minutes, over two thousand rounds had been fired, and thirty-nine people were dead. One hostage ran out shouting, “White power!”

The revenge the prisoners feared was meted out over the next four hours as the guards retook the prison, forcing inmates to strip, beating them, and threatening to castrate them. Only a few wounded prisoners were allowed out; the others were treated in an eight-by-ten-foot cell soaked in blood. “It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” the doctor told the press.

“There’s always time to die. I don’t know what the rush was,” a disappointed member of the negotiation team said. Like most of his colleagues, he believed the bloodshed could have been prevented by patience. It was announced that the ten hostages who died had all had their throats cut, but the autopsies revealed only gunshot wounds. They had been killed by their rescuers, who seemed to have fired indiscriminately. The coroner said, “It was like a turkey shoot.”

“I don’t know any other employer who could murder their employees and get away with it, except the government,” a former hostage remarked. In 2005, he and his co-workers were awarded $1.3 million in damages.

The immediate result of Attica was a deluge of reform bills and an additional 12 million dollars for the state’s Department of Correctional Services. But have America’s prisons really improved since then? With more than 2 million people behind bars, the United States has the world’s largest prison population. Its rural landscape is dotted with jails, mini-civilizations of largely black and Latino urban populations under the watch of mostly white guards. Inmates have more time outside their cells, better food, and improved sanitary conditions, but underlying tensions remain strong.

One thing can be said for certain: At least there has never yet been another Attica.

—Elizabeth D. Hoover is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.