Vol.64/No.3 January 24, 2000
Why inmates rebelled at the Attica state prison
This past week New York State offered $8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit for its murderous assault and brutalization of prisoners at Attica state prison in 1971. Then Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered a military force including CH-34 Army helicopters to retake the penitentiary in wake of a prison rebellion. They left 43 people dead and more than 300 wounded. We are reprinting below excerpts from an article by Mary-Alice Waters, first published in the October 1, 1971, Militant. It was later printed in the Pathfinder pamphlet, Attica: Why Prisoners are Rebelling, by Derrick Morrison and Waters. The pamphlet contained "The Attica Prisoners' Demands" and a list of the prisoners who died. Copyright © 1972 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Since the rebellion at Attica was brutally crushed on September 13, 1971, thousands of articles have been written about the prisons in this so-called free society. And volumes more will be written in the weeks and months to come, as countless politicians, journalists, and professors of sociology and criminology try to explain--often vainly--the roots of the "problems" with the "correctional system."
The most reactionary and racist commentators simply attempt to justify the Attica massacre with the assertion that the men caged up there are criminals--i.e., guilty of acts defined as crimes by our "free" society. They are, therefore, not like "other people." They are "uncivilized," "antisocial," and if they are treated like animals, it is because they are, after all, subhuman.
But millions of other Americans were struck by the elementary justice of the demands for which the Attica rebels were willing even to die. They were stunned by the brutal inhumanity of the murderous state officials. And they are trying to understand what happened at Attica.
One of the recurring topics in the post-Attica commentary on the prisons has been the "new mood" in the prisons, the emergence of a supposedly new kind of inmate. As Steven V. Roberts of the New York Times commented September 19, 1971: "A 'movement' paralleling those that have arisen in recent years among Blacks, students and women has now begun to emerge in the nation's prisons."
A number of aspects of this new political consciousness, militancy, and unity point towards the deeply revolutionary implications of what is happening in the prisons today. Many of the observers on the scene at Attica commented on the militant class solidarity of the rebels, on the unity in struggle among Black, Puerto Rican, and white rebels, and the apparent absence of racial conflict among them. New York Times columnist Tom Wicker commented with obvious astonishment: "That prison yard was the first place I have ever seen where there was no racism." But equally significant was the fact that it was unity under predominately Black leadership. The composition of the leadership reflected not only the prisons of this country, the reality of race and class oppression, but the depth of the Black radicalization as well.
Every improvement in the physical surroundings, every victory that gains a few more human and civil rights for society's victims, will help make life just that much more bearable for them. But even the most humane prison is still a prison and the reason there will be more Atticas is lodged in the very function of prisons in this capitalist society. Such revolts will recur so long as men and women are put behind bars for disobeying the inhuman laws of this society and struggling against its inequities—that is, as long as capitalism remains intact.
What does this society define as a crime? Almost all "crimes" are acts which violate the sacred right of private property upon which class society rests—the right of the few to control and benefit from wealth that belongs to all. "Crimes" are acts which break rules set up to guarantee the rights of a small handful, their right to condemn the masses of humanity to misery, exploitation, disease, starvation, and death--if it is profitable. The fact that the targets of "criminal" acts are most often the poor themselves only attests to the success of the rulers in setting the victims of class society to prey upon each other. Even murder, rape, and other "crimes of violence" can ultimately be traced, almost without exception, to the social inequalities and distortions of human potential and character that are rooted in capitalist society.
The prisons of this country exist for one reason—to try to terrorize people into accepting an inhuman, irrational social system based on maintaining the "rights" of the few over the majority. Once capitalism is eliminated, once it is replaced by a system which can provide abundantly for the needs of the many rather than the profits of a tiny handful, once we have eradicated all the distortions of human potential which flows from this inhuman system and the institutions that prop it up, there will be no need for prisons. The very social system that has created and defined crime will have been eliminated.
But only a revolutionary upheaval strong enough to take power out of the hands of the Rockefellers and Nixons and place it in the hands of the most oppressed and exploited--the workers, the prisoners, the Black and Brown communities, the women, the draftees—only such a fundamental reorganization of society can bring about the necessary changes. That is the "prison reform" we are ultimately working for....
The names of the individuals who struggled and died at Attica and San Quentin and in the other prisons of America will go down in history alongside the names of men like Malcolm X as heroes of the masses in the coming American revolution.
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