The Attica Prison Uprising (Part 2)

The riot at Attica Correctional Facility in September 1971, demanding better living conditions and basic human rights, remains a significant moment in the history of the U.S. prison system. But many of the problems that catalyzed it persist.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, I'm Chuck and I'm Josh and we're the host
of Stuff You should know, the podcast that's right And
if you're into understanding cool and unusual and seemingly ordinary
and even boring things that are made interesting, you should
check us out. Please and thank you. We're on iTunes, Spotify,
Google Play Music, anywhere you get podcasts. Welcome to Stuff

(00:22):
you missed in History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. Today we are picking up where we
would left off on our previous episode about the Attica
prison uprising. When Attica Correctional Facility opened, it was praised

(00:47):
as a model of security, and it had been designed
specifically to limit the possibility of an uprising within its walls.
But forty years later, a lot of the systems, tools
and procedures that it relied on for security we're temperamental
and an obsolete or in some cases absent. As we
discussed in the previous episode, conditions at the prison had

(01:09):
long been demoralizing and humanizing to the men who were
incarcerated there, and on September nine, nineteenty one, and uprising
began that would end four days later with horrific violence
and bloodshed. So while the events in this episode can
stand on their own, I mean they have a defined beginning, middle,

(01:30):
and end. Our prior installment does contain a lot of context,
so we do recommend listening to it. To it first
and again, this whole thing ends with just some extreme violence,
so be forewarned if if if you're listening with your kids.
The incident that ultimately sparked the Attica prison uprising happened

(01:53):
on September eight, less than three weeks after the prisons
protest of the death of George Jackson. At San Quentin Prison,
Leroy Doer, who was on his first day back in
the cell block a exercise yard after being keep locked
for a week, was play fighting with another man. An
officer on one of the catwalks above the yard yelled

(02:13):
at him to stop, but he mistook him for another
inmate and he called him the wrong name. Dor not
realizing he was the one being yelled at, kept on
with his horseplay and Lieutenant Richard Moroney came in to
break it up. Dower insisted that he had not done
anything wrong, and he said he was not going to
be keep locked again for nothing. When Moroney tried to

(02:35):
grab him, do Or hit him, not hard, but hit
him in the chest. Maroney was astonished that Doer had
struck him even lightly, and so were the other men
in the yard, and a crowd started together, mostly taking
Doer's side and telling the officers to leave him alone.
One of the particularly vocal people in the crowd may

(02:57):
have been Ray Lamourin, who had been playing football nearby
the time. Eye witnesses completely contradict one another about whether
Lamori was involved, though soon Lieutenant Robert Curtis walked by,
saw the situation in the crowd that had gathered and
started to intervene. He moved in to try to get
Dower to go inside, and do Er continued to refuse.

(03:19):
Tempers on all sides flared up until Lieutenant Curtis suggested
that Lieutenant Moroney just drop it and they would sort
it out later. The method of sorting it out later
was to remove both Doer and Lamoury from their cells
after lock up that night and take them to the
prisons solitary confinement wing known as Housing Block Z or

(03:39):
h b Z. The widespread belief among Attica's incarcerated men
was that anybody taken too HBZ, especially after lock up,
was in for a severe beating, and this perception was
heightened in this case by the fact that Dower, who
was taken to HBZ first, was physically carried from his
cell and You protested loudly the whole way, which most

(04:03):
of the men in the cell block could hear but
not see. When officers returned for ray La Mauri, he
went willingly, but from their cells meant through whatever they
had at hand at the officers escorting him as they
passed through the block, In particular, William Ortiz through a
full soup cam which struck an officer and caused him

(04:24):
to need stitches. Although Ortiz was not taken to HBZ,
the order came down that he was to be keep
blocked the next day. By morning, everyone was on edge,
with rumors flying around Cellblock A, assuming the worst about
the fate of Deer and Lamouri. Some of the officers
who came on duty that morning had also been called

(04:44):
at home ahead of their shift and told to expect trouble.
And trouble arrived, and it arrived quickly. When Company five
William Ortiz's cellblock company went to breakfast. He was supposed
to stay in his cell. However, someone took advantage of
an unattended lock box to throw the lever for teases cell,
freeing him in defiance of his keep block order. Of course,

(05:09):
officers quickly spotted Ortiz at breakfast where he was not
supposed to be and realized that someone in Company five
had freed him. They started scrambling to figure out how
to keep Company five contained without alerting them to what
was going on, with the hope that they would be
able to identify the culprit. Ultimately, the decision was made
to take Company five to the exercise yard after breakfast

(05:31):
as normal, but to lock the gate at one end
of that tunnel, the end that connected the cells to
the yard, so that basically the man would get to
the end and then be stuck there. However, this plan
was not communicated very well. Attica just did not have
a good way of relaying information from one officer to another,
and at about eight forty five in the morning, Company

(05:53):
five's escort officer, Gordon Kelsey, was completely surprised to find
the gate locked. Then Lieutenant Curtis, who had been part
of the altercation the previous day, came into the tunnel
to talk to the men who were now contained there.
By this point, many in Company five believed that it
was Curtis who had decided to send La Maurian doer

(06:13):
to HBZ, and they started to think that they had
been trapped in this tunnel on purpose, so that the
officers could take retribution for Ortiz having hit an officer
with a suit can, or maybe for some of the
you know, the the uproar the day before. So men
from Company five jumped Officer Kelsey and Lieutenant Curtis. This
quickly devolved into a complete melee that rapidly spread through

(06:37):
Cellblock A. In the initial riot, Officer Carl Murray was
relieved of his keys and baton, while Cellblock a's inmates
destroyed furniture and equipment and ripped out telephone lines. As
we mentioned in Part one, Attica had been specifically designed
to reduce the threat of uprisings within the prison, and
to that end, all of the tunnels that connected various

(07:00):
parts of the prison converged into one point known as
Times Square. Each tunnel had its own gate to the square,
which could be locked or unlocked depending on how the
traffic needed to flow through it, or all the gates
could be locked to keep the cellblocks isolated from one another.
By closing and locking all the gates and theory, officers
could contain an uprising to just one portion of the prison. However,

(07:24):
on September nine, a group of about twenty prisoners from
Cell Block A tried to break down the gate to
Times Square, and they succeeded. The likely failure point was
a weld that probably dated all the way back to
the prisons original construction. Once they had access to Times Square,
the men from Cell Block A, who had scavenged makeshift

(07:45):
weapons and football gear and blowtorches from elsewhere in the block,
stormed Times Square and attacked the three officers who were
stationed there, taking their keys and knocking at least two
of them unconscious. Then they started opening the gates to
the other blocks, and and they're opening all the cells
in the other blocks. While some of the men that
they freed joined the riot, others did not and basically

(08:07):
stayed out of it. Officers who tried to intervene in
this initial chaos were quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers and
many were injured. Inmates forced several officers to remove their
clothing and march naked through the prison before being locked
in a cell. Attica really had no formal plan for
an event like this. The one thing that was supposed

(08:29):
to prevent a wide scale riot from spreading all through
the prison had failed to do that exact thing. The
prison was also seriously hampered by being incredibly short staffed
thanks to budget cuts and having a truly archaic system
of communication among the cell blocks. The blocks were connected
by a single line telephone, meaning that when officers first

(08:50):
tried to call the administration officers to report what was happening,
the line was busy. There was a dangerous chaos, and
the prison staff was really at a loss at first.
Stop it, and we're going to talk about how the
officers at Attica tried to regain control of this situation.
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Because of Attica's archaic communication system, Sergeant Jack English had
to call the block captains of each individual cell block
by phone to try to give them instructions and figure

(10:39):
out what happened in Cell Block A. Some of his
calls were thwarted by busy signals, and to make things worse,
some of his first successful calls were to ask other
cell blocks to send officers to sell Block A to help.
But the riot quickly spread out of a block and
into the rest of the prison, leaving those areas without
anyone there to try to regat in control. So for

(11:01):
about half an hour the riot spread essentially unchecked. At
about nine fifteen in the morning, the prison sounded its
only alarm, which was the steam whistle from the powerhouse.
The whistle alerted officers living nearby that they needed to
report for duty because something was going on, and it
also alerted everyone in the prison, inmates and officers alike,

(11:22):
that something was going on. Officers and incarcerated men and
parts of the prison who weren't yet touched by this
chaos started to operate under the assumption incorrectly that someone
was trying to escape, when really what was going on
was way more dangerous. For about the first two hours,
as people in various parts of the prison labored under

(11:42):
that misinformation, the incident at Attica was brutal and destructive,
moving through all four main cell blocks, riding men open
cell doors and armed themselves with kitchen utensils, hot grease tools,
and handmade knives that were hidden around the workshop ups.
They set fires and triggered the sprinkler systems. They assaulted

(12:04):
the custodial staff and destroyed furniture and equipment. Vandalism was widespread,
as was looting of the kitchens. The officers messed medicine
chests and the commissary. Multiple officers and civilian employees were assaulted,
and at least two incarcerated men were raped. Yeah, this
whole thing definitely involves into something that has a much

(12:26):
more noble purpose, but the first couple of hours definitely
fit the criteria of calling it a riot. In that
brief period, rioting prisoners took more than forty hostages, including
both civilians and officers, and that number would eventually rise
to fifty, although eleven would be released over the course
of the day, many of those being who were released

(12:48):
being very seriously injured. Thirty two prison employees and many
more inmates were also injured in this first two hour
wave of violence. Not everyone released from his cell participated
in the violence and destruction, though, several of the prisons
Muslim population rescued Officers Curtis and Murray from their attackers

(13:09):
in Cell Block A, and they continued to try to
seek peaceful solutions and prevent bloodshed for the duration of
the uprising. Barry Schwartz, who was also incarcerated in Cell
Block A, hid Lieutenant Curtis and officers Elmer Hewan and
Raymond Bogart, all of whom had been injured in the
initial melee in a cell, cleaned up a trail of

(13:29):
blood so they would be less easily spotted, and then
tried to keep them updated about what was happening elsewhere
in the prison. Ernest Hobbs, who was seventy two years
old and serving a fifteen year sentence for grand larceny,
first tried to protect a civilian employee from the mob
and then devoted himself to guarding the prisons oil and
gas in the garage. Rioters were only able to get

(13:51):
away with about five gallons of fuel, which were in
a container that was easy to grab. Throughout those first
two hours of chaos, there were also multiple other individual
inmates who found and sheltered injured officers in their cells,
sometimes dressing them in prison uniforms to camouflage them. Of course,

(14:13):
acts of heroism were not limited to the incarcerated men.
Civilian employee Mark Eckhart, for example, wound up sheltering fifty
five inmates and nine civilians in a maintenance shed overnight.
After the initial wave of violence started to subside, two
efforts simultaneously got underway. Attica's incarcerated men started to organize themselves,

(14:36):
moving inmates and hostages into the exercise yard of Cell
black d and law enforcement officials started planning to try
to retake the prison. On the law enforcement front, off
duty officers reported to Attica they were issued weapons from
the prison's arsenal in the administration building, but they soon
ran out of firearms and ammunition and began recommending that

(14:58):
people reporting for duty brea their personal firearms from home. However,
it became clear really quickly that after the fall of
Times Square, the regular custodial staff was not going to
be enough to restore order at the prison, not even
if every single officer off duty came in. New York
State Police were contacted to send in reinforcements. Major John

(15:20):
Monahan brought in two hundred from his own troop and
then summoned three hundred and fifty more from elsewhere in
the state. A lack of communication, which had been such
a limiting factor in the custodial staff's original response to
the riot, continued to hamper the state police's effort to
take the prison. There was no overall strategy, and there
was no centralized command. As the prison's population was moving

(15:44):
itself into D Block, the state police were slowly and
carefully moving through the rest of the prison, one section
at a time, evacuating anyone they found, and trying to
re secure the facility piece by peace. As they cleared
out and regained control of individual blocks, they relocated hundreds
of incarcerated men that they found in those cells. Although

(16:05):
some shots were fired during this initial process, no one
was injured. Meanwhile, about half of Attica's incarcerated population relocated
itself into D Block, with one thousand, two one incarcerated
men crowded into the yard, with about fifty hostages being
held in the corner. The hostages regarded once again by

(16:26):
many of Attica's Muslim population, who also found blankets for
naked officers to cover themselves and basically formed a human
wall to protect them. Gradually, the tone in d Yard
shifted from a riot to a disorderly party to a
protest one that developed a clear set of goals and demands.
Organization efforts started when Roger Champon, who was known as

(16:48):
champ took an officer's bullhorn and began trying to bring
the group to order. Champon had been serving time for robbery,
and he had become what was known as an inmate lawyer.
He had no formal law training, but he had become
adept enough at law to inform and assist other people
incarcerated at Attica. Champion had not participated in the initial destruction,

(17:10):
but he had come to d Yard after rioters were
already gathering people there. During this initial period of organization,
they moved the hostages to the center of the yard,
where their guard resumed their watch and reformed their human
chain around them. Once that was done, incarcerated men, especially
the ones who were the most popular and looked up
to within the prison, started passing around the bullhorn, taking

(17:33):
turns addressing one another about reforms that were needed in
the justice system, rules that they should set and follow
for the duration of this uprising, how they could work
together to bring about change, that sort of thing. Speakers
also stressed that this was not a race riot, which
was something that the white men had really feared was happening,
that they were all on the same side here. They

(17:56):
also organized security patrols of force that they intent only
integrated after realizing that almost all of the men who
volunteered at first were black. Long before this uprising, multiple
organizations with a range of social and political goals had
had a presence within Attica's incarcerated population, and although the

(18:16):
prisons leadership had feared that they might form some kind
of coalition, many of these groups had never really seen
eye to eye, but that changed during the uprising. Members
of several organizations, including the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican
Nationalist group, the Young Lords, and multiple Muslim organizations including
the Nation of Islam and the Five per Centers, temporarily

(18:38):
put aside their differences to try to organize and negotiate
in cell Block D. As all of this was going on,
the State Police was slowly and gradually moving through the
prisons other cell blocks, eventually retaking all of cell blocks
A and C. Eventually, law enforcement had retaken all of
the prison except for cell blocks B and D and

(18:59):
the sun, the tunnels and the catwalks that connected them
and Times Square. Once officials had retaken A and C blocks,
they also had a vantage point on catwalks where they
could see what was happening in the other blocks. From
early afternoon on Thursday, September nine through Sunday, September twelve,
this was the basic breakdown, with prison authorities having control

(19:19):
of most of the prison, but the the uprising having
control of being D blocks and those those connecting other areas.
With the incarcerated men concentrated in cell Block D and
the state police holding most of the rest of the prison,
the uprising took an unexpected turn. Rather than moving to
retake the rest of the prison, Commissioner of the Department

(19:41):
of Correctional Services, Russell g Oswald, decided to negotiate with
the men who were occupying cell Block D and we're
going to talk about what happened, but first we will
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com slash history. Of course, not every person in d
Yard during this uprising was actively participating in the uprising

(21:31):
as it evolved. A lot of them were basically just
passing time or waiting, maybe causing some mischief. Some were
really there under durest they had been moved by the
forces of that were that were rioting. Initially basically felt
threatened and went along with it. But those who decided
to organize developed really ambitious goals. First, they negotiated for

(21:55):
medical care, including first aige for the injured and help
for people who had chronic medical conditions. Walter C. Swift,
who was serving a life sentence for murder. Was working
in the prison hospital as the head nurse, and he
volunteered to deliver prescription medications to d Yard. He wound
up both successfully negotiating with d Yard for the release

(22:16):
of several hostages and providing medical care during this uprising.
He became known as the Angel of Attica. Dr Warren Hansen,
who worked at a nearby hospital, provided medical care during
the uprising as well. After commandeering a typewriter from the
prison school, a group of men in d Yard started
drafting a set of demands. They began, one, we want

(22:39):
complete amnesty, meaning freedom for all and from all physical, mental,
and legal reprisals too. We want now speedy and safe
transportation out of confinement to a non imperialistic country. Three
we demand that federal government intervened so that we will
be under direct federal jurisdiction. Four we demand the reconstruc

(23:00):
action of Attica Prison to be done by inmates and
or inmates supervision. This manifesto went on to list a
number of people through whom they wanted to negotiate and
demanded that all communication happened in quote our domain, which
was the d Yard. What followed the delivery of this
manifesto was a huge, multi day effort to negotiate and

(23:23):
to try to bring the uprising to a peaceful end.
At three in the afternoon that day, Assemblyman Arthur O.
Eve and Professor Herman Schwartz, both of whom had been
advocates for prison reform, were allowed into the prison. They
were involved in much of the rest of the negotiations,
and along with prison officials, media and observers who were
selected by the inmates to try to negotiate a settlement,

(23:47):
they made repeated trips into the d yard over the
next three days. By Thursday evening, the overall mood was optimistic.
Commissioner Oswald had come to the yard himself and had
spoken to the men to Professor Schwartz had left to
get a court order to prevent reprisals against the incarcerated men.
An assemblymen Eve had left to gather the more than

(24:09):
thirty observers the incarcerated men had requested to help negotiate
on their behalf. For their own parts, the inmates had
crafted a set of fifteen practical proposals patterned after a
set of demands that were written during a protest at
fulsome prison in nineteen seventy. These proposals included things like
apply the New York state minimum wage law to all

(24:30):
state institutions, stop slave labor, and give us free religious freedom,
and allow all inmates at their own expense, to communicate
with anyone they please. Many of these Oswald openly said
that he agreed with, at least in spirit, but by
Friday morning, negotiations started to get rocky. The prisoners didn't

(24:52):
believe the injunction Schwartz came back with was valid because
it had no seal and because it referenced quote the
disturbance on September nine, and now it was the tenth.
Initial feelings of optimism started to fade as Attica's incarcerated
men started to lose their trust in the negotiations. Back
and forth, essentially uninterrupted negotiations continued all day Friday and

(25:16):
into early morning hours on Saturday, September ten. By that point,
the strain was clearly starting to show. In addition to
the core demand of complete amnesty for everyone who had
participated in the uprising, which was just a huge sticking point,
the thirty some observers who had been summoned were really
all over the spectrum in terms of the social their

(25:38):
social and political points of view. They ranged from more
moderate social reformers who might advocate for, you know, incremental
reforms that were a little less uh less radical, to
people who truly were parts of very radical Black and
Puerto Rican nationalist organizations. Eventually, they decided that thirty something
observers were way too many to effectively negoti eight, so

(26:00):
they narrowed their numbers down to a much smaller group.
By Saturday evening, after lengthy negotiations, the observers and Commissioner
Oswald each had versions of a set of proposals for
reforms at Attica which addressed many of the conditions that
we outlined in Part one, and the two documents had
quite a bit of overlap. For example, both contained quote

(26:22):
provide adequate food, water, and shelter, with the observer's proposal
ending quote for this group and the commissioners quote for
all inmates. The observers read quote apply the New York
State minimum wage law and the commissioners read quote recommend
the application of the New York State minimum wage law.

(26:42):
So while there were lots, really lots of points of overlap,
the two sets of proposals also had some places that
were a total disconnect. The observers proposed quote placed this
institution under federal jurisdiction, but the corresponding point and the
Commissioner's proposal is quote, as established by October one, nineteen
seventy one, a permanent ombudsman service for the facility, staffed

(27:05):
by appropriate persons from the neighboring communities. The observers proposals
had thirty eight points to the commissioners thirty three. So
some of the things that that the observers were proposing,
the Commissioner wasn't really noting at all. The biggest stumbling
block continued to be, unsurprisingly, the idea of amnesty. The

(27:26):
men in D Block still insisted on total amnesty for
their participation in the uprising, and some even went so
far as wanting to be granted asylum outside the United States,
and that was more than officials could really grant. It
is possible that with continued negotiations, Oswald and the observers
could have gotten to a settlement that the men in

(27:48):
D Yard would have accepted, especially if they could have
been convinced to accept a more narrow definition of amnesty
rather than like a total amnesty, Like there were a
lot of things in place to try to prevent reprisals,
but I mean, the state obviously was very reluctant to say, yeah,
we're just gonna disregard that this whole thing even happened.

(28:09):
But on September eleven, Officer William Quinn, who had been
struck in the head during the initial takeover of Times Square,
died of his injuries. Rumors ran through the d Black
Assembly about exactly what had happened, and these were fueled
by inaccurate media coverage saying he had been thrown from
a window, But in general everyone involved recognized that someone

(28:33):
would be charged with murder, and Officer Quinn's death this
amnesty point that had been so so central to the
demands from the very beginning was now completely off the table,
and with that, negotiations started to fall completely apart. By
Sunday morning, September twelve, those negotiating with d Block took
desperate steps in the hope of preventing an invasion and

(28:55):
massacre they were certain was on the horizon. Calling his
listed home number, which they got from a state senator,
the observers tried to convince New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller
to come to Attica to talk directly to the prisoners,
which he declined to do. Attica's superintendent, Vincent Macusie, offered
to resign in the hope that it would encourage the

(29:17):
men to accept the agreement, but Oswald declined to accept
his resignation. On the morning of September thirteen, Commissioner Oswald
sent a final pleading request d Yard to accept his
proposal and to bring things to a peaceful end. After
some debate, the men in d Yard rejected it. Soon after,

(29:39):
inmates took eight hostages up to the catwalks around the
yard and held knives to their throats in a visible
show of defiance. Shortly thereafter, state police moved into Attica
in an operation planned by State Police Major John Monaghan.
His job, however, was only to plan the assault, not
to plan for com indication with the media or families,

(30:03):
medical care, emergency response, or a return to normalcy for
the prison, and consequently there was no plan for any
of those things. There were procedures in place to protect
the state police who participated in this assault from harm.
For example, they were barred from participating in hand to
hand combat, knowing that the men in Cell Black D

(30:24):
had armed themselves with makeshift knives. Additionally, they anticipated that
visibility was going to be really poor in the whole
situation chaotic, but there were no policies in place really
to reduce the threat of unnecessary injury or death among
the inmates or the hostages. Also, Attica's correctional officers, who
had clear emotional ties to what was going on, were

(30:47):
allowed to participate in this assault once once the negotiations
had completely broken down. When the assault began at ninety
six am on Monday Septem, power was cut to the prison.
Sharpshooters made their way to rooftops to provide covering. Fire
units moved through the prison and began to cut their

(31:09):
way through barricades that blocked their way into D Yard.
Gas grenades were dropped by helicopter and a warning played
by loudspeaker, do not harm the hostages. Surrender peacefully. You
will not be harmed. Put your hands on top of
your head, and move to the outside of B and
D corridors. Sit or lie down. Once everything was in place.

(31:32):
From their positions along catwalks above D Yard, New York
State Police open fire. Over the span of about fifteen minutes,
thirty eight people were shot to death and eighty more
were wounded. One more would die of his injuries about
a month later. Overall, ten percent of the people in

(31:52):
the yard were hit by the State police's gunfire. A
quarter of the hostages died in the mediate aftermass. Officials
announced that the hostages who had died had all had
their throats cut by inmates before the state police assault
on the prison. This was false. Although two survivors did
have serious knife wounds to the neck, both said that

(32:15):
they had been slashed after the state police opened fire,
not before. Because there had been no plan in place
for providing medical aid, including no plan for transferring incarcerated
men to hospitals, many of the people who were injured
went without medical care for hours Because there had been

(32:35):
no plan in place to identify bodies or to communicate
with families of the incarcerated men or the hostages. The
last families to be notified that their loved ones had
died happened on the following Thursday. A National Guard unit
that was meant to set up a field hospital did
not even arrive on the scene until after the initial

(32:56):
assault was over, and then was described in media report
as having been part of the assault, which was absolutely
not true. After the initial assault on the prison, state
police and correctional officers began trying to relocate inmates from
D Yard to still functioning cells in other blocks. During

(33:16):
this process, there was extensive retribution against the incarcerated men.
Some were made to essentially run a gauntlet of officers
who beat them on the way down. Others were taunted, humiliated,
and addressed with racist slurs. And while there certainly were
officers who exercised restraint both during the assault and during

(33:37):
the efforts to restore the prison to normalcy, many definitely
did not and the words of the official commission report quote.
Officials have subsequent subsequently pointed to the one thousand, two
hundred fifty survivors of D Yard and said they did
not do badly. The Commission has considered the thirty nine
dead and scores of wounded and concluded it was not

(34:00):
done well. There was also a conversation between the governor
and President Richard Nixon, and which Richard Nixon was basically like,
we've saved a lot of guards, so that's good. In
making their way through the heavily damaged prison, officials found
nearly fift ndred weapons, many of them made during the
course of the uprising, including molotov cocktails, wooden and metal bludgeons,

(34:24):
and makeshift knives. There were also baseball bats, knives, razors,
and tear gas guns scavenged from around the prison after
the assault was over. Officials also found the bodies of
three inmates who had been stabbed to death during the
course of the uprising. One was Barry Schwartz. He was
the one who had hidden guards in one of the cells.

(34:48):
Some of the reforms that Oswald had been planning before
this uprising did follow after it, and a lot of
them were compatible with what the inmates had been demanding
during their negotiations, as as a few examples. In the
months after the uprising, telephone booths were installed at Attica
for for the men to use, along with a new
commissary that actually sold commercial droppers for heating food, so

(35:12):
you could both buy food and buy something to heat
it up. The library was expanded and censored materials were
re reviewed, with fifty five of previously rejected materials being
approved this time around. At the same time, correctional officers
were largely bitter after the uprising, both at the inmates
who had participated and the Commissioner Oswald for negotiating with them.

(35:38):
In July of nineteen seventy two, incarcerated minute Attica went
on strike to protest the dismissal of a recently hired
female nurse, which derailed further plans for reform, with officials
instead becoming a lot more focused on the prevention of
another uprising. Many of the same resource issues, racial and
economic disparities, and other factors that to that uprising still

(36:02):
persist today. The prison strike that started on September nine,
for example, was in protest of forced labor for minimal
pay that is still a standard part of many US prisons.
The New York State Commission on Attica was convened after
this to basically research everything that had happened, and they

(36:22):
did extensive interviews among basically everyone who was involved, and
you can read that entire report online and initially I
had multiple lengthy quotes from it that really sound like
they could be about today with things that are in
the news relating to racism and the justice system and
mass incarceration, like all of these things really sound as though, uh,

(36:48):
they could be about situations that are happening in in
today's world. So even though a lot of the circumstances
that were present Attica in nineteen seventy one were improved later,
a lot of the core conditions that lead to this
uprising are still things that exists in the world today.
And we will link to that in the show notes

(37:08):
so that people can read for free, because as I said, like,
this is really an overview of it, and the book
Blood in the Water that just came out um in August,
I think, uh also incredibly detailed, full of like research
gleaned from tons and tons of of original record requests. Uh.

(37:30):
So there is lots of other information available out this
about this for folks who are interested. I also don't
want to make it sound like there was, you know,
a protest at Attica and then all of these conditions
got a whole lot better, because a lot of the
things that they were protesting about do still exist. There's
still you know a lot of censorship in prisons, and
pay that is either or work that is either not

(37:53):
paid or paid a few cents per day or per hour.
A lot of the same sorts of conditions that were
so dehumanizing to people in nineteen seventy one are definitely
still around today. Hey, Tracy, you also have a little
bit of listener mail for us. Maybe not so heavy
you do. It's not it's not so heavy. It is
a correction. Uh. This is from Heidi. Heidi was the

(38:15):
first person who wrote to us about this. Several other
people have written to us about this. And then the
thing that I love is that several people have commented
on our Facebook posts to say, I came over here
to see if you had already corrected this. I love
all of you who did that so much because occasionally
when when when one of us messes something real bad,

(38:35):
it starts to feel like kind of a pile on
and and so all the folks, I love you all
very much. Yeah, thank you for not making a landslide,
because I messed up a super concretely messed up, so,
Heidi says. Dear Tracy and Holly, Greetings. I was listening
to your most recent episode entitled six Impossible Episodes Deja
Vu and was super excited to hear you talking about

(38:57):
the history of my hometown Toledo, Ohio. Thanks for covering
this little section of the Midwest. Throughout the section, you
discussed the Toledo Strip as the area of land between
Indiana and Lake Michigan. However, this was actually Lake Erie,
easily confusing since like Michigan is more often associated with
Chicago and Wisconsin then its namesake state. That was tricky

(39:20):
to say, and I'm with you on the Ohio State
University University of Michigan football rivalry. Not being a big
fan of sport myself, I only knew football was in
season growing up because it was also marching band season. However,
you always knew the big game was coming when the
Friday before everyone was dressed for their team. The demographic
of fans and Toledo is almost fifty fifty in the
town exploded with blue and yellow or red and white colors.

(39:43):
Thanks again and keep up the good work, sincerely, Heidi.
First of all, I get this whole thing about marching
band season being what football season was because I was
in the marching band and that was how I knew
what was up. Uh. Yeah, I want to preface this
by saying I do know how to read a map.
I have used maps often to get myself out of

(40:04):
the situation being lost uh. And in this real enticular case,
I looked at the descriptions of where the borderline so
many times, and they all referenced Michigan and Lake Michigan.
That like, in my head, Lake Michigan became the problem.
That's incorrect. So, for those of you who don't necessarily

(40:24):
have in the forefronts of your mind a map of
the United States, Michigan, the peninsula of Michigan looks kind
of like a hand in the little mitten, and over
on the pinky side of the mitten that is Lake Michigan,
and then over the thumb side of Lake Michigan that
is Lake Erie. And so if you draw a straight
liright across your wrist, you're gonna eventually cut off access

(40:46):
to Lake Erie down there. And I, in my head,
I just decided that Michigan was the problem. Like that
was not correct at all. So I feel like I
should interject here because you're taking all the blame for this,
and you may have prepped those notes. I have relatives
in both the up and LP of Michigan. Didn't even

(41:08):
click for me. No, not a phase, not a moment
of that doesn't seem geographically correct. I drove up there
over the summer. So I have to take some of
the heat on this because my brain didn't geography one
Harry bit it went, yeah, that seems right, it seems good.
It seems good. Uh And so yeah, I apologize for

(41:28):
messing that up. Thank you again for the folks who
have written in. And I just I think this is
the first time that we have made a like a
that discreet and concrete of an error, that a bunch
of the response that we have gotten his people on
our on our Facebook page saying hey, I just came
to check and see if you had corrected this, and
I'm glad that you did. And that makes my heart

(41:48):
happy because number one, it means people are coming to
our Facebook page to talk to us. And then number two,
it means like that's the thing that folks, folks know
that when we mess up, we're gonna try to fix it. Uh.
So I I apologize for that error. I'm glad it
gave me the opportunity to describe a state as a
hand at a mitten. Now it sounds really cute when

(42:10):
you describe it. I have to say I never thought
of those kind of look like a hand. Sweetest thing
ever there's so many other states that look like somebody
making a real gestures, so it was nice to describe
what this Vans did. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast where at
history podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also
on Facebook at facebook dot com slash miss in History

(42:31):
and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumbler is
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come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff
works dot com. You'll find articles on just about anything
you can think of. You can come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, where we have
show notes for everything Holly and I have ever worked on.

(42:53):
Like I said, I'm gonna put the Special Commission Report
a link to that in the show notes for this
because there are just so many things we didn't not
even get into you in this overview. So you can
do all that and a whole lot more at how
stuff works dot com or missed in History dot com
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because

(43:14):
it how stuff works dot com, m