Blood in the Water Read online

  The men at Attica worried a great deal about remaining as healthy as possible while serving their time, not only because they had to work even when ill. This vast facility had just two doctors: Selden T. Williams and Paul G. Sternberg. The pair came to Attica between 8:00 and 8:30 every morning to address the medical needs of the 100 to 125 prisoners who showed up for “sick call” each day. Dr. Williams had worked at Attica since 1949, Dr. Sternberg since 1957. These physicians usually required prisoners to describe their problems through a mesh screen and rarely gave them a physical examination. Most men were sent away with an aspirin. For prisoners with chronic health issues, like Big Black Smith, who had serious dental problems, this meant that initially minor issues often grew acute. During his few years at Attica, Big Black lost almost all of his teeth because Attica’s doctors had refused to give him a referral to a dentist.16

  Dr. Williams and Dr. Sternberg were particularly unresponsive to the medical needs of Attica’s Puerto Rican population. Neither of them spoke Spanish, and neither ever asked correction officials for interpreters. The only way Angel Martinez was able to communicate to the doctors the intense pain in his legs was to roll his pants up to show them the swelling. Even so, they did nothing to help him.17 These doctors did even less for the men who had been placed in Housing Block Z. One man in this segregated unit had broken bones in his hand and was in such pain that he couldn’t move his fingers. When he begged Dr. Sternberg to help him, Sternberg turned his back and told him to write a letter to a different doctor.18

  Attica’s doctors were so regularly unresponsive to the medical needs of the prisoners that at one point in 1969, the civilian staff of E Block actually tried to take action. That year a thirty-year-old E block prisoner had died under Dr. Williams’s care, and the staff decided to have a meeting to discuss holding the doctor accountable. They debated a couple of options, including picketing the doctor’s private practice, writing the newspaper with details of the prisoner’s death, and writing to a congressman and/or having prisoners write their congressmen. Another wanted to go much further and bring Dr. Williams before the district attorney of the county to have him charged with malpractice.19 But in the end, nothing came of these plans, and Dr. Williams changed nothing about the way he dealt with the prisoners in his care.

  From time to time prisoners’ family members tried to intervene to get better medical care for their loved ones. One woman was so distressed by her son’s lack of needed treatment at Attica that she enlisted the aid of one of the leaders of FIGHT, a community organization in Rochester. This minister in turn wrote to the deputy commissioner at the Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) to let him know that “unless the situation is taken care of by your staff, we will be forced to send our own doctors in to examine [the prisoner].”20 Rather than investigate the situation, however, this prison official took umbrage and merely responded, “There is nothing in any law giving you permission to send doctors in to examine any prisoner.”21

  Although prison officials weren’t eager to press Attica’s doctors to provide prisoners better care, they were willing to allow medical experimentation on them. One physician, employed by both Rochester and Strong Memorial hospitals, conducted “studies of the immune response system to a viral infection” at Attica.22 The doctor knew that he needed volunteers for his ongoing research, but finding a stable population of volunteers was “not easy,” therefore he was most grateful when he got permission to use Attica’s men.23 Because becoming a test subject offered the men in Attica some needed money, more than a few agreed to be exposed to the test virus.24 Although the doctor made sure that prisoners signed an informed consent agreement, as he later conceded, one “could argue about how informed they were.”25

  The overwhelming disregard for the health of the men in Attica certainly eroded their morale, but so did other things about the way the state’s correctional system operated, such as the workings of the parole process. Being allowed to leave Attica early on parole was of course the dream of every prisoner, but the way in which a man might earn parole was shrouded in mystery. Once a month the parole board came to Attica, but it was never clear why some men qualified for early release and others didn’t. As one prisoner noted, “It’s so arbitrary.”26

  Even for those who did somehow make parole, their elation was usually short lived since they could not actually leave Attica until they secured a job on the outside. To make this happen, the men were handed a long-outdated phone book so that they could find the addresses of businesses they might contact in order to secure employment. Because many of the prisoners could barely write, and all had to pay for both paper and postage, trying to find a job in this manner proved extremely difficult. Prisoners were known to save their money and to write as many as two or three hundred letters, and stay imprisoned long past parole was awarded, before any response was received.27 So capricious was Attica’s parole process that even correction officers recognized the problem. Having prisoners face repeated disappointments and feel cheated out of earned time off made their own jobs much harder.28

  Prison life was also made unnecessarily tense because administrators routinely cut corners. A number of correction officers thought that prisoners should be offered more vocational and educational training opportunities instead of just being warehoused, but the DOCS always cited its severe budgetary constraints as barriers.29 Administrators also failed to provide the prisoners sufficient food because they were told to watch the bottom line. As one correction officer put it frustratedly, “if you can spend an extra dollar on feeding, it would solve a lot of our problems.”30 But according to state officials, even for obvious necessities, money was in short supply. Only 6.19 percent of Attica’s operating budget was allotted to food, 0.69 percent to medical supplies, 1.6 percent to academic and vocational training, and 1.65 percent for clothing.31

  Though resources were limited for all of the prisoners, it was obvious that some of them suffered worse hardships than others because of the highly discriminatory way that prison officials ran the institution. While everyone at Attica had to work and run various cons to supplement his basic supplies, African Americans and Puerto Ricans had to hustle a great deal more because their work usually paid much less. Even though only 37 percent of the prisoner population was white, whites held 74 percent of the jobs in Attica’s power house, 67 percent of the coveted clerk positions, and 62 percent of the staff jobs in the officers’ mess hall. By contrast, 76 percent of the men in the dreaded and low-paid metal shop, and 80 percent in the grueling grading companies, were African American or Puerto Rican.32 Even when whites worked the worst jobs, it was common for them to start off at a higher pay rate.33

  Sometimes racial discrimination operated in ways that hit the men at Attica particularly personally. For instance, although all prisoners were, theoretically, subject to mail censorship, in practical terms it was disproportionately the black and Puerto Rican inmates who suffered most from the policy. Every month an administrative committee would review which publications should be censored, but overwhelmingly it was the titles requested by the prisoners of color that made it onto the prohibited list. Whether it was a black community newspaper such as the Amsterdam News or the Buffalo Challenger, or a religious publication such as The Messenger or Muhammad Speaks, rarely would the reading materials requested by nonwhite prisoners make it past the mail room.34 For reasons they never had to justify, prison officials considered these materials too dangerous to allow. As one lawyer for the DOCS put it, the rules for “the Black Muslims” were “in general the same as those applied to other religious sects except that you should exercise greater caution and vigil with this group.”35 Meanwhile, any letter written in Spanish, or any Spanish-language publication, did not even have to be considered inflammatory to be confiscated. If something was not in English, it was thrown out.

  Puerto Rican and African American prisoners were subject to far more stringent rules when it came to family visitation as well. Twenty-six point six perc
ent of all Puerto Ricans and 20.4 percent of all blacks at Attica were in common-law relationships, but prison policy was clear that no common-law wives or children from those unions were allowed to visit.36 Even letters between common-law partners were confiscated. In one such letter a prisoner wrote to the mother of his child and told her how she might try to reach him while he was incarcerated at Attica. “Darling, I know you’ll be surprised to get this, so please read it carefully several times. I had it smuggled out….When you write, make sure that you don’t make a mistake and write your name.”37 In case her letters still didn’t get through, he went on, “I listen to WMYR, Rochester, from 6:30 to 7:30 in the evening after supper. You call in and he will give requests. I will be able to hear your voice on the earphones. Ask him to play ‘I’m so afraid of losing you’ and say hi to me. I will start listening as soon as I mail this.”38 So obvious was the racial discrimination at Attica that white prisoners readily agreed that guards applied rules differently to blacks and Puerto Ricans.39

  While such discrimination did its part to escalate tensions at Attica, so too did the deepening problem of overcrowding that increased stress for prisoners and correction officers alike.40 As Attica grew ever more crowded during the late 1960s, rather than hire more officers, prison management instead decided to put existing employees in charge of ever greater numbers of prisoners. Officer John Stockholm couldn’t believe when he came to Attica in 1971 and realized he was “in charge of approximately 60 to 70 inmates at one time…sometimes we would take up to 120 inmates to breakfast.”41 The fact that prison administrators expected a single officer to accompany two or even three companies of men to the mess hall, to their jobs, and to the exercise yards several times a day, completely on their own and with only a nightstick at their side, generated enormous anxiety for those guards and made prisoners fearful as well.42

  The truth was that the only thing that kept the prison running smoothly under these circumstances was that the prisoners usually followed the rules and did what the officer in charge asked them to do. But as the number of men at Attica grew, order and calm were harder to come by. Significantly, the profile of the average prisoner coming to Attica had changed. Many more prisoners were young, politically aware, and determined to speak out when they saw injustices in the facility. These were black and brown youth who had been deeply impacted by the civil rights struggles of this period as well as by the writings of Malcolm X, Mao, and Che Guevara. These younger men made it clear that they were more willing to stand up for themselves—less likely to put up with poor treatment than were Attica’s veterans. Correction officers found this new type of prisoner alarming and their fear and suspicion of these more outspoken men further exacerbated tensions. Time and again Attica’s COs, believing they had to start coming down harder on these younger, more militant prisoners, resorted to the very intimidation, verbal abuse, and petty rule enforcement that virtually guaranteed a militant prisoner response.43 These increased “expressions of solidarity and inmate militancy” in turn made Attica’s correction officers even more aggressive.44 While most officers knew deep down that their own safety depended on making sure that prisoners felt, as one put it, “a sense of respect and a feeling that all the legitimate grievances…are being attended to,” many COs were too bitter, angry, and even frightened to put those principles into practice.45

  The truth was that most of the correction officers at Attica had little familiarity with African Americans or Puerto Ricans and little connection to the cities where these prisoners had grown up. The officers were from small towns across western New York—overwhelmingly white, Catholic villages like Attica where high school graduates had few job prospects save a career in corrections. In 1970 Attica prison employed 398 locals ranging in age from twenty-two to sixty. A young man starting out as a CO earned between $8,500 and $9,600 per year, and after fifteen years on the job he was still making under $12,000.46 Many officers had to work two jobs to make ends meet, and thus were always bone tired in addition to being on edge.47 Perhaps most significantly, these men had received virtually no training for their jobs at the prison.48 When new hires first reported for duty they were handed a stick, a badge, and a uniform, and then put in charge of a company of forty or so prisoners. With only nineteen supervisors, the nearly four hundred men who made up the CO staff were left mainly to their own devices to figure out how to deal with the ever-growing number of prisoners.

  The lack of training and direction from the prison administration frustrated and angered the COs a great deal. They blamed their superiors for the fact that they were working in an increasingly dangerous and hostile workplace. COs began demanding that their union, Council 82 AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), negotiate more pay for their work as well as more hires to walk the cell blocks so that they would be safer.

  Yet even in the wake of the uprisings in the New York City jails in the summer and fall of 1970, Attica’s administrators and the prison officials in Albany did virtually nothing to address either the COs’ or the prisoners’ concerns.49 If anything, administrators at Attica had begun to clamp down even more on the men in their charge, and to turn an even deafer ear to the complaints of their COs, as the year 1970 wore on. In no small part this was because Attica’s prisoners had initiated their own very bold protest to improve conditions even before the New York City jails had erupted.

  On July 29, 1970, prisoners working in Attica’s hated metal shop had sat down and refused to work until someone raised their wages, which, they insisted, were “so low that working at Attica is tantamount to slavery.”50 These men had been making between 6 cents and 29 cents per day, but prison officials were then keeping back half of that pay until the men were released, which meant that they had too little each week to buy necessities at the exorbitant commissary prices.

  The men locked up at Attica had long been sensitive about the exploitation of their labor; particularly once one of them, a white prisoner named Sam Melville, did some research into the economics of the metal shop, the commissary, and the prison laundry and then wrote a mini-treatise, “Anatomy of the Laundry.” By mid-1970 copies of his short exposé could be found in many an Attica cell.51 Had the men also known that Attica netted the state of New York almost $1.2 million in sales off of their labor between 1969 and 1970 they might well have been even more outraged than they already were.52

  The July 1970 protest started out quietly. The prisoners sent a small delegation of men to meet with their supervisor. However, this effort at peaceful negotiation failed. Superintendent Vincent Mancusi had the members of the delegation put into keeplock, and then arranged for other men he suspected of stirring up trouble to be transferred out of Attica altogether.

  Mancusi’s actions so enraged the metal shop workers that they called for a full-scale strike. At first it was only B Block prisoners who refused to work, because it was men from their block who had been keeplocked. But when Mancusi locked down that entire cell block for striking, the next day almost all 450 of the men in the metal shop refused to work. Flustered, Mancusi called the commissioner of correction, Paul McGinnis, to make sure he knew of this prisoner recalcitrance. Rather uncharacteristically, Commissioner McGinnis decided not to further punish the strikers, and instead agreed to talk with them once they had elected two representatives to present their position. Thanks to those discussions, those who were making 6 cents in Attica’s metal shop got a raise to 25, and the maximum allowable hourly rate went from 29 cents to $1 per day.53

  The prison metal shop (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  But the metal shop strike of 1970 proved a pyrrhic victory. Even though the metal shop workers had protested peacefully, and had assured COs when they began that they intended no harm and “merely wanted to demonstrate the extent of their grievances,” Superintendent Mancusi was determined to make them pay for their actions. In the wake of this rebellion, once Commissioner McGinnis had returned to Albany, Mancusi suddenly transferred a numbe
r of the strikers whom he had previously keeplocked over to the dreaded Housing Block Z.54

  Mancusi viewed prisoner activism as the work of black militant troublemakers who needed to be watched with particular care and shut up the instant they spoke out.55 His perspective mirrored that of an increasing number of state and national politicians by the year 1970. It was past time, they believed, to get tough on anyone who bucked authority, and even tougher on anyone who had broken a law.

  2

  Responding to Resistance

  In the early 1960s, Northern cities including Philadelphia, Rochester, and New York, were the sites of particularly intense urban rebellions against seemingly intractable discrimination and the lack of jobs, as well as against the abusive actions of law enforcement.1 Although Northern politicians had been relatively sympathetic when such racial uprisings rocked Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama, when they witnessed upheaval in their own downtowns they were greatly unnerved. Northern politicians very quickly began responding to the unrest and anger they saw on their city streets just as their Southern counterparts had: they sought to discredit these protests as the behavior of a criminal element bent on destruction. By 1965, politicians from both North and South, and from both major political parties, were routinely equating urban disorder with urban criminality. All agreed not only that crime was fast becoming the nation’s most serious problem, but also that it was well past time to wage a major new war against it.