Blood in the Water

It is hard to understand the significance of Attica or its legacy without considering the phenomenon of America’s “war on crime.” First, the Attica uprising was in many ways caused by the overcrowding in prisons that resulted from increasingly draconian “anti-crime” legislation that was introduced in 1964 by Lyndon Johnson and continued by Richard Nixon from 1969 into the 1970s. This happened even though, as Thompson notes, in 1964 “the nation’s crime rate was historically unremarkable” (19). For example, she cites the fact that the murder rate that year was only 5.1 per 100,000 as opposed to 8.1 in 1921 and 9.7 in 1933. Further, this war on crime influenced the brutal nature of the retaking. As Thompson points out, “Rockefeller made no bones about the fact that he too would be ‘tough on crime’” (19). He wanted to shake off his liberal reputation in the Republican party, and crushing the Attica uprising provided the perfect opportunity.

Events at Attica then helped accelerate the process of which it had been a symptom. This was especially true of the stories told about prisoner atrocities. As Thompson says, “While the lies told at Attica—how it had been spun— did not, in some linear way, cause mass incarceration, they had certainly fueled it” (564).