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417 T ear gas was still hanging in the air at Attica when prison authorities gave their first reports of inmate atrocities. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York state police had just retaken control of the prison on 13 September 1971, in a bloody assault that left thirty-nine inmates and hostages dead. According to the official version of events, the rebellious inmates who seized control of Cell Block D four days before had, that morning, taken eight of the prison guards they held as hostages to the catwalk above the prison exercise yard and slit their throats. Even as the police were shooting their way into the prison to retake control, the inmate executioners had allegedly mutilated the bodies of dead hostages. At least one of the victims, it was understood, had been castrated and his testicles shoved into his mouth.1 None of this was true. Autopsies conducted the next day revealed that all of the ten hostages killed during the assault had died of gunshot wounds. There had been no fatal slitting of throats, no mutilation, no castration. State officials had already reported that the rebels, three-quarters of them African American and Hispanic, had no firearms. The conclusion was inescapable: police gunfire had killed the hostages, some shot five, ten, or twelve times as the all-white assault teams fired point-blank at the retreating rebels and their hostages.2 The mounting evidence pointed to rank incompetence in the planning of the police assault and a vengeful cruelty in its execution. The assault teams had been issued shotguns loaded with buckshot, ensuring that the spreading pattern of deadly slugs would indiscriminately kill inmates and hostages alike. In spite of explicit orders that only the state police and National Guard were to participate in the retaking of the prison, the assault force had included Attica prison guards, many of them enraged at the inmate rebels and seeking revenge. Wounded prisoners were left to bleed to death. Surrendering inmates were stripped naked, ordered to crawl 12 Attica 418 C H A P T E R 1 2 through mud and broken glass, then forced to run repeated gauntlets of white corrections officers armed with clubs. Rebel leaders were tortured for hours. Many of those included in the final list of casualties, investigators confirmed, were injured long after the assault was over.3 Reading the headline news, Goodman could recognize the same deadly mixture of rebellion and reaction that had convulsed Detroit after 1967. The rebel inmates, he knew, were not harmless innocents. They had been convicted of felonies, two-thirds of them for violent crimes. During the initial uprising, inmates had assaulted the captured prison guards and beaten some of them severely. One guard had died of his injuries. Even so, the rebels were nothing like the murderous barbarians portrayed in the initial media accounts. As state investigators later confirmed, it was not blood lust that drove them to rebellion but long-standing grievances that prison officials had done little to address. They had lived with extreme overcrowding, 2,250 men packed into a prison that its superintendent considered secure for no more than 1,600. Inmates were locked in their six-by-nine-foot cells for fifteen hours a day with no TV and only a three-channel prison radio to fill the hours. The daily ration of hot water was delivered to each cell in a bucket; inmates could shower only once a week. They worked in the prison shops for as little as 25¢ a day, then marched in funeral-like silence to the mess hall (some guards prohibited talking), where they forced down barely edible food. Prison censors routinely sent intercepted books and magazines to storage, and prison rules prohibited chewing gum, the wearing of hats indoors, moustaches, and unbuttoned shirts; violators of these petty rules could be sent to solitary confinement for days. The all-white guard force did nothing to protect newly arrived inmates from the gang rule and homosexual rape that shadowed the prisoners’ lives. Living in rural New York, the guards knew only the narrow spectrum of criminal behavior they saw in African American and Puerto Rican inmates, fueling a racist contempt for the prisoners and a matching brutishness in how they were treated.4 The assertiveness that Goodman and Crockett had come to know in Detroit’s Black Power movement had likewise emboldened Attica’s inmates to join...

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