Historical Significance of the Attica Rebellion:
Presentation to follow showing of Attica documentary
In all, the state police killed 39 people, 10 of them hostages. They leaked it to the press that the hostages were killed by the prisoners, but autopsies revealed they were all killed by the police.
The prisoners at Attica in 1971 were allowed only one shower per week. They were allowed visits only through wire mesh. The interception and censorship of mail was assumed. In the metal shop, prisoners worked for $.29 per day.
But in fact, conditions at Attica were slightly better than they had been in the past, as a result of increasing agitation and consciousness on the part of prisoners. The prison rebellions was not a spontaneous response to immediate conditions and demands. It was part of a much broader movement.
In MIM's 1991 commemorative Attica coverage, a Washington prisoner wrote: "To appreciate the events at Attica, it is first necessary to put them in proper political and historical context. Today many prisoners view justice as nothing more than a cop's bullet in the back or as endless years of meaningless confinement. That's bourgeois justice. What the brothers at Attica were fighting for is proletarian justice, which is an end to the system that perpetuates the destructive cycle that imprisonment represents. They wanted us to see their rebellion as one battle in a continuous struggle waged on an international level, not just one isolated incident."
What were their demands? They boiled them down to a handful, including:
The state response:
The response of the state was a cold-blooded massacre, so vicious it surprised everyone. It wouldn't have cost the state much to improve conditions. That wasn't the point. The point was that the Attica rebellion -- and the revolutionary nationalist and anti-war movements it was associated with, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, the Weatherman -- were a crisis for the state.
Their response was both inside and outside of the prison system:
Inside
1. Crackdown on prisoner organizing
2. Some dress-up type reforms, some real reforms, and modernized security
Outside
3. Increased use of the prison system itself to quell resistance: more prisons and prisoners, concentrated on oppressed nation members (e.g., the drug war)
Some of our lessons from Attica:
1. The United Front: They united all the different groups in Attica, and then called for an outside delegation that included revolutionary leaders, but also middle class liberals. We have some more support now in a bigger anti-prison movement, and some support from groups like Amnesty International and the ACLU.
2. The importance of political rights as a pressure point for prison organizing: speech, organization, free literature, censorship. We have publications for prisoners and supporters that link inside and outside, we have United Struggle from Within, the Books for Prisoners Program, study groups and so on.
3. Tactics: We can't win military confrontations with the state in and around prisons at the present. We don't encourage takeovers and violent confrontations, but they can lead to some reforms at a very high price. There is more political repression now, dressed up as anti-gang or anti-drug measures (Security Threat Groups, Secure Housing Units, etc.)
What we need now:
To build support on the outside: Books for Prisoners, agitation and exposure, education and consciousness raising; linking prison to other issues (national oppression, imperialism, internationalism, labor, gender)
Organization on the inside: United Struggle from Within (independent institutions of the oppressed), pooling resources and experience, education and consciousness raising, agitating for reforms where they will be useful in a revolutionary context.