Heather Ann Thompson

This book took me almost five months to read entirely, partially because it is a dense legal history spanning some forty years, and more importantly, it is a witness to a huge amount of past and present human suffering, to a level of abuse of power that remains hard to fathom, to many many people working relentlessly for a level of justice they know will and can only be inadequate. It's a hard book to read. It is an incredible piece of work, and I am deeply deeply grateful it exists. It is as close to the truth as most people today can access about what happened at Attica, and it sheds a light on so many related struggles, in the past and right now.… (more)

It is surprising the Attica prison uprising and massacre are not better known today, disgracefully as they reflect on official America, and evocatively as they sum up the state of dissension into which the country had fallen after the upheavals of the Sixties. This was really a home-grown My Lai and Watergate in one, both brutal lethal action and state cover-up.

In 1971, conditions in a New York state prison provoked a prisoner riot and takeover. One guard was killed and others beaten and taken hostage, before the prisoners organized themselves to protect the hostages and provide them comforts. A small number of other serious prisoner-on-prisoner crimes took place during the takeover, but in the main the guards and civilian observers were treated well after the initial riot. After negotiations stalled over amnesty, which hostages begged Governor Rockefeller to grant, state troopers assaulted the prison with tear gas, shotguns and rifles, but without training, planning or clear rules of engagement. Riled up by untrue claims about prisoner brutality, racism against the mainly black prisoners, fear of radicals, and a days-long itch to get even, they shot dead 9 of the guards and dozens of prisoners in the barely coordinated assault, then proceeded to commit cold-blooded murders and torture. The state and police claimed the prisoners had executed the guards, until coroners publicly stated the deaths had been from firearms.

Afterwards, the state police investigative unit, which had been involved in the assault, was allowed to carry out the investigation, which entailed faking and destroying evidence, and coercing or suborning testimony from prisoners. Police leaders met with the Governor and his officials to cooperate on their stories. Trials proceeded for prisoners but not for any police or state agent. Only years later did prosecutorial assistant lawyer Malcolm Bell blow the whistle from the inside on police misconduct, after the state deepened the cover-up by shutting down his grand jury indictments of police, and instead putting up police commanders who had led the cover-up as grand jury witnesses to immunise them against prosecution. Even then, Governor Carey tried to close the book on Attica by pardoning the prisoners and ending any efforts to prosecute police. It took 30 years for a lawyer for the prisoners to get the state to settle civil claims over the violence, torture and abuse, for just $12m, and longer for the hostages and their families to get $20m.… (more)

Detailed account of the Attica riot, coming at a time of great social upheaval, which ended in deadly violence against inmates and the prison worker hostages they were holding (a number of whom were killed during the indiscriminate retaking). Rockefeller declined to send in the National Guard out of fear of another Kent State, but then made sure that higher-ups were insulated from the decisionmaking. The result was that a bunch of state police and prison guards went in, after hiding their identification and deliberately obscuring who had which guns, and then even after the riot was quelled continued to physically torture and torment the surviving inmates.… (more)

5532. Blood in the Water The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, by Heather Ann Thompson (read 17 Feb 2018) (Pulitzer History prize in 2017)This book tells the story of the Attica uprising in 1971 and of the subsequent events as the prisoners and hostages strove to obtain justice for the brutal methods used to subdue the uprising, involving much reckless and even criminal behavior in the poorly planned putting down of the prisoners' revolt. Governor Rockafeller did his best to try to cover up the evil that ,was perpetrated by the law officers who subdued the revolt. The legal system in New York does not come out looking very well; The author has done a lot of difficult research and there were still legal proceedings related to the uprising going on as recently as 2015, more than 40 years after the event. The author is not a lawyer and it shows but she has brought out such that was poorly done by the state and its lawyers and officers. Sometimes one thought that a more balanced account would have been more telling, since the facts do show misbehavior by lawyers and, surprisingly, judges in the long legal wrangling. I thought the book was over-long (578 pages of text, and 106 pages of notes) and I confess that the setting out of bad things suffered by many prisoners did not make for pleasant reading and I was glad to finish the book. But the accumulation of bad things done to the prisoners for many years is pretty convincing to show how hard it was for them to be afforded some justice in regard to the mistreatment they suffered. It is the 56th Pulitzer history prize winner I have read.… (more)