Word: attica
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Until nine days ago, we could believe we were sheltered from the rest of the world, separated as we were from the problems of the people in the city and the ghettos and the rest of the world. If we did not know it then, we know it now. Attica is part of the tragedy that is the world. Time will heal the loneliness and grief we feel now. But Attica can never return to the Attica of nine days...
...prison tragedy has clearly been a shock to the values and ideals of Attica's citizens. There is a bitterness toward the rebel prisoners who led the riots that in many cases borders on hatred. One man referred to them as "outlaws who are out to destroy our country and burn our cities, and now want to destroy our prison." A woman who refused to give her name went even further. "Now when I see a Negro I feel different," she said, "now I feel uncomfortable." But there is also an understanding of the prisoners' lot. "I felt they...
...ATTICA is certainly not the worst of the 4,770 American prisons and jails. It has too much competition. But it is, nonetheless, fairly typical of a penal system that almost everyone agrees is a disgrace. Almost everyone, that is, but Vice President Spiro Agnew, who, in a spasm of Podsnappery, argued on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times last week that "our penal system remains among the most humane and advanced in the world." By and large, the penologists-not to mention the prisoners and ex-convicts-would go along with Senator Edmund Muskie, who told...
...almost all states, inmates have few legal rights to freedom of speech and assembly. One of the 28 concessions that Commissioner Russell G. Oswald offered to the Attica rebels was that convicts would be covered by minimum-wage laws for their work. Yet courts have consistently ruled that prisoners have no right at all to wages. Nor are they entitled to compensation for injuries on the job. "Prisons have been such a garbage can of society," says Buffalo Law Professor Herman Schwartz, "that they have been a garbage can of law as well...
Most black prisoners would welcome prison reforms. But for those growing numbers who are becoming intransigently ideological, reforms may seem irrelevant, even a dangerous distraction from their goal of eliminating the "racist system." After George Jackson's death at San Quentin and after Attica, penologists wonder whether any reforms within the current prison framework would mollify such prisoners. "Their anger is not directed toward the prisons but toward society," says Peter Preiser, New York State's Director of Probation. "The problem of the militant inmates festers beneath everything we are trying...