Warehouse

Our professor’s written directions to New York’s Attica Correctional Facility have a flair for the dramatic. Clutched in my slightly trembling fist, they tell us that the prison’s walls will “loom” on our left to signal the final turn. But loom they do, solid and menacing in the half-light of the winter evening, almost inconceivably big compared to the three bleak hours of interstate my classmate and I have passed through. This is open, distant country, farms and mountains and oasis villages nestled in dips in the rocky soil. The prison is a high-walled, turreted exception, an industrial edifice that looks like it has wandered from its urban home and lost itself in the woods.

I am already a mess, wound impossibly tight. My driving companion—fraternity guy, lacrosse athlete—appears unruffled. Our shared English major seems the only thing we have in common. “We’re early,” he says. “Wanna eat?” I do. So we coast past the prison, the state flag flopping weakly on its pole, the sprawling parking lot that suggests an amusement park more than anything else. I was raised rural—this much asphalt signals a vacation somehow, a deviation from the norm.

It makes sense that the building itself is big. It is maximum security, over maximum capacity, full to the brim with men siphoned in for violent crimes or for infractions committed at other correctional facilities.

America is a nation of prisons; 2.4 million of us locked up, seven times the incarceration rate of western Europe. Incarceration is built into our national heritage, particularly by the nineteenth-century Quakers’ hopeful vision for a true penitentiary. This utopian facility, first attempted with the establishment of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829, would theoretically use solitude and reflection to scrub clean the criminal soul, while still conveying in its architecture “a cheerless blank indicative of the misery that awaits the unhappy being who enters.” The Quakers’ carceral method was one of total solitary confinement, with prisoners masked and hooded for trips outside their solid-walled cells in order to avoid visual contact between inmates. Each convict was provided with a Bible. The philosophy supporting this warehouse was that time spent in complete solitude and religious contemplation would eventually rouse the criminal’s conscience and render him penitent.

We have long warehoused each other, and this imposing fortress is among our most infamous warehouses. Attica has loomed here since 1931, discontent rising by degrees until it boiled over into an inmate rebellion in September, 1971. My father was 14 when he watched the news coverage of the uprising—the inmates seizing control of D Yard, taking correctional officers hostage. Negotiating for their rights to worship, read, and bathe, some of them hoping for amnesty, they were met with silence from Governor Nelson Rockefeller—until he phoned in the order for the National Guard and state troopers to retake the facility, blanketing D Yard with tear gas and opening fire into the resulting fog for two uninterrupted minutes. Thirty-nine men were killed by gunfire in the retaking of the prison, including ten hostages.

In the decades since, America’s memory of the uprising has faded. I am a product of these years of collective forgetting. Even now, staring down the physical fact of the prison itself, I find the first association in my head is not Rockefeller, nor the ricochet of bullets and stinging gas, but Al Pacino—all butterfly collar and Bronx accent, the rasping scream of “Attica!” in Dog Day Afternoon. I have researched the uprising, memorized its statistics, watched the original news coverage—seen footage of broadcasts “at the scene” in the very parking lot we are cruising past now, reporters gulping with emotion as the Doppler-distorted buzz of helicopters rends the air. But still, in open defiance of my efforts to learn this history of my adopted state, Pacino’s character shouts down the actual uprising in my mind.

But Attica is still Attica. The building before me is an aggregate of intimidation and wrongdoing; it overwhelms on sight. My breathing shallows. I am glad when my classmate...