Word: atticas
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...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...
Attitudes toward Attica are still so divided that it is uncertain whether this tragedy will help or hinder the cause of prison reform. James V. Bennett, the former director of the federal Bureau of Prisons, is one who thinks the uprising will "harden attitudes" against change. "That's the backlash," he says. "The public is going to believe that the uprising in and of itself was a manifestation of revolutionary protest." Oth ers say that Attica will inspire nothing more than an increase in the quantity (but not the quality) of prison guards...
Gilliatt remains one of the few foreigners who openly celebrates her adopted home. "England is a very brilliant, very wry old country and I love it very much," she says. "But America is huge and different and I don't think any event, any act-like Attica-will ever express the whole of this inexhaustible country. I hope some day to be good enough to write a film about...