The largest prison riot in US history, the Attica prison riot, began on September 9, 1971. Attica was a maximum-security prison located in New York State near Buffalo. At the time of the riot it housed 2,200 inmates in a facility meant to hold fewer souls. Besides overcrowding, the grievances of the inmates included censorship, unsanitary living conditions (one shower per week and one roll of toilet paper per month, for instance), and racism in a place where over half the inmates were colored and every guard was white.
The immediate event that triggered the uprising, perhaps, was the probable murder of George Jackson at San Quentin prison in August of that year. On the way to breakfast on September 9, inmates overpowered their guards, broke through a weakened gate, and gained access to all the cell blocks.
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Although tear gas and armed state police quickly regained control of most of the prison, about half of the inmates continued to hold one of the exercise fields while taking thirty-nine prison employees hostage. After several days of negotiations, during which time New York governor Nelson Rockefeller called in more forces, state police stormed the yard amidst a hail of bullets and tear gas.
The Cost of the Attica Prison Riot
After the tear gas cleared and police finished firing 3,000 rounds into the yard, thirty-nine people were dead and eighty-nine others wounded. Of the dead, ten were hostages and twenty-nine were inmates, a few of whom police killed after they’d surrendered. Although authorities claimed that the inmates had slain the hostages, autopsies clearly showed that every dead hostage had been shot by the authorities. Later, the inmates faced various other reprisals from prison authorities.
Although I suppose the reader could draw many conclusions from the story of the Attica prison riot, the one I’d like to focus on is the utter indifference to human life shown in every aspect of the riot. The original treatment that angered the prisoners to begin with seems, by all accounts, horrible. This, along with racism shown many of them by the guards, made the inmates even more callous and angry, causing them to riot on September 9. This resulted in the other four casualties at Attica—one prison guard whom inmates threw from a window and three other inmates killed when the riot began.
Worst of all was the storming of the exercise yard. Thirty-nine people died when negotiations could have prevented any deaths. Why? Apparently, the lives of the inmates and the prison employees were less important than the state exerting force and sending a message that it could not tolerate any dissension against its authority. The lives lost in the Attica prison riot were, it seems, a price the state gladly paid to send this message.
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