Word: quentins
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...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 a private or municipal hospital, children are born inside the prison. Clinton T. Duffy, a former warden at San Quentin, was born there--his father was a guard--grew up there--playing "prisoners-and-guards" instead of cowboys-and-Indians--and married there to the daughter of the Captain of the Yard...
...long run what is probably more important than the erroneous information the officials fed the public is the fact that they failed to deal in any meaningful way with why the two incidents occurred. The authorities at San Quentin claimed that George Jackson had been killed in an aborted escape attempt. Yet at no time did they or their supporters attempt to explain why Jackson would try to escape. Their entire treatment of the incident took Jackson's motivation as a given--as not susceptible to change nor of any particular consequence...
...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. In so doing, they have succeeded in turning public attention from the question of why these incidents occurred in San Quentin and Attica to how they occurred...
...revolving around 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...
...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...