Word: attica
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...other side of the country, another potential time bomb, New York's Attica Correctional Facility, is ticking again. The state, strapped for prison space, has allowed Attica's population to rise above the 1,758 limit set after the 1971 riot in which 43 guards and inmates were killed. By this fall, Attica had 2,100 prisoners, which overwhelmed employment and education programs; for 500 there is no work at all. In September most of the inmates went on a two-week protest strike...
...Quentin and Attica are but two examples of the nation's dangerously overcrowded prisons. Across the nation, institutions are glutted with inmates who continue to pour into cell blocks at an unprecedented rate. The state and federal prison population, currently 432,000, has doubled in the past ten years and sets a record every time new federal figures are published. In just the past two years, the population has increased by more than 80,000 inmates, even though the national crime rate is in decline...
...That was Attica. For some time to come in the U.S., that word will not be primarily identified with the plain upon which ancient Athens nurtured philosophy and democracy. Nor will it stand for the bucolic little town that gave its name to a turreted prison, mislabeled a "correctional facility." Attica will evoke the bloodiest prison rebellion in U.S. history...
Many of the rebels, of course, were in prison for violent and ugly crimes; many were there for lesser offenses. Yet by and large, at Attica they were treated without distinction, as numbers or niggers or animals to be caged. Most penologists point out that the key to dealing with inmates is to know them-and their leaders-well. In the end, the major failure at Attica may be that the authorities simply did not know what the desperate men behind their walls really wanted, thought or felt...
...After 17 years of New York's Attica State Prison (and a lifetime total of more than 35 years in jail), Willie ("The Actor") Sutton, a tired, sick old man of 68, was ready with some wistful reminiscing. "People don't seem to want to work hard for anything any more," said Willie. "Years ago, cons used to approach me in various prison yards and ask me to lay out a bank job for them. But not lately. These young kids don't believe in hard work." Though Sutton's own hard work may have netted...