"I was locked up in 1969 (a previous commitment) for supposedly laughing at an officer. My sentence was 'five days on the boards.' The boards means that you are put in a cell on a segregated tier, with no clothes, no books, no smokes, no lights. You get a filthy mattress and an equally filthy blanket (no sheets, and a pillow is absurd). You are allowed one meal a day, and water. (You used to sleep on a board, that is where the name originated.) If this does not 'straighten you out,' you can be sent to Bridgewater. All cons fear Bridgewater, especially DSU— Departmental Segregation Unit, MCI Bridgewater..."
A woman whose husband was in prison wrote about the ordeal of visiting him. She called it "The Crime of Loving." Her name is Linda Camisa:
"I write this in order to give you a brief look at the agony caused by loving a man in prison. It is hard to face the reality that the man you love is for some reason put in prison. Even harder is the visit, because of the rules imposed by the prison system itself. Because then you are also treated as a prisoner when the only crime you have committed is loving this man. And that, to me, is no crime.
"The major problem is the guards. They are the ones who dictate the do's and don'ts. I know that on many occasions visiting my husband at Norfolk, I've been told by guards not to hold his hand, not to put my arms around him, not to even sit in certain parts of the visiting room because actually they didn't want to have to turn their heads to keep their eye on you. You are watched constantly.
"You are always aware of their eyes checking you out; now and then a wise one will even proposition you.
"You also have problems such as, if you don't smile in a certain manner, or if you comment on something, then you may even wait an hour before you get to see your husband. Does anyone realize what it's like sitting in a crowded (or empty) visiting room for sixty minutes, waiting? Well, I do, and when it happened to me I also had my two children with me, ages four and five. Let me say that after riding one hour up there on a hot summer afternoon, sitting for another hour in a crowded hot visiting room with my children was very nerve-racking and upsetting to the children and me. Finally, by the time I saw my husband, I felt so uptight I wasn't much good for his morale...
"Plus there is a hassle of getting there. I'm lucky enough to have access to a car; some people don't. Imagine being broke and wanting, needing, desperately to see the man you love. I've seen days when I was terribly depressed over matters ar home, the house, the kids, and mainly welfare. When the car was broken down, I was broke and had no way to see my husband. It hurts deep down when you can't visit the one you love, the only one who might make you feel alive, and make you realize you're loved and that better days are in the future (hopefully!)."
What happens when prisoners, feeling alone and incapable of getting even the smallest of reforms connected with visiting hours or food, or medical treatment, decide to organize? Norfolk and Walpole are the two maximum security institutions in Massachusetts, and in 1971, Norfolk prisoners began to organize, tried to negotiate with prison officials to get changes. The guards union was angry at this, and insisted that certain prisoners be shipped out of Norfolk to other institutions, or they would strike. On November 8, 1971, armed guards and state troopers, in a surprise raid, moved into cells at Norfolk, pulled out sixteen men, and shipped them out. One observer tells about it:
"By the time I finish this letter, maybe it will hurt less inside. But right now I feel drained, hurt, betrayed, and filled with a sickening anger. I wish there were some pay-back, but I can't think of one. It seems that they have all the cards. All the time, and it really sucks.
"All through the demonstration, committee meetings, negotiations, etc., there was one overriding theme. Amnesty... In spite of all the reassurances by more experienced cons that the kinds of changes that we have been initiating would not go down without some kind of retaliation, I believed. Foolish youth.
"Between one and two last night I was awakened (I've been a light sleeper since Vietnam), and I looked out my window. There were troopers. And screws. Lots. Armed with sidearms, and big clubs. They were going into dorms and taking people, all kinds of people.
"The only man I saw who had pants and a jacket on was Mike Riley. All the rest were near naked, and nearly all were barefoot. It was cold last night. Damn cold. In some houses guys did give the screws and troopers arguments. A lot of people are locked in isolation here in the camp. But over sixteen guys were shipped. Some natural leaders, some friends, and a few that just have big mouths...
"They took a friend of mine and it wasn't till late this afternoon that he could talk about it. He was able to tell it, because they decided, after getting him all the way out front, that they didn't want him. Being pulled outside in your underwear, at 1:30, in bare feet by two troopers and a house screw. Looking at those troops, with guns, and masks and clubs, with the moon shining off the helmets and the hate that you could see in their faces. Thinking that this is where these guys live, with the guns and the hate, and the helmets and masks, and you, you're trying to wake up, flashing on Kent State and Jackson, and Chicago. And Attica. Most of all Attica..."
At Concord Prison, a medium-security institution, leaders and organizers were also shipped out, November 11, 1971, and one of those men tells about it:
"I and five others like me were awakened by six screws in my room about 1:00 Monday morning. I was told nothing but to dress. They all wore helmets and face shields and carried clubs. One screw said that if I didn't hurry up and dress he would drive his club through my head. I was then handcuffed.
"I was taken outside my unit where numerous state police stood at attention with very large clubs. Again I asked what was going on and was told the club through the head story again.
"I was brought through the trap and was being pushed through to an awaiting van. There a screw with a list said I was to go to Walpole, no Concord. I mean Walpole, no Concord, and while he was struggling to read his list and stammer he rammed his club into my throat. Like it was my fault he couldn't read his list.
"I then entered the van to see a friend of mine already there. He knew as little of what was happening as I.
"Upon arrival here we were released from the van two at a time. I was the last man out of the van and the guard that struck me with his club was standing outside the van, with a carbine on his hip (like he must have seen Cool Hand Luke twelve times). Out of the side of his mouth he said, 'Go ahead. Make a move.' He was intimidating me to move so that he could blow me away..."
One of the young leaders of the prison reform movement at Concord was Jerry Sousa, who, with others, was taken out of Concord in the night and dumped into Walpole, where he was immediately put into one of the segregation units, Block Nine (this means twenty-four hours a day alone in a cell). Sousa had been in Walpole only a short time when he got a report out:
"We are writing with a somber report regarding the circumstances and events leading up to and surrounding the death of prisoner Joseph Chesnulavich which occurred here an hour ago in Nine Block.
"Since Christmas eve, vicious prison guards here in Nine Block have created a reign of terror directed toward us prisoners. Four of us have been beaten, one who was prisoner Donald King.
"Other prisoners tried to escape constant harassment and inhuman treatment. Prisoner George Hayes ate razor blades and prisoner Fred Ahern swallowed a needle...they both were rushed to Mass General Hospital.
"This evening at 6 P.M. prison guards Baptist, Sainsbury, and Montiega turned a fire extinguisher containing a chemical foam on Joe then slammed the solid steel door sealing him in his cell and walked away, voicing threats of, 'We'll get that punk.'
"At 9:25 P.M. Joe was found dead. Another human life snuffed out by the system. Twenty-six-year old Joe, who had served seven years of a life sentence at Walpole until the toll...the final payment...was extracted here tonight, by a cruel society that has turned her back on her brothers and sisters and children in prisons. Forced to serve part or all of their lives in cages, constantly in fea
r of being snatched from their bed in the middle of the night by blackjack-wielding prison guards, who stalk the corridors and cell blocks, seeking to vent their hostilities on some hapless prisoner. Prison authorities as well as news media will label little Joe's death a suicide, but the men here in Block Nine who witnessed this murder know. But are we next?"
An inmate named Don Sylvia wrote a poem: "The Man With No Identity."
When I was two years old my mother divorced my father for "cruelty.":
When I was five, ten years old, I went to school, and the kids called me "bastard."
I went to court when I was thirteen (for breaking windows) and the "good judge" called me a "THUG."
When I was eighteen I got in a car accident (received some everlasting wounds on my head and face) and the "community" called me "scarface."
I grew a beard when I was twenty-eight, and society called me a "hippy."
I'm thirty-six, doing seven to twelve in society's prison, and the "District Attorney" calls me an "animal."
When I leave this prison and settle down, I'll be titled "Ex-Convict."
And when I'm dead, and laid to rest, I'll be an "unknown soldier."
7
Attica
In September of 1971, Tom Wicker, New York Times columnist, was asked to serve on a committee of observers to go into Attica Prison in New York after prisoners there had rebelled, taken over a prison yard, and held prison guards as hostages, asking for various changes in their living conditions. They set up a community and organized their daily activities. More than half of the inmates were black, and Wicker later reported: "The racial harmony that prevailed among the prisoners—it was absolutely astonishing..." But after five days of stalled negotiations, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered an all-out military attack by state troopers, who used automatic rifles, carbines, and submachine guns. The prisoners had no guns. Thirty one prisoners were shot to death. So were nine of the hostages. In the following days there were protests around the country, some of the protesters carrying signs which read: "Ludlow, 1914. Attica, 1971," recalling the Ludlow massacre in Colorado, when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. declared, as his son did at Attica, that a military attack was necessary to defend "a great principle." What follows is my review of Tom Wicker's book A Time to Die, which appeared in the Saturday Review, March 22, 1975, under the title "They Were Expendable."
Ours is a time of place names that need no explanation. To sound them is to stop the heart a fraction of a second. Auschwitz. Hiroshima. My Lai. Kent State. Attica.
Attica. An eerie camp of war inside a stone wall 30 feet high, with prisoners as guards and guards as prisoners, and then the guns, roaring, the chaos of slaughter, a moving circle of survivors stripped naked, disappearing behind enormous steel doors that clang shut, reverberating to infinity, behind which we faintly hear the methodical fall of clubs on flesh, and then a silence, signaling the restoration of law and order.
Tom Wicker's book on Attica is a tense narrative—told in the third person—about that week in September 1971, a week that was brought to a climax when the Governor of New York, now our VicePresident, spoke the words that turned D-yard into a slime of blood. But the book is more. It is the tough self-examination of a noted columnist, whose profession nervously stands watch over the passivity of its members, but whose own sensibilities demanded—almost before he could think about it—that he cross into the forbidden zone of commitment. The mood is fascination, growing ashamed of itself, turning to anger.
As Wicker left Washington for Attica, his name on a small list the prisoners had requested as observers, he made a simple pledge to himself: Nobody gets killed. It came from deep down, perhaps from his plain, morally scrupulous family in Hamlet, North Carolina; it was a simple idea that somehow stayed alive even inside the sophisticated journalistic world Wicker inhabited in Washington, D.C. When that pledge was shattered by the guns of the troopers at Attica, a back-home naivete, which had held its breath an unreasonably long time inside Wicker, collapsed.
You realize, reading this book, that Wicker is an incorrigible novelist, unrehabilitated by all his time in press clubs. You also learn, in compact digressions, about the prison system in America—enough to persuade you, if you need it, that prisons should not be reformed and prettied up, but should be dismantled, brick by brick, leaving to our grandchildren no physical reminder of our barbarity. Wicker skillfully sketches the evidence that prisons do not help fight crime, and that they probably make things worse—thus removing any justification for a system of unspeakable cruelty.
He might also have said (we always want the author to consult us before writing his book) that the huge proportion of poor people in jail for crimes against property suggests that prisons are inevitable counterparts of banks. And that so long as we have a system that breeds fierce and unequal competition for scarce resources (although it is not the only system that requires imprisonment), some steel bars will be needed to protect money, and others to confine human beings.
But mostly the book is those six days at Attica, Wicker and his fellow observers filing back and forth between a sullen, impatient army outside and the fragile friendship of the besieged inside. Wicker's honesty is as impressive as his prose. He gives a quick portrait of a white inmate who admits the observers to D-yard:
The man did not look directly at him, but in the weak, yellow light, like that in a medieval painting, there was something—so it seemed to Wicker in his nervousness—hard and desperate about the white face, the tattooed arm, the rigid intensity with which the man's body seemed to be charged, as if he were about to spring from the darkness and strike right through the mask of affluence and ease and order that shielded the faces of men like Tom Wicker from the hardest weathers of human existence.
The inmates created their own community inside the yard— hardly ideal, inescapably violent, unexpectedly humane, but considering the circumstances, an astonishing testament to the human potential for self-rule, and far superior, ethically, both to the slave world they had just sundered and to the free world outside the walls, now getting ready to kill them. Wicker sketches the leaders and orators, almost all black: Herbert X. Blyden, eloquent, angry; Roger Champen, almost seven feet tall, cool; L.D. Barkley, bespectacled, precise, uncompromising (he was 21, in Attica for driving without a license, and had but a few days to live). He finds solidarity between black and white unbroken, from the seizure of the yard to the re-occupation.
There is diversity in the bureaucracy: the ruthless conservative, Warden Mancusi (the inmates, he said, were destroying "their home"); the rueful liberal, Commissioner Oswald; and the whole spectrum from itchy-fingered guards to manicured gubernatorial assistants. In the end, all differences in personal morality were ground into homogeneity by the work ethic and its chief rule: Obey the boss. The boss was Nelson Rockefeller, whose powers so transcended liberalism and conservatism that it would take a stronger stance than the mild reformism of an Oswald to resist the deadly suction that drew the cold and the compassionate alike into the vortex of the murderous. Rebellion was unthinkable inside the bureaucracy.
And in the end, even the observers—good men all, intelligent, brave—could only weep with despair and anger, sealed off in the Stewards' Room of the prison while the massacre proceeded a few hundred yards away. They had been more than observers: Wicker, Arthur Eve, Herman Badillo, William Kunstler, Lewis Steel, Clarence Jones, Jaybarr Kenyatta, and the rest. They had tried to mediate, tried to stall for time. They had, in the end, developed an agonized comradeship with the insurrectionists.
But the observers' powerlessness was ensured by adherence (though some of them knew better) to the "rationality" that is crucial to our higher learning. Only an "irrational" act (perhaps refusing to move from D-yard, thus forcing the authorities to reckon with killing not just obscure guards and worthless prisoners, but journalists and legislators as well) had even a chance of preventing or delaying the attack. The observers were not lacking in courage, but, as Wicker writes, "
Wicker... was a middle-class product of a system he regarded as fundamentally rational. He took it for granted that no one wanted the irrationality of bloodshed and death." And while not all the observers believed this—certainly not Kunstler and Steel, not Herman Badillo, and probably no black among them—as a group they were trapped inside the Stewards' Room of our Machiavellian culture, where we are all taught to stay within the rules of rationality and civility by those who break the rules at will.
That the powerless can expect rational compromise from the powerful, that rulers and ruled share common values in the modern liberal state, is a seductive idea, mangled by history but kept alive by incessant transfusions. At Ludlow, Colorado in 1914, strike leader Lou Tikas went up the hill with a white flag to negotiate with the National Guard, which was being paid by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to crush a miners' strike in his coalfields. Tikas was executed on the spot, and then the tent colony where the strikers' families lived was attacked. That was the Ludlow Massacre, John D.'s legacy to his sons.
At Attica, Herman Badillo said, "There's always time to die. I don't know what the rush was." It was a momentary of forgetting of the madness of those who ask for rationality.
The negotiations had broken down over the issue of amnesty, where—with the inequality in weaponry—no compromise was possible. To give amnesty would be to violate the Rockefeller Principle—the principle of Establishments everywhere: Don't let them think rebellion works.
And so the attack was ordered. Then came the official lies about the killing of the hostages, repeated in the press ("...convicts slashed their throats with knives, the New York Times said). The politicos were not anxious to have the remaining guards begin to think—that when the government is uptight, we are all as expendable as the prisoners.