Greg’s Reviews > Blood in the Water (Pulitzer Prize Winner): The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy > Status Update

That Attica had directly, albeit unwittingly, helped to fuel an anti-civil-rights and anti-rehabilitative ethos in the United States was soon clear...Any politician who wanted money for his or her district had learned that the way to get it was by expanding the local criminal justice apparatus and by making it more punitive. The tougher on law and order a district was, the more dollars would come its way.

‘Imagine the terror,’ Fink said, '...you don’t have to stretch your imaginations...You saw him break down.’ Perhaps worse than anything, ‘the torture that was inflicted upon Mr. Brosig…was not by the actions of law enforcement existing in places where barbarism is the law, but what happened here happened about fifty or so miles away, committed by people who are sworn to uphold the law and the constitution.’

One Attica prisoner had been cowering near the hostage circle, and when he didn’t lie down to the liking of a state trooper, he ‘was shot above the knee.’ Another prisoner, who had been shot twice, testified to finding himself in the midst of countless bodies on the ground, ‘like they had those slave ships…There was people packed on top of people.’

The fact that key slides had been removed from slide trays, that bullets had gone missing, and that entire swaths of film as well as radio transcriptions no longer existed, suggested that the protection of trooper shooters was being orchestrated from on high...to lean on morticians to contradict Edlund’s account of how the men had died.

...Edland...spoke of how he had been ‘isolated, tortured, [and put] under extreme pressure’ even though his findings had been independently verified and he had autopsied over five thousand bodies in his career... jurors had seen this man’s pain…the amount of pressure under which this man had been living simply because he had told what he had seen, with no motivation other than to state the truth.

Another witness said, after the terror he’d experienced at the hands of the troopers in D Yard, by ‘the time the attorney generals, or whoever it was, the BCI came to see me, I would have testified to my mama doing something.’

The McKay Commission’s narrative of events unflinchingly and graphically exposed the mistreatment of prisoners that had led to the rebellion, and made it equally clear that its bloody end was both avoidable and unconscionable...‘The decision to retake the prison was not a quixotic effort to rescue the hostages in the midst of 1,200 inmates; it was a decisive reassertion of the state of its sovereignty and power.’

Russian roulette was a frequent practice of the night guards and troopers; so was telling thirsty, exhausted men cowering on the floor—like Carlos Roche—to ‘drink the urine of correction officers.’ Officers spent the entire night of the 13th scraping the bars loudly with the butts of their guns, taunting, physically assaulting, and threatening to kill the men they had just rehoused.

...Blyden said... ‘Man, I am not trying to scare you,’ but no matter what they say and promise here at Attica, ‘you’re gonna still die'…As he tried to bed down that night, Champ felt some peace, though, knowing that ‘if there are any lives lost in here, and if a massacre takes place…in the final analysis the world will know that the animals were not in here, but outside running the system and the government.

In many ways their long history with prison authorities led them to expect betrayal and so, even as they waited for negotiations to recommence, the men also devoted considerable time that day to constructing barricades at various doors in the yard as well as on the catwalks above.