Word: wickers
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...these reasons, the Wisconsin Council on Criminal Justice recommended to the governor in 1972 that Wisconsin's prisons be abolished and that money be allocated instead to minimum security community and vocational rehabilitation programs. Wicker feels that America's prisons should be abolished: "Hate and fear have been made institutions, tax supported, government-operated, sealed with the approval of society...
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...
...Wicker always wondered later whether he could have averted the massacre. At the time, he believed in the system, that it would work things out, because it always had. He 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...
...Wicker tried to convince Rockefeller to come to Attica, so that he could see the awful chances for bloodshed. But the governor refused to come and refused to give the observers more time. Wicker says the "order of things" was more important to the governor than lives...
...Wicker has ot disinterred the bones. No one can do that. He only promised us a "time for anger," and four and a half years after Attica, his book screams quietly--a stark gravestone rubbing to remind us of the grave and what is buried there, lest we forget...