Forty years ago today, New York state troopers and corrections officers stormed upstate Attica prison and put down a violent riot in an effort to free 40 guards being held hostage in the Upstate facility.
The results were spectacularly bloody: In the end, 10 prisoners and 29 guards died, most of them during the retaking.
Four days earlier, 1,200 inmates had seized control of the maximum-security facility. In the process, they beat a guard to death, took scores of hostages, dug trenches and built defensive barriers.
They presented 32 demands to state Corrections Commissioner Russell Oswald, most of which — concerning prison conditions — were accepted.
But there were also political demands: passage to Cuba or another “non-imperialist” country; amnesty for those who remained behind; a federal takeover of the prison and access to Black Panther newspapers.
And they demanded that Gov. Nelson Rockefeller present himself to respond.
This last demand Rockefeller rightly refused. And with negotiations at a standstill, he ordered the troopers in.
The recapture was calamitous, but ultimately necessary. Anarchy behind prison walls is impermissible.
But a cultural barrier had been breached.
Hitherto, convicts were perceived as they truly are — victimizers. Afterward, they were seen as victims themselves.
A “prisoner-rights” movement mushroomed, winning everything from cable TV to free college education to conjugal visits.
And even the surviving inmates prospered — collecting an $8 million court settlement (plus $4 million for their lawyers) from Albany in 2000.
What made that award particularly outrageous is that the families of the dead guards had yet to be compensated — and wouldn’t be for another five years.
And it would take a quarter-century after the Attica riot for public disgust with violent crime to finally swing the pendulum the other way, toward a renewed emphasis on incarceration and punishment.
That’s where it needs to stay.