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1 Improvising on Reality The Roots of Prison Abolition LIZ SAMUELS Improvising on reality is the key principle underlying the building of a united left and raising the consciousness of the people. It will give us our tactics. —George Jackson, Blood in My Eye, 1972 The five-day seizure of Attica Correctional Facility in 1971 by prisoners held there was pivotal for the development of what can be called prison abolitionist praxis. This political approach, at once an analysis and a strategy, held that “prison reform” was not just insufficient, but also counterproductive. It sought instead to remove entirely the system of imprisonment and policing through a revolutionary transformation that would render such institutions unnecessary. As the rebels at Attica made clear, abolition involved both direct confrontation with the prison system and building alternative practices to replace confinement and solve the social problems that the criminal justice system could not. The “Attica rebellion,” as it was known, also marked the beginning of the end of the revolutionary prisoners’ movement—at least as an item of national attention . Over the previous decade, prisoners had become politicized alongside and as a part of radical movements of the time. By 1970 many prisoners across the country publicly identified themselves as revolutionaries organizing and fighting for prisoners’ rights, often leading to confrontations with prison officials. Prisoners took control of Attica on September 9, 1971, after a year of rising tensions with the prison administration, led by newly forged alliances among Black Panther, Young Lord, Black Muslim, and white radical prisoners. Members of these groups and unaffiliated prisoners organized water and blankets for people in the yard as well as a negotiation team composed of two representatives from each cellblock . The Attica Brothers, as they came to be called, wanted improved conditions and rehabilitation programs, political and religious freedom, freedom from physical harm, and, in their initial demands, “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement, to a non-imperialistic country.”1 Negotiations began after the group 21 of observers requested by the prisoners arrived at Attica on the night of September 10. By the morning of September 13, the negotiation team and New York State commissioner of corrections, Russell Oswald, had not reached resolution; Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller ordered the state police to flood the yard. Within five minutes, police had shot and killed twenty-nine prisoners and ten of the fortythree guard/hostages.2 News of the events at Attica saturated newspapers, television, and the alternative press for months. It was the focus of conversation among prisoners, leftist organizations, and national prison staff and administrators. Mainstream media broadcast the Attica standoff and subsequent police violence, which inspired, radicalized , startled, and infuriated people across the country. Prisoner newspapers buzzed with information about the uprising, connecting the events in upstate New York with struggles in their own prisons. Attica was every prison, and every prison was Attica; as the Attica Defense Committee put it, “Attica is all of us,” and “Attica means fight back.”3 The prisoner organizing at Attica demonstrated the possibilities for a unified prison movement—specifically, prisoners’ ability to selforganize and develop a social and political infrastructure—just as the subsequent state violence illustrated its risks in the context of America’s growing dependence on prisons as a means of addressing problems in U.S. society. Organizing with people imprisoned at nearby Walpole State Prison, the Families and Friends of Prisoners Collective of Dorchester, Massachusetts, described prisons as a microcosm of power and oppression in the United States. Prison activists nationwide increasingly shared this analysis. The Dorchester collective wrote in its newsletter, “Walpole does not stand alone as a symbol of the institutionalized inhumanity of this country. Walpole is Attica is Angola is McAllister is Lewisburg is San Quentin is Deer Island and Charles St. All are pits of degradation and despair and all of their shame reflects on us.”4 The violence prisoners experienced at Attica catalyzed similar actions. Despite persistent animosities, prisoners forged alliances. There were long work strikes at Alderson Federal Women’s Prison in North Carolina, as well as in Vermont, Indiana, and California prisons.5 Many of the actions organized in solidarity with the prisoners of Attica were led by multiracial coalitions that endeavored to erase racial divisions among prisoners by forming a united prisoner class consciousness. The organizational and ideological groundwork laid by Black Muslims, Black Panthers, and anticolonial and anti-imperialist prisoners throughout the preceding decade helped create the logistical coordination and political solidarity seen among...

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