Uprising in Attica

Once a staple scene in Warner Brothers B films, the prison riot has become an ugly constant of American life. As time passes, the revolts of angry convicts get better organized, more political and harder to bring under control. Last week, at the turreted Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, 1,200 of the 2,250 inmates, most of them blacks, seized control of one cell block and parts of two others. They grabbed more than 30 guards as hostages, then locked the gates shut against a gathering force of more than 1,000 heavily armed police, state troopers and National Guardsmen. Rejecting surrender demands from prison officials, the convicts shouted instructions back from the captured central watchtower through makeshift megaphones. They demanded, and were allowed, outside lawyers and observers of their own choice to help them bargain with state authorities.

The tense deadlock continued for three days and into the weekend. While the impasse lasted, reported TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, the 55-acre prison compound in the lush and rolling countryside near Buffalo looked like the playground for some fantasy war game.

Tear-gas-carrying helicopters at times hovered over the prison yards. Officers with high-powered rifles pointed their weapons from atop the 30-ft. walls. Behind police barriers, local youths guzzled beer and wisecracked about the jailhouse drama. Later, both black and white groups of radicals converged on Attica, demonstrating on behalf of the prisoners. Inside cell block D, inmates armed with baseball bats, claw hammers, clubs and tear-gas canisters kept close guard over their hostages. In the prison yard, with the cool intensity of guerrillas, leaders of the rebellion put forward demands as inmate typists recorded the dialogue between the negotiators.

Dinnertime Incident. No one was certain precisely what had triggered the uprising, which appeared to be spontaneous rather than long-planned. The inmates themselves discounted the importance of a dinnertime incident one evening last week in which two prisoners hurled glass shards at a guard; the offenders were thrown into solitary confinement and, they claimed, beaten. Next morning after breakfast, one group of inmates refused to line up for a work detail, and the riot was on. In a short time, windows in nearly every cell block were smashed, bedding and furniture were set afire, and three buildings were burned out. Guards were quickly captured. Some of the hostages were beaten, and the rebels eventually released those needing medical attention. Guard William Quinn, 28, who apparently was thrown out a window, died of head injuries two days later. After the initial violence, the prisoners treated their hostages with care, giving them blankets, food and clothing.

Clearly, the causes of the riot went deeper than the dinnertime incident, and some were reflected in the prisoners' not unreasonable demands. Among other things, they had initially asked for better pay for prison labor, permission to hold political meetings, the right to "religious freedom," an end to mail censorship, better educational facilities, orderly grievance procedures and better food (including less pork in the diet, a provision put forward by Black Muslims). As the deadlock continued, the prisoners' main concern seemed to be for their own safety. They demanded not only "complete amnesty" but, for a time, even "speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialist country."

At first, the prisoners conducted their negotiations with New York Commissioner of Correctional Services Russell Oswald, who was carefully frisked before being allowed into the captured cell blocks. Early in the negotiations, a lawyer sympathetic to the prisoners secured from a federal judge a highly unusual injunction prohibiting any physical or administrative retaliation by prison authorities for the uprising. Even though Oswald signed an agreement that no rebel would be punished, the increasingly desperate convicts refused to accept his promise--and even rejected as worthless the court injunction, the terms of which they had dictated. Then, in an effort to avoid bloodshed, officials permitted a diverse array of outside observers, specifically requested by the prisoners, to "oversee" the negotiations. The group included Radical Lawyer William Kunstler, New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker (see THE PRESS), the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, a Baptist minister from Harlem and Black Panther Party Chairman Bobby Seale.

Much of the antagonism between prisoners and Attica authorities was clearly racial. A statement by the inmates complained of "the unmitigated oppression wrought by the racist administrative network of this prison." Although 85% of the inmates are black or Puerto Rican, there is not a single black guard. The cultural clash between the blacks, who are mostly from the New York metropolitan area, and the small-town or rural white guards is obvious and sharp. One critic of the prison charged that the abuse of black inmates has included throwing them into cells containing nothing but two buckets, one for food, the other for use as a toilet. After the buckets were taken away to be emptied, prisoners had no way of knowing which had been used for what purpose. Claimed one inmate last week: "The only way to get along here is to be white or a homo. The guards favor them." Added another: "I've been in jails for ten years and this is the worst--it is a death house."

More dispassionate witnesses point out that Attica is neither the best nor the worst of New York State's prisons. In fact, its prisoners have been successful in winning some improvements in their conditions--leading some Attica townspeople to complain that the "permissiveness" of the prison management was to blame for the rebellion. Yet most of the few prisoner gains were made through courts to change the policies of prison officials. In 1966, a federal court ordered officials to formulate rules that would allow Black Muslims to practice their faith. Attica prisoners conducted a non-violent sitdown strike last year, protesting low workshop wages and high prison-commissary prices, that led to a regulation cutting back on commissary profits. Last winter, prisoners won the right to be represented by lawyers at parole hearings, which has resulted in a backlog of hearings that, paradoxically, is a new source of grievance.

The troubles at Attica dramatize again the fact that much of the U.S. prison system (TIME cover, Jan. 18) is still inhumane and brutalizes rather than rehabilitates. The ills are not remedied by riots. The public has every reason to be outraged by the beatings, or as in last month's smaller but more violent uprising at San Quentin, the killing of guards. Yet, given the persistence of dehumanizing conditions in so many prisons, it is perhaps lucky that there have not been more Attica-scale rebellions.

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