Search Results for: Prison

Conspiracy to Cover-up: Why We’ll Never Learn the Truth About the Attica Prison Riot

Photo by Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At The Morning News, J. Oliver Conroy reports on the aftermath of the Attica Prison riot and how the state doggedly covered up the truth: a grisly state-initiated mass murder in the name of justice and order. Of the 43 dead, 29 were inmates — many of them shot in the back or executed at close range as the state attempted to regain control of the prison.

Shortly before 9:45 a.m. on Sept. 13, 1971, the fifth morning of the Attica prison uprising, hundreds of prisoners milled in the yard, waiting with increasing dread for news of any developments in their ongoing negotiations with New York state authorities. At 9:46, they got their answer. A helicopter thundered overhead and began blanketing the yard in billowing clouds of tear gas. In fact the tear gas was partly a powder: C.S., a weaponized orthochlorobenzylidene compound then popular a world away in Vietnam, where the US military used it to flush Viet Cong out of the jungle and into the sights of waiting gunships. In footage of the Attica retaking, you can see a domino wave of people crumpling as the cloud of C.S. rolls over them.

The powder hung in the air like a dense fog, clinging to the prisoners’ clothes and working itself into their skin and lungs and further obscuring the vision of the gas-masked state troopers waiting for the signal to begin their assault. As the prisoners collapsed, choking and retching, the police opened fire. Over the next several minutes, officers poured hundreds of rounds of gunfire into the yard, including, a judge later estimated, between 2,349 and 3,132 pellets of buckshot. The prison yard was transformed into a charnel house. The prisoners, who had no firearms, were sitting ducks, as were the hostages that the police had ostensibly come to save. As hundreds of police and corrections officers stormed the prison, they sometimes paused to shoot inmates who were already on the ground or wounded. “Surrender peacefully. You will not be harmed,” a megaphone announced as unarmed prisoners were mowed down.

After the shooting ended and the gas cleared, National Guardsmen came through, collecting bodies and dumping them in rows on the muddy ground. The final death toll of the Attica riot and retaking was 43 people, including one corrections officer fatally wounded during the initial uprising, three prisoners killed by other prisoners, and 39 people killed by authorities, including 10 hostages—captive corrections officers and civilian prison staff killed by the troopers’ indiscriminate shooting.

The bloody outcome, it becomes clear…was the result, to a great extent, of conscious political choices by the state.

Mike Smith is someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about Attica. Smith, then 23 years old and recently married, had just started as a rookie corrections officer at Attica when the riot broke out and he was seized as a hostage…

Then the helicopter rose above the prison walls, showering everyone in C.S., and shooting started from every direction, and “all hell broke loose.” Smith was shot four times across the abdomen—by someone firing, he believes emphatically, a fully automatic AR-15—incidentally a rifle then issued to servicemen in Vietnam—and his arm was hit by a ricocheted pistol bullet. Noble, also wounded, pulled him to the ground. As Smith lay bleeding he watched prisoners and hostages shot to pieces around him.

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The Long Tail of the Attica Prison Riot

Longreads Pick

On the aftermath of the Attica Prison riot and how the state covered up the truth: a grisly state-initiated mass murder in the name of justice and order. Of the 43 dead, 29 inmates were killed — many of them shot in the back or executed at close range as the state attempted to regain control of the prison.

Published: Feb 21, 2017
Length: 18 minutes (4,509 words)

The Prisoner

Longreads Pick

In 1991, twelve-year-old Edwin Debrow killed a cab driver. Twenty-five years later, he remains in prison, continuing to be denied parole since 1999. Is the public better served by putting youngsters in adult prisons and keeping them off the streets for years and years?

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Dec 27, 2016
Length: 30 minutes (7,598 words)

Tim Robbins’s Prison Improv Classes Make Inmates Less Likely to Re-Offend

Longreads Pick

A look at the Actors Gang Prison Project, an improv workshop actors Tim Robbins and Sabra Williams have been leading for inmates for ten years, which has been shown to reduce recidivism rates.

Published: Nov 14, 2016
Length: 8 minutes (2,092 words)

My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard

Longreads Pick

Bauer goes undercover as a private prison guard to investigate the inner workings of a for-profit prison in Winnfield, Louisiana run by the Corrections Corporation of America. He witnesses multiple stabbings, prisoners denied adequate care, and becomes unsettled by the way the job changes his behavior.

Source: Mother Jones
Published: Jun 23, 2016
Length: 145 minutes (36,384 words)

‘How We Became a Prison Family’

Longreads Pick

A new first chapter from author Patricia Engel’s novel, The Veins of the Ocean.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 23, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,331 words)

The Story Behind The Deadliest Prison Bus Crash In Texas History

Longreads Pick

A gruesome recounting of one of the bloodiest days in the history of Texas prisons.

Source: BuzzFeed
Published: Jan 13, 2016
Length: 21 minutes (5,397 words)

Belly Chains on a Baby Bump: What It’s Like to Be Pregnant in Prison

Shortly after she became pregnant a few years ago, Mira Ptacin, author of the forthcoming memoir Poor Your Soul, began teaching at a prison. There, she met a woman named Courtney Fortin, who was pregnant, too—and incarcerated. At Elle.com, Ptacin tells Fortin’s story, shedding light on the experience of being pregnant in prison, and how frequently that involves being illegally shackled:

A recent study published earlier this year by the Correctional Association of New York, a nonprofit organization with the authority to inspect prisons, found that 23 of the 27 inmates who’d given birth while incarcerated in New York had been shackled in violation of the law, and this is not uncommon elsewhere. “You comply when you’re in prison,” says Amanda Edgar, an advocate with the Incarcerated Women’s Project. “One woman [told me] that if she didn’t keep her shackles on, she wouldn’t be able to go to her appointment and [that] other women have been denied access to prenatal vitamins.”

So shackles—belly chains around a baby bump during transport, chains around ankles during active labor—continue to be routinely used on inmates during pregnancy, even where they are technically banned, and even though there have been zero documented cases of pregnant inmates attempting to escape during prenatal checkups, labor, or postpartum recovery. Nor is there any documentation of a pregnant inmate attempting to cause harm to herself, security guards, or medical staff. The vast majority of female prisoners are non-violent offenders who pose a low security risk.

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Hallowed Ground: Patti Smith on Visiting the Prison of Jean Genet’s Dreams

We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The driver’s identity card was inspected and after an interminable stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.

They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French. The commander arrived, and we were brought before him. He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mustache that dominated his careworn face. Fred quickly took stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely a man’s world. I watched silently as the human contraband, stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into the commander’s office. He turned and looked at me. Stay calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.

-From Vogue‘s excerpt of M Train, Patti Smith’s new memoir, in which she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, make a pilgrimage to the remains of the French penal colony in northwest French Guiana where Jean Genet longed to be imprisoned, which he wrote about in The Thief’s Journal. Smith collected stones there, to bring to Genet.

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When Prisons Need to Be More Like Nursing Homes

Longreads Pick

America’s prison population is rapidly graying. So what happens to the growing pool of older, ailing inmates incarcerated in institutions that weren’t designed to serve as nursing homes?

Published: Aug 26, 2015
Length: 7 minutes (1,805 words)