Word: attica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Attica is a prison town, which (with the exception of some cities and large communities like Trenton that are the sites of state or federal penal institutions) is a place analogous to the company town. The majority of people in the community are directly connected in some form to the operation of the prison. Fathers, sons, and grandsons work as prison guards. Wives and daughters hold jobs as secretaries or other noncombative positions on the staff. Often in facilities large enough to provide employees housing inside the walls or in cases in which the town is too small to have...
Faceless revolutionaries, men beyond the call of any sense of moral decency or reason is the image of the prisoners at Attica and of George Jackson which the authorities in California and New York have attempted to persuade the public to accept. To a large degree, the authorities were successful. Abetted by the Establishment media, they mustered all the representations of the prisoner as a dark and irrational man justly separated from the world of civilized men that have appeared in B-grade films and novels and armed these stereotypes with the most explosive rhetoric of insurrection and hate...
...things like coroners' reports and ballistics that are basically peripheral to the human experience. Imprisoned in the heat of the debate--which, at best, can end in an impotent draw--people on both sides have lost sight of the principle issues involved in what happened at San Quentin and Attica. Regardless of whether or not they have accepted the stories the officials in California and New York have given of how the prisoners in the two institutions acted, people involved in the debate have, either openly or by default, accepted the officials' versions of why the prisoners may have acted...
...precisely this question of motivation that is the central one in both cases. It is the pivotal issue, not only because it is the key to the specific truth of what happened at San Quentin and Attica, but also because it is the portal to reaching an understanding of what significance the two incidents hold for those of us surviving, both inside and outside prison walls. It is only through an analysis of the human element of motivation that one can accurately answer the most enduring questions raised by the tragedies at San Quentin and Attica...
...come to terms with the motivation of the men involved in the two incidents one must begin by looking outside of the prisons, for neither George Jackson nor any of the inmates at Attica was born in prison, nor, in probability, were many if any of the guards held hostage...