Attica and Rikers

- By Carolina Soto

Blood In My Eye captures the revolutionary resistance and leadership against rampant racism and oppression of the United States Government inside and outside of the prison system. The author George Jackson’s seminal abolitionist text was completed days before his murder at the hands of San Quentin guards on August 21, 1971. The guards stated that Jackson had a gun and that they were forced to shoot him down while he was escaping in broad daylight. The state of California convicted George Jackson, eighteen years old, of stealing seventy dollars from a gas station and sentenced him to one year to life. For the next eleven years he was confined in San Quentin prison. Seven of those years were spent in solitary confinement. In prison he read widely and transformed himself into a political activist, defining himself as a revolutionary. 

The news of Jackson’s murder set prisons across the country on fire. In New York, the prisoners at Attica, living under extreme oppressive conditions, first responded to George Jackson’s death with a Hunger strike. Between September 9 and 13th thirteen to fifteen hundred incarcerated men rebelled calling attention to inhumane prison conditions, taking over the prison, and holding forty guards hostage. After issuing a list of demands, including calls for improvements in living conditions and medical care, religious freedom, and educational and training opportunities, they demanded to be treated as human beings. They spent most of their day sitting in a cell.

This began the Attica Prison Liberation Faction, Manifesto of Demands in 1971:

“WE are MEN! 

We are not beasts and do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. The entire prison populace has set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization and disregard for the lives of the prisoners here and throughout the United States.”

Tense negotiations with politicized prisoners followed, and while the rebellion was on its way to being resolved through diplomacy, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, with the informed consent of President Richard Nixon, ordered state police to storm the facility. There were 450 officers discharging more than 4,500 rounds of ammunition, including shotgun pellets and exploding impact dum-dum bullets, outlawed by the Geneva Convention. Twenty-nine prisoners and nine hostages were killed, all by police gunfire; at least three prisoners were shot at close range in a manner suggesting an execution.

I do not want to recount the horrors and deprivations that the prisoners endured; the new HBO movie Betrayal at Attica, features formerly incarcerated men describing tortures and the brutal suppression of the uprising.

What I do want to ask of you is this:

Are prison officials, state governors and the president able to be judge and executioner of incarcerated people without penalty? 

Elizabeth Fink, the head lawyer for the Attica defendants is responsible for procuring most of the documents that we now have available on Attica. As Liz Fink said herself, “I stole all this stuff. I shouldn’t say that. I expropriated it from them as the chief counsel for the prisoners, who were the plaintiffs. They were going to destroy it. We’re at this point right now where they are refusing to admit they have all these files, and they are lying about what they have.” 

The Attica lawsuit consumed much of her time until 2000, when prisoners won a $12 million judgment from the state of New York but received neither an apology nor admission of responsibility from the state. We lost Liz Fink, freedom fighter and champion of prisoners in 2015.

The organizers of an Attica commemorative event note, “five decades later we look back at the uprising and how we continue to fight to make the vision of the Attica Brothers a reality.”

The number of prisoners in the USA in 1970 was 300,000, a number that has now grown to 2.4 million. That is 2.4 million people that are kept in overcrowded conditions that are dangerous and predict the spread of COVID and the Delta Variant. It is a human right to be kept safe from pandemics and ill health while being confined. The government can reduce the prison population by half without threatening the safety of US citizens. Elderly and sick people and those incarcerated for parole violations should be released or recommended for release under compassionate release provisions or another authority. Barring that, prison officials should be mandated to use their discretion to transfer people to community corrections options. 

Why does our society feel that because someone committed a crime that they are no longer members of the human race and should be denied human rights or civil rights that are provided under the constitution? 

Prison and subsequent activism with Prison Abolition has introduced me to incarcerated and  formerly incarcerated people that are leaders, visionaries and brilliant human beings. Some are political activists, some have made terrible mistakes, some miscalculations and many are simply guilty of not being white. Our country does not believe in or fund redemption or rehabilitation. If I did not sit on a prison bunk myself I would not have known that prison conditions are only marginally better than in 1971. 

Today the brutality in both Federal and State women’s and men’s prisons and jails is so ubiquitous that I believe all correctional officers should wear body cameras and that they should be subject to review by an organization outside of the penal system. I demand that body cameras be worn by all guards and medical personnel that work in the prison system. 

Why does New York City’s Rikers Island come into the discussion about Attica? Activists present a grim picture of the jail in chaos, an unsafe environment and broad negligence that amounts to a humanitarian crisis.  Rikers Island is home to nearly 6,000 detainees employing thousands of officers, and has suffered five suicides in the last nine months and 10 deaths in the last year. It is a way station for those awaiting trial, a penal colony for the poor, people charged but not yet convicted of committing a crime, people who have violated parole on state charges, drug challenged and mentally ill people.

In a 2014 investigation of the jail, US Attorney Preet Bharara wrote a scathing report of a "deep-seated culture of violence." that has been going on for decades. The report to Mayor De Blasio singled out for blame a “powerful code of silence” among the Rikers staff, along with a virtually useless system for investigating attacks by guards. The result was a “staggering” number of injuries among youthful inmates, the report said. Injuries and suicides.

This has been compounded by COVID. There are not sufficient masks for the incarcerated, no room for social distancing and an environment where the incarcerated and guards alike fell to the pandemic. Fifteen hundred people were released but the population has now exceeded the pre-pandemic levels.  According to people who have visited the premises recently, some areas are covered with garbage and urine, and some of the detained people are being kept in small showers with barely enough room to stand and given plastic bags in place of a toilet, other units are without toilet paper, meals are sporadic, there are no activities or medical services. The New York Times reported this week that more than 2000 officers were out sick or unable to work on certain days this summer.

No human being deserves this treatment, these circumstances are criminal. Dr. Robert Cohen, Board of Correction member stated in the NYT: “Every person they send to jail is at great risk of harm and death.” 

If they are unable to keep people alive at Rikers, they should stop sending them there!

A group of lawmakers, officials and public defenders held a press conference at the Rikers facility this past Monday, the 50th anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. They called for  Gov. Kathy Hochul, Mayor De Blasio and prosecutors to use their legal discretion to affect outcomes for individual defendants. 

I want the governor to stop sending people back to prison for parole violations. It is a corrupt system that prolongs unjust sentences. She should grant conditional pardons for those jailed at Rikers. New York City should reinstate its No Bail Law, ​​eliminating cash bail for most misdemeanor and nonviolent felony arrests.

Mayor de Blasio has been stating that he is in favor of closing Rikers for years. Closing Rikers in order to put people in better jails is not going to work. Alternate community facilities, drug rehabilitation centers and humane places for mentally ill people are needed immediately. 

The mayor claims that his hero is Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. He should take a page out of LaGuardia’s book. When the city found a major corruption scandal where organized crime and gangs had essentially taken over the first notorious city jail, Blackwell’s, it was raided and closed permanently in 1935. 

Why is solitary confinement used in prisons and jails? 

Solitary Confinement should be outlawed across the board. This is the story of the beginning of the Attica rebellion told by Tyrone Larkins on Democracy Now: On September 8th, 1971, two guys that were locked up were horsing around in the yard, in A Block yard. The officers rushed over to them, threatening them and ordering them to stop and a circle of inmates gathered, surrounded the officers and said, “You’re not doing anything to anybody.” They backed off. The two men who were horsing around were literally dragged out of their cells later that night and beaten all the way to a special housing unit. Their screams could be heard throughout the A Block yard.

The U.S. Supreme Court has noted, international jurisprudence can be helpful in determining the scope and meaning of broad terms in our Constitution such as “cruel and unusual punishments” or “due process,” as those terms ought to be understood in the context of what has been deemed unacceptable by the world community. The United Nations has a comprehensive manifesto on prisoner’s rights. They are not allowed into US penal Institutions. The American prisons should be monitored by delegations from the United Nations. 

In 1890, the US Supreme Court recognized the dangers of solitary confinement, noting that “a considerable number of the prisoners fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition.”

How long will it take? Less time if you get involved.  Freedom Agenda  is an organization dedicated to closing Rikers. Our society is one body, if the foot has gangrene it will affect all of us. We need to take responsibility for closing Rikers and stopping the brutality. We can work together to find humane alternatives.

After years of struggle, the HALT SOLITARY CONFINEMENT bill has passed both houses of the NY State legislature, driven by NYCAIC. More than 70 state legislators are accusing the city of violating the new state law with its plan to end solitary confinement at Rikers Island and other jails. The state lawmakers are asking the City Council to step in and pass legislation to end solitary confinement, using a stricter definition of that term.

Let’s keep up the pressure and make sure that solitary confinement, under any name, is stopped!

Albert Woodfox spent 40 years in solitary confinement for the killing of a guard. Multiple witnesses proclaimed his innocence. He started a branch of the Black Panther Party in Angola Prison and is a member of The Angola 3. He told me that he survived so many years in solitary by thinking of his mother, who was a beautiful person.

One of “the real women of Orange Is the New Black,” Carolina Soto is one of the founding members of the Re/Creation writing workshop at Restoration Plaza in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Unlike the fictionalized Yoga Jones, Carolina has a long history of work in social justice and advocacy, and is a seasoned painter and visual artist. Since beginning her work with Re/Creation, Carolina has increased her confidence and aptitude with both the written and spoken word, composing speeches and essays for her advocacy work and as well as written memoir. In particular, her essays and memoirs illustrate her vast capacity for empathy in her descriptions of people with whom she shared time inside. She now splits her time between living in New York City and the Dominican Republic.