50 years ago, inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility rebelled against the prison system that denied them their human rights. Today, prisoners across the US find themselves in the same dehumanising landscape their predecessors fought against.

ATTICA - THE LAND OF THE UNFREE

On 9th September, 1971, in the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, over 1,000 incarcerated men took control of their prison. Although the event was to become but a brief interlude in the prison’s history, lasting just under a week, it had a profound impact on the lives of its inmates, who suffered grievous retribution and fought a decades long campaign for redress.

For Attica’s majority-Black-and-Brown population, theirs was a humiliating existence in the prison. As Arthur Harrison, an inmate during the uprising, recalled, the dehumanisation of Black inmates especially was akin to that of those enslaved on plantations. 

Indeed, prisoners suffered from overcrowding, poor healthcare, insufficient food and sanitary provisions, correspondence censorship, and brutality. Their attempts to tell corrections officials about these impoverishing conditions were in vain. It is little wonder, then, that their desire to be treated like human beings culminated in revolutionary action against prison staff and New York state to reclaim their rights. 

THE UPRISING

At the beginning of the uprising, the inmates presented their overlords with a manifesto of their human rights: adequate medical care by trained professionals, an end to exploitative labour practices and political and racial persecution, the right to unionise, digestible and sanitary food which accommodated Islamic dietary restrictions, and, among other things, a uniform set of rules to be applied to all New York prisons to undermine the power of wardens. The simplicity of such demands indicates the extent to which the New York prison system (and, by extension, the US prison system) had failed its inmates. 

During the five-day uprising, the 39 hostages were protected by Muslim prisoners, inmates formed security details to guard the reporters who ventured inside the prison, and the leaders of the uprising worked in tandem with lawyers such as Willian Kunstler to negotiate a peaceful end to the stalemate. Yet, despite the coordination and caution of the inmates, the uprising failed: New York law enforcement agents invaded the prison on the fifth and final day, bringing death and destruction in their wake as 29 inmates and 10 guards were killed by their bullets.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Attica’s inmates found themselves the targets of punitive measures designed to torture and humiliate them, while New York authorities worked to fashion a narrative which vilified the inmates and covered their own responsibility. The fact that it was only in August 2022 when the ban which prevented state-prison inmates from reading Heather Ann Thompsons’ history of the uprising was lifted - six years after its publication - indicates the longevity of Attica’s erasure. 

LESSONS LEARNT? 

Infamously, the US is a world leader in incarceration, with a prison population of approximately 2 million people. Although nine states (including New York) have cut their prison population by at least 30%, US incarceration rates are still leagues ahead of other countries, disproportionately affecting Black and Brown people. 

While Black people make up approximately 14% of the US population, they account for roughly 38% of federal inmates, while Indigenous Americans, accounting for less than one percent of the national population, make up around 2% of federal inmates. Additionally, as the NAACP notes, though Black people represent only 5% of illicit drug users, they represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated for drug offences, an unmistakable legacy of the political “war on drugs”. 

Thus, with its programme of mass incarceration indicating an over-reliance on imprisonment for nonviolent crimes such as possession, it is little wonder that the US prison system continues to dehumanise its prisoners, who are converted into numbers on a ledger. 

Such dehumanisation occurs most vividly through exploitative labour practices. The fact that the nearly 800,000 prisoners employed in state and federal prisons who generate billions of dollars in goods and services work without basic labour protection and little-to-no training for less than a dollar an hour highlights the extent to which prison reform has remained stagnant since Attica. New York state is no exception, with some prisoners employed in manufacturing jobs paid as little as 65 cents an hour. Evidently, Attica’s prison staff and the New York state has ignored the call for an end to labour exploitation by Attica’s inmates in the intervening years.

The tragedy of Attica therefore lies in the fact that the demands made by its inmates still resonate today. As well as the labour conditions akin to indentured servitude, the healthcare services available to prisoners remain deficient. For example, the rates of substance disorder, hepatitis C, heart disease, miscarriages, and mental health conditions are significantly higher amongst people who have been incarcerated, compared to the national average. Prisoners are therefore dehumanised to the extent that their well-being is overlooked, with 19% of people in state prisons never even receiving a health-related visit.

Thus, with an overrepresentation of Black and Brown prisoners, exploitative labour practices, and inadequate healthcare, it is clear that the lessons of Attica have not been learnt by prison officials and state policymakers, to the detriment of the welfare and human rights of US prisoners.

In 1979, an article concluded that the Attica Correctional Facility still suffered from the same problems that led to the riot just eight years earlier, highlighting just how little had changed in the short-term for its prisoners. Fifty years later, these problems of exploitation and dehumanisation continue to run their course across the US, exposing just how little has changed for prisoners across the country in the long-term.

Saniya is a History and International Relations BA graduate from King’s College London. She is hoping to study law in the near future.