Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016) (If you believe the world divides into the "good guys" and the "bad guys," STOP! Even the best of us seem prepared to do some pretty bad things, even in our official capacities, when we think no one is watching, or no one really cares, or the public is on our side. In reading this book, ask not only whether the various state officials were negligent. Ask whether some of them committed (or at least condoned) essentially premeditated shooting, killings, torture, and abuse of Attica prisoners. Including the "Introduction," this book has 576 pages of text, plus 106 pages of endnotes. It is, at least for me, difficult reading as one see how the perversity of the criminal justice unfolds before one's eyes. Fortunately, the text is broken into 58 chapters, plus the "introduction" and "Epilogue." One will note many of the issues with the criminal justice system America is facing in the second decade of the Twenty-first century are the same, unresolved, chronic issues that were more than evident in late-1960s and early-1970s America. And, unsurprising, "race" is at its cornerstone. However, one will note the complicity of the press, the ever-present political "spin-doctors," the failure of critical thinking, and the reactionary "law-and-order" drumbeats. Moreover, back then, as now, the facts don't seem to really matter: of the facts don't jive with one's agenda, create facts (e.g., a hostage was castrated by the Attica prisoners, when in fact the hostage's injury and death was result of gun wounds inflicted by New York State Troopers and Correctional Officers). Time moves forward, people remain unchanged. And, few people read history, so there is little or no learning form the past."The troopers had removed their identification emblems--the badges affixed to their collars that indicated which troops they belonged to as well as their name and rank--just before they went in. Trooper Captain William Dillion not only took off his nameplate and his captain's bars. but as he later recounted, he 'told [his] people to take them off too . . . [because] we weren't stopping traffic where a citizen would have the perfect right to know who they're being stopped by . . . it was a different thing.' Trooper Gerald Smith explained it even more bluntly: 'Everybody started taking off their things . . . so they couldn't identify what troop or identity to pinpoint the individual in case something happens'." Id. at 179. "Looking over the railing, Smith saw a trooper approach a prisoner who was lying still on the pavement and shoot him in the head." Id. at 183. "' I never saw human being treated like this,' another prisoner later recalled.He couldn't understand: 'Why all the hatred?' But is wasn't just any hatred--it as racial hatred. As one prisoner was told by a proper who had a gun trained on him: he would soon be dead because 'we haven't killed enough niggers,' Everywhere there were crises of 'Keep your nigger nose down! 'Dob't you know state troopers don't like niggers?' Don't move nigger! You're dead!'" Id. at 185. "Any white inmate who had stood with the black rebels in D Yard also suffered special abuse. Doctors from the National Guard reported hearing troopers and COs punctuate their beating of white inmates--the 'nigger lovers'--with bitter refrains of 'This is what you get for hanging around with niggers.'" Id. at 212. "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 deliberatively kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access." Id. at xiii. So, the question: who was/is being protected by preventing access to the documents?).
Tom Wicker, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1975, 2011) (From the "Afterword": "Long after A Time to Die was published in 1975, Governor Hugh Carey of New York pardoned everyone who had been concerned in any way with the Attica revolt ad the attack that ended it. That had the effect of canceling the indictments of sixty-one inmates who had been charged with everything from murder to sodomy. But Governor Carey's action also meant that no state policeman, correction officer, or any state official would be charged with anything that had contributed to the deaths of twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages in the deadly, six-minute fusillade fired into D-yard on Sept. 13. Nor would anyone be indicted or tried for the failure to provide adequate medical care for the wounded after the firing stopped, or for the repeated torturing and beating of inmates when the revolt had been crushed, or for prison officials' failure to put a stop to these reprisals." Id. at 311.).
