A guard assault on a prisoner provided the spark for the Attica revolt. On Sept. 9, 1971, about 1,500 prisoners took over four cellblocks and the adjoining yard at the Attica state prison in New York. They held about 40 guards and civilian workers hostage, elected an executive council, and presented several demands—including to be allowed to take more than one shower a week, that the bugs be washed off the lettuce they were fed, and that Muslims not be forced to eat pork. On September 13, on the order of then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, 1,000 state troopers, prison guards, and National Guardsmen descended on the unarmed inmates, firing indiscriminately. They murdered 33 prisoners and 10 hostages, and wounded more than 300. (For more details see “What was behind 1971 Attica prison revolt?” in last week’s Militant.)

The following is copyright © 1972 Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
 

The most reactionary and racist commentators simply attempt to justify the Attica massacre with the assertion that the men caged up there are criminals—i.e., guilty of acts defined as crimes by our “free” society. They are, therefore, not like “other people.” They are “uncivilized,” “antisocial,” and if they are treated like animals, it is because they are, after all, subhuman.

But millions of other Americans were struck by the elementary justice of the demands for which the Attica rebels were willing even to die. They were stunned by the brutal inhumanity of the murderous state officials. And they are trying to understand what happened at Attica.

One of the recurring topics in the post-Attica commentary on the prisons has been the “new mood” in the prisons, the emergence of a supposedly new kind of inmate. As Steven V. Roberts of the New York Times commented September 19, 1971: “A ‘movement’ paralleling those that have arisen in recent years among Blacks, students and women has now begun to emerge in the nation’s prisons.” Everyone is in agreement that while Attica and San Quentin are the visible tip of an iceberg, they are in no way unique. All over the country, Roberts comments, inmates “are making speeches, demanding meetings, and occasionally calling strikes.”

“They saw the welfare groups organize, the students, the Blacks organize for their rights…. There’s much more awareness that to organize is the way to go,” explained the obviously worried director of “corrections” in Michigan, Gus Harrison. The single most important reason, he added, is the general concern throughout society for more individual rights and self-determination.

Richard R. Korn, a former professor of criminology at the University of California (Berkeley), describing the particular oppressiveness of a maximum security prison and the way victims react to it, observed in the September 19 New York Times that “more and more (prisoners) are organizing politically and their political organizing is bringing them closer to the one objective prison administrators most dread: militant unity.” Roberts’s article commented that prisons are a kind of university for political education. “The ‘sacred texts’ of Black revolution— Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, George Jackson’s Soledad Brother—are treasured like gold. In Auburn prison in New York, such books rent for a pack of cigarettes a night. In Jackson, inmates circulate typed manuscripts of those that are banned.”

In the year preceding the rebellion, Pathfinder Press received close to fifty literature orders from Attica prison alone, covering titles like Malcolm X’s By Any Means Necessary, James P. Cannon’s Socialism on Trial, Trotsky’s Fascism: What It Is and How To Fight It, The Essential Works of Lenin, Etheridge Knight’s Black Voices from Prison, and George Breitman’s How a Minority Can Change Society. There were six subscribers to the revolutionary socialist weekly The Militant in Attica at the time of the rebellion.

A number of aspects of this new political consciousness, militancy, and unity point towards the deeply revolutionary implications of what is happening in the prisons today. Many of the observers on the scene at Attica commented on the militant class solidarity of the rebels, on the unity in struggle among Black, Puerto Rican, and white rebels, and the apparent absence of racial conflict among them. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker commented with obvious astonishment: “That prison yard was the first place I have ever seen where there was no racism.” But equally significant was the fact that it was unity under predominately Black leadership. The composition of the leadership reflected not only the prisons of this country, the reality of race and class oppression, but the depth of the Black radicalization as well.

Figures are not readily available on the race composition of the nearly 200,000 prisoners in state and federal institutions, but they are available for some prisons and some states. In New York City, for example, roughly 70 percent of the inmates are Black, 20 percent Puerto Rican, and 10 percent white. For New York State as a whole, 1970 statistics showed 52 percent Black, 13 percent Puerto Rican, and 35 percent white.  
 
The reality of class justice in America
Such figures reflect the reality of class justice in America. If you are young and Black and are convicted of any petty crime, you may well get life. If you’re rich and white and own half of Venezuela, you can order the murder of forty-two people and receive the thanks of the president of the United States. To pick one small example, an Illinois banker, Irving Projansky, was recently sentenced to one year in prison after being convicted of a $4-million stock fraud. George Jackson got life—and ultimately death—for a $70 gas station holdup he never committed.

In the aftermath of Attica, Howard University law professor Herbert O. Reid told New York Times reporter C. Gerald Fraser, “Certainly for Blacks, that as far as any notion of prison and punishment being a stigma, we are losing that because of the number of Black prisoners. We’re beginning to think that if you haven’t been (in prison) there’s something wrong with you. Going in is no big thing.” So the realization is growing, especially in the Black community, that prisoners are the real victims of this society. One must look outside the prisons for the criminals.

The prisons contain many of the most conscious, articulate, and courageous spokespersons of Black liberation, and they will unquestionably lead the struggle inside the prisons just as they have led it on the streets. It was precisely their rebellion against this racist, capitalist society which led to their imprisonment in the first place. As one Black ex-prisoner expressed it: “Blacks go to prison for messing with white society.”

The racist mentality of many of the guards was depicted in dozens of stories surrounding the Attica rebellion. Numerous observers noted that every single guard at Attica is white. Reporters detailed the treatment given news people, observers, relatives, and others who congregated in Attica during the rebellion. The Tipperary Bar across the street from the prison closed for the week when several Black members of the observer committee went in for a drink. Black and Puerto Rican observers were refused accommodations at motels. “A curfew, aimed at ‘outsiders and civil rights workers,’ according to the mayor (who is a prison guard), was enforced by civilians carrying hunting rifles who stationed themselves at the main intersections,” reported the September 15 Washington Post. The same article observed that “to many people in the town of Attica, the word ‘nigger’ was interchangeable with ‘inmate,” and when the list of freed hostages was read outside the prison Monday morning, it was greeted with loud shouts of “white power” from one of the waiting guards.

Perhaps the real mentality of those who ride herd on the prison inmates was revealed most gruesomely in the story of the post-massacre revelry. “On Monday night, after the prison rebellion had been put down, some of [the troopers] traded stories of their parts in it,” wrote New York Times reporter Francis X. Cline in the September 17 issue of that paper. “The talk in the barroom at the Holiday Inn in Batavia was heavy with memories of warlike darts and thrusts into embattled cellblocks, and through the rebels’ ‘tent city’ in the yard.

“The feeling of the troopers seemed then to be one of relief and relaxation, as glasses clinked over the songs of the bar’s entertainer, who at one point stared quietly at the drinkers and then sang: ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home,’ a song written by a convict about a Death Row inmate’s fantasy of dying.”

While some forty bodies lay in the morgues, and as many as 300 more human beings lay wounded in the cellblocks of Attica, the murderers ate, drank, and made merry. Against such a backdrop, the repeated assertions of the rebels that they were simply demanding their rights as human beings take on their full force. As Brother Richard (Richard Clark) put it during one of the long nights in the yard of Cellblock D, explaining that it was the guards and troopers outside who had the bullets and the machine guns, and the inmates who were safeguarding the lives of the hostages: “We are the only civilized men here.”

The overwhelmingly Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano population of the prisons; the all-pervading, institutionalized, and brutal racist mentality of the prison authorities; the growing political radicalization within the concrete walls—all these facts have been widely recognized and analyzed. Some observers have also predicted what is obviously on the order of the day—a growing battle for the extension of the civil and human rights of prisoners. While there have been prison revolts since prisons themselves came into existence, along with class society, it is unquestionable that the increasing numbers of politically aware inmates will spearhead a drive for political freedom within those walls. The American prison system can never be quite the same again following Soledad, San Quentin, and Attica.

But it is also true that there will almost certainly be more Atticas. Those who foresee more revolts and bloody reprisals are usually arguing for faster prison reform measures and fearing correctly—that they will not come rapidly enough. Such reforms are vitally necessary. Every improvement in the physical surroundings, every victory that gains a few more human and civil rights for society’s victims, will help make life just that much more bearable for them. But even the most humane prison is still a prison, and the reason there will be more Atticas is lodged in the very function of prisons in this capitalist society. Such revolts will recur so long as men and women are put behind bars for disobeying the inhuman laws of this society and struggling against its inequities—that is, as long as capitalism remains intact.

What does this society define as a crime? Almost all “crimes” are acts which violate the sacred right of private property upon which class society rests—the right of the few to control and benefit from wealth that belongs to all. “Crimes” are acts which break rules set up to guarantee the rights of a small handful, their right to condemn the masses of humanity to misery, exploitation, disease, starvation, and death—if it is profitable. The fact that the targets of “criminal” acts are most often the poor themselves only attests to the success of the rulers in setting the victims of class society to prey upon each other. Even murder, rape, and other “crimes of violence” can ultimately be traced, almost without exception, to the social inequities, and distortions of human potential and character that are rooted in capitalist society.  
 
Prisons exist to terrorize
The prisons of this country exist for one reason—to try to terrorize people into accepting an inhuman, irrational social system based on maintaining the “rights” of the few over the majority. Once capitalism is eliminated, once it is replaced by a system which can provide abundantly for the needs of the many rather than the profits of a tiny handful, once we have eradicated all the distortions of human potential which flows from this inhuman system and the institutions that prop it up, there will be no need for prisons. The very social system that has created and defined crime will have been eliminated.

But only a revolutionary upheaval strong enough to take power out of the hands of the Rockefellers and Nixons and place it in the hands of the most oppressed and exploited—the workers, the prisoners, the Black and Brown communities, the women, the draftees—only such a fundamental reorganization of society can bring about the necessary changes. That is the “prison reform” we are ultimately working for. New York Deputy Commissioner of “Corrections” William Baker told reporters the day of the Attica massacre that prison riots, like proletarian revolutions, occur in a climate of rising expectations. He might have added with even greater insight that the prison revolts merely reflect the growing crisis of the capitalist system in its death agony.

The names of the individuals who struggled and died at Attica and San Quentin and in the other prisons of America will go down in history alongside the names of men like Malcolm X as heroes of the masses in the coming American revolution.  
 
 
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