Attica in September 1971 and the Prisoners' List of Demands

In late August 1971, a few weeks before anyone outside western New York had heard of Attica, the men inside the prison held a protest that guards found more unsettling than a riot. The news had reached them that George Jackson, a Black prisoner and writer, had been killed at San Quentin in California. The next morning hundreds of Attica prisoners walked to breakfast wearing black armbands, sat down, and refused to eat or speak. Nobody shouted. Nobody threw anything. The silence spread through the mess hall, and the officers, almost all of them white men from the farm towns around the prison, realized that the people they guarded had organized themselves without asking permission. Two and a half weeks later, on the morning of September 9, a confrontation in a tunnel turned into a takeover, and by midday about 1,300 prisoners held D Yard and dozens of hostages. What happened over the next four days is the deadliest prison uprising in American history. The part that tends to get forgotten is that the men in the yard spent most of that time writing down what they wanted.

In short: The Attica uprising began on September 9, 1971, as prisoners seized a yard and hostages and drafted demands about food, medical care, religion, censorship, wages and parole. After talks broke down over amnesty, the state retook the prison on September 13 with gunfire that killed 29 prisoners and 10 hostages, and the legal fights over the killings, the reprisals and the official cover-up went on for about three decades.

The prison in 1971

Attica Correctional Facility, in the town of Attica east of Buffalo, was built in the early 1930s and was advertised as a model institution. By 1971 it held well over two thousand men, and its population had changed faster than its staff. Most of the prisoners were Black or Puerto Rican, many from New York City. The officers were overwhelmingly white and local. Few staff spoke Spanish.

The conditions the prisoners described have been confirmed by every serious investigation since. Men were allowed one shower a week. They were given a single roll of toilet paper a month. Work in the prison shops paid pennies a day. Mail was read and books and newspapers were censored, especially anything political. Muslim prisoners said they were denied the chance to practice their faith and eat according to its rules. Medical care was minimal. Parole hearings, which decided whether a man went home, were brief and unexplained.

Over the summer of 1971, a group of prisoners calling themselves the Attica Liberation Faction had sent a manifesto to the state corrections commissioner, Russell Oswald, and to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, setting out their grievances and asking for changes. Oswald was considered a reformer by the standards of his day, and he made some promises. Very little had changed by September.

Four days in D Yard

The takeover was not planned as a revolution. A clash between officers and prisoners the day before led to rumors of punishment, and when guards tried to move a group of men on the morning of September 9, a fight broke out in a passageway, a gate failed, and prisoners poured through the institution. Officer William Quinn was badly beaten in the first minutes and died two days later in a hospital. He was the first person to die at Attica that week.

By the afternoon, prisoners had gathered in D Yard with about forty hostages, guards and civilian employees, held in a circle at the center. Then something unusual happened. Instead of chaos, the yard organized. Prisoners elected spokesmen from each cellblock. They set up a security force to protect the hostages from angry men. Muslim prisoners formed a guard around the captives. Medics improvised a hospital. Committees argued in front of television cameras about what to ask for.

The prisoners requested outside observers, and the state agreed. Over the next days, an extraordinary group arrived: the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, the civil-rights lawyer William Kunstler, the Buffalo state assemblyman Arthur Eve, the Bronx congressman Herman Badillo, ministers, journalists and activists. They went into the yard, sat at a table in front of hundreds of men and tried to broker an end. Wicker later wrote a book about the experience, and his account of sitting in that yard, frightened and moved at once, is one of the reasons the public ever understood what the prisoners wanted.

What the list actually said

The demands evolved over the four days. Some of the early ones were impossible and the prisoners knew it, like a request to be transported to a nonimperialist country. But the core list, refined through argument with the observers, was strikingly practical.

The prisoners asked for a real diet, with less pork and more fresh food. They asked for more than one shower a week. They asked to be paid the state minimum wage for prison labor. They asked for an end to censorship of newspapers, magazines and books, and for freedom to practice their religion. They asked for Spanish-speaking officers and doctors, an end to arbitrary punishment, a grievance process, real education and job training, and a fair system of parole with reasons given for denial. They asked for better medical care. They asked that they be allowed to communicate with lawyers and the press without interference.

Read today, much of that list sounds like a modern corrections policy manual. Many prisons in the United States now have grievance systems, religious accommodation rules backed by federal law, and at least some educational programs. The men in D Yard were early, not unreasonable.

Commissioner Oswald eventually agreed to twenty-eight of the demands. That should have been a turning point. It was not, because two issues could not be settled. The prisoners wanted complete amnesty from criminal prosecution for the uprising, and after Quinn's death that meant amnesty for what might be a murder charge. They also wanted the prison's superintendent removed. The state refused both. The observers pleaded with Governor Rockefeller to come to Attica in person, arguing that his presence might buy time and save lives. He declined, saying it would not change anything.

The morning of September 13

It rained on Monday, September 13. In the middle of the morning, a helicopter flew over D Yard and dropped tear gas. State troopers and corrections officers, many of whom had not been trained for this kind of operation and some of whom were using their own weapons, moved in firing. The shooting lasted only a few minutes.

When it was over, 39 people in the yard were dead or dying: 29 prisoners and 10 hostages. Counting Officer Quinn and three prisoners killed by other prisoners during the occupation, 43 people died because of the uprising.

That afternoon, state officials told reporters that the hostages had died because prisoners cut their throats. The story spread across the country. The next day, the Monroe County medical examiner, Dr. John Edland, performed autopsies and reported that every hostage killed in the retaking had died of gunshot wounds. The prisoners had no guns. The bullets came from the state. Officials disputed him at first; his findings were confirmed.

The violence did not end with the shooting. Prisoners were stripped, forced to crawl through mud, made to run between lines of officers swinging clubs and threatened with death. One man, Frank Smith, known as Big Black, was forced to lie on a table with a football under his chin and told he would be killed if it fell. Those reprisals were later documented in court and became the heart of the prisoners' civil case.

The state's story and the long correction

New York's first response was to prosecute the prisoners. A special prosecutor's office brought indictments against dozens of them for crimes during the uprising. Only one state trooper was indicted for anything connected to the retaking, and that charge did not result in a conviction.

A lawyer inside the special prosecutor's office, Malcolm Bell, became convinced that the investigation of law enforcement was being steered away from the truth. He resigned and went public in 1975, alleging a cover-up. The state appointed a judge, Bernard Meyer, to look into his charges. Meyer's report found serious failures in how the investigation of officers had been handled, though large parts of it were kept sealed for decades. At the end of 1976, Governor Hugh Carey moved to close the Attica cases, granting pardons and commutations to prisoners and declining to pursue disciplinary action against officers. His message was that the state should stop prosecuting one side of a tragedy while ignoring the other.

Meanwhile, an official commission led by the dean of New York University's law school, Robert McKay, had issued its report in 1972. It concluded that the retaking was, with the exception of massacres of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War. It also concluded that the uprising grew out of the conditions the prisoners had described.

Three decades of lawsuits

The prisoners filed a federal class-action suit in 1974 on behalf of the men in D Yard, seeking damages for the reprisals and the use of force. It became one of the longest-running civil-rights cases in American history. A jury in 1997 found a senior prison official liable for the abuse of prisoners after the retaking. After appeals and more litigation, New York settled in 2000 for about eight million dollars for the prisoners, plus money for their lawyers. Frank Smith, who had spent much of his life on the case, saw it end.

The hostages' families had a different and, in some ways, bitterer fight. Many said that in the confusion after the retaking, they had cashed small state checks without understanding that doing so waived their right to sue. A group calling itself the Forgotten Victims of Attica pressed the state for years for an apology, the release of records and compensation. In 2005, New York agreed to pay them a settlement of about twelve million dollars. Some of the guards' families and some former prisoners came to see each other as people harmed by the same decisions.

The full story was not assembled until much later. The historian Heather Ann Thompson spent more than a decade researching the uprising, found records that were supposed to be sealed and published Blood in the Water in 2016. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It laid out in detail how the state planned the retaking, who fired, and how the investigation was shaped afterward.

Why Attica belongs in today's arguments

There are two easy ways to tell this story, and both miss something.

One version treats the uprising as a cautionary tale about dangerous prisoners. That version cannot explain the medical examiner's findings, the twenty-eight agreed demands or the official commission's conclusion about conditions. The other version treats the prisoners as pure heroes. The men in D Yard included people who had committed serious crimes, and a guard was beaten to death in the first hour; any honest telling has to hold William Quinn's family in view.

The more useful reading is about institutions. A prison is a closed world run by the state, and when the people inside it have no lawful way to complain, complaints come out in other ways. The state had months of warning, a list of reasonable requests and a commissioner willing to make deals. What failed was the political will at the top to take a risk on negotiation and the willingness, afterward, to tell the truth about who killed whom.

The irony of Attica's timing is hard to miss. Less than a year and a half after the retaking, Governor Rockefeller proposed some of the harshest drug sentencing laws in the country, and New York's prison population began a long climb. The men in D Yard had asked for rehabilitation, education and fair parole. The state that answered them with gunfire went on to build a system that needed more prisons, not fewer.

Attica also set off a wave of prisoners' rights litigation in the 1970s, as federal courts took up complaints about overcrowding, medical neglect and brutality that judges had once refused to hear. The pendulum swung back in 1996, when Congress passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which made it much harder for incarcerated people to bring and win lawsuits about conditions. Any honest account of what changed after D Yard has to include both the opening and the narrowing.

The demands still read as a checklist. Can incarcerated people file grievances that are actually answered? Do they get medical care that would be acceptable outside? Can they read what they want and practice their faith? Do parole boards explain their decisions? In many states, the answers have improved. In many, they have not.

What you can do

• See which parts of the D Yard list your state still has not met. Your state legislators set prison budgets, oversight rules and parole law; the representatives page finds them by address, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes.
• Support prison oversight and reentry work near you. The organizations directory lists justice reform and legal aid groups in every state, many of them run by formerly incarcerated people.
• Follow the federal rules that touch prisons and jails. When a federal agency proposes a rule on detention standards or prison programs, it appears on the public comment page, which lists rules closing soonest first and explains how to write a comment that counts.
• Read further on protest and resistance, where organizing inside and outside prison walls is part of a longer story.