ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1971 a four-day rebellion of over 1200 inmates at the Attica State Correctional Facility in bucolic upstate New York ended most horrifically after Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered almost 600 state troopers to storm the prison. Even though the raid took only 10 minutes, when one could finally see through the haze of spent ammunition, it was immediately clear that the price of retaking this facility by force had been staggeringly high.
Strewn across the muddy, rutted earth were bodies — 29 inmates and 10 hostages lay dead and scores of other men lay so severely wounded that they were assumed dead. As inmate James Asbury recalled shuddering, “I could see all this blood just running out of the mud and water. That’s all I could see.”…..
The bodies that littered D Yard were cleared away long ago. But the Attica rebellion is worth remembering, and reckoning with, because in ways that few have appreciated this uprising (and more specifically, the way in which it was “spun” to the public), left an important legacy. Not only did it have a significant impact on the post-1970s evolution of justice policy in the country, but it also had some serious political as well as legal fallout….
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