Vol. 79/No. 21 June 8, 2015
Thousands of inmates have organized hunger strikes and other protests over the last couple years, including in the notorious solitary confinement units in California.
The documents are from a 1975 report by a commission headed by Judge Bernard Meyer, who was appointed to investigate charges of a cover-up in crushing of the rebellion. The first volume was made public at that time, but volumes two and three were sealed.
Even though highly edited from some 400 pages in the two volumes, the newly released documents corroborate accounts by prisoners that authorities have brushed aside for years.
A state judge granted permission to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to release the edited material last year. Thousands of other documents are still sealed.
The Attica rebellion began Sept. 9, 1971, when 1,300 prisoners took over four cellblocks and the adjoining yard, after guards beat two prisoners. Anger had been simmering after prison authorities brushed aside petitions demanding inmates be allowed more than one shower a week and more than one roll of toilet paper a month, better food, an end to censorship of newspapers and magazines, the right to medical treatment, and an end to the fostering of racial divisions by prison officials.
Inmates held about 40 guards and civilian workers hostage, elected an executive council and presented more demands. “Apply the New York State minimum wage law to all state institutions. STOP SLAVE LABOR” topped the list.
The rebellion took place in the midst of a rising movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam and on the heels of the mass proletarian fight that overturned Jim Crow segregation in the South and the rebellions in northern ghettos that helped win affirmative action in hiring and education.
The fury of the oppressed
“We are men. We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States,” L.D. Barkley, one of the leaders of the rebellion, read from a “Declaration to the People of America” by the inmates. “What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.”On Sept. 13, liberal Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller ordered in 1,000 state troops, prison guards and National Guardsmen to retake the grounds. They fired indiscriminately as helicopters dropped tear gas.
Thirty-three prisoners and 10 hostages were killed and more than 300 prisoners wounded. At first the government asserted that prisoners had killed the hostages, slit their throats and castrated one of them. That turned out to be a bald-faced lie. Within a day officials had to admit that all the dead had been killed by the cops’ assault. Barkley was one of the inmates killed after the prison was retaken.
The newly released documents report that James Watson, a National Guardsman, told the commission that “he observed inmates beaten on stretchers, poked in the groin and rectum with nightsticks, beaten while running through gauntlets, and other severe beatings, including one inmate beaten by seven Correction Officers.”
Kevin Burke, another National Guardsman, “treated wounded inmates only to have bandages ripped off, saw stretchers deliberately tilted, saw guards beat inmates on medical carts with clubs, saw a prison doctor pull an inmate off a cart and kick him in the stomach.
Robert Jenks, a physician, testified that he “was refused permission to evacuate to Genesee Hospital an inmate who had suffered severe brain damage; on the 14th saw people with fractures that had not been treated and people in need of transfusion who had not yet received it.”
The documents include testimony from several prisoners. Inmate Jacques Roberts described “being beaten with rifle butts while lying prone, hearing a shot fired immediately after an officer in an orange raincoat said, ‘This nigger ain’t dead yet,’ having a lit cigarette shoved by a trooper into his rectum.”
Only one prison guard was ever indicted — but never prosecuted — for any act of brutality connected to the retaking of the prison. Gov. Hugh Carey granted a blanket amnesty for prisoners and guards in 1976.
Conditions in Attica, like other prisons, are pretty much the same today. “The United States Justice Department is now reviewing inmate abuse at Attica Correctional Facility,” the May 17 New York Times reported, after three guards brutally beat an inmate in August 2011. As part of a plea bargain, none of the guards will go to jail.
Related articles:
1971 article explains ‘Why Attica exploded’
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