Word: atticas
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...shocks multiplied. There was Captain Henry Williams, tactical commander of the state police at Attica, whose "narrow black tie had an air about it of woe to the hippies." There was the initial police response to the observers' committee--rigid indifference--as if they were only a formality to be gotten through, one more time-consuming nicety, like warning an arrested man of his rights, before the inevitable business at hand could be attended to by armed and empowered patriots. The indifference quickly turned to hostility, as the observers kept trying to avoid violence and began to sympathize with...
...STORY WICKER tells of America's prisons adds yet another sorry dimension to the Attica tragedy. The Quakers in the late 1700s had the notion that offenders should be locked alone in cells, day and night, so that, in such awful solitude, they would have nothing to do but ponder their acts, repent and reform. By 1825, New York had begun an entire penal system that combined individual cells and total silence with floggings, hard labor in fields and quarries, undeviating routine, and subsistence level food and shelter. As the first warden of Sing Sing had said, "Reformation...
MALCOLM X ONCE said that American society itself was a prison for blacks, and Wicker recognized that racism in himself. He had usually managed to compensate for it--but compensation wasn't enough in D- Yard of Attica Prison. A Time To Die has its only joyful moment when Tom Wicker conquers his racism at least for a moment: embracing a young black inmate, he said, "We're gonna win, brother," and they were two human beings solidly together and Wicker was "free at last, free at last, thank God." But when he turned to leave he saw police...
...didn't realize how greatly the police and guards hated and feared the inmates, nor how deeply the inmates mistrusted the state. Governor Rockefeller condemned their radical action, but his condemnation rang hollow. He had effected no prison reform since he came to office in 1959, and not until Attica did the state promise change. Of the 28 reforms the state agreed to in the process of bargaining at Attica only three--the creation of an ombudsman's office, a grievance procedure, and allowing political activity--were real changes. The rest were either hedged promises conditional on legislative action--modernizing...
GOVERNOR ROCKEFELLER refused to grant amnesty. He didn't think he had that constitutional power, and he was convinced it would be wrong anyway--it would "undermine the basic tenets of our society," that is, "equal application of the laws." This was Rockefeller's answer to the Attica Brothers, many of whom were in prison because of the unequal application of the laws--this, from one of the most "equal" men in a nation where all too many are more equal than others...