Prisoners as People

...Attica is another...

...Nor did it spark fundamental changes in the New York prison system, or in any other state system for that matter...

...This, however, probably means that we have not witnessed the last of the Atticas...

...He then realized that the men, locked behind solid steel doors, could see who entered the tier only by putting mirrors through their tiny apertures and catching the reflection...

...But that Attica captured, and continues to capture, national interest, demands explanation...

...Clearly, our notions about the character of prison life have been altered, and numerous observers and administrators of the penitentiary system now share a skepticism as to the viability of incarceration...

...The press generally received an education, too, especially after repeating faithfully and without qualification the official statements about hostages who were castrated...

...With public figures from the President on down ever ready to score easy points by linking crime on the streets to the need for longer and longer prison sentences, it could well be that reform will have to await the maverick leader or the especially courageous prison administrator...

...Wicker's book may indicate the nature of the problem...

...As he made his way out, obviously for the last time, upset at himself for not telling the men that their choice was between compromise and death, he encountered a young, slightly built, black...

...It is testimony to the uncompromising honesty of A Time to Die that it allows for such generalization...

...Slowly and painfully, if never completely, Wicker developed a sense of the prisoners as people, linked to him in their essential humanity...

...Finally, Attica was a failure story, the kind we might rush to forget: The team of prominent observers brought in at the inmates' request was unable to negotiate a settlement, to prevent the bloodshed when the prison was retaken, or to protect the inmates from the crudest of reprisals after the takeover...

...Watergate was one of them...

...author, "The Discovery of the Asylum" Some stories simply will not go away...

...The brilliance of Tom Wicker's account of his four days at Attica in September 1971 lies in its ability to explain the critical but unexpected impact of the episode...

...The inmates holding hostages believed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the prisoners still under the control of the authorities in C-block were being gassed and beaten, and worse...

...As we learn how the experience transformed the author, we begin to understand how it affected all of us...

...And Wicker, "in the prison yard, before the onslaught for the first time in his life . sensed that nothing racial stood between him and a human being who happened to be black...

...His initial thought was that these were potentially dangerous weapons and ought not be in the inmates' possession...

...Anthony Simonetti, the special Attica prosecutor, is now under investigation on charges by his former assistant that he covered up possible crimes by law enforcement officers...

...The footage provided the basis for a filmed version of the Commission report as well, and later for a documentary on Attica by Cindy Firestone that has played to large audiences, particularly in New York City-encouraging other filmmakers to enter other prisons...

...A surprising number of people have shared Wicker's experience-including the members of the McKay Commission that investigated the affair...

...Of course, he had mixed with blacks in his professional career, but they were almost exclusively middle- and upper-class...

...Then, to complete his introduction to the Madeon-Mars character of the institutions, Wicker learned that prisoners actually preferred these cells...

...A Time, to Die is a personal and moving document, but it is not a blueprint for change...

...Wicker is prepared to admit to a range of feelings and prejudices as commonplace as they are usually surpressed...

...He put his arms around the youth and held him fast, held him hard...

...Indeed, every prison riot before Attica had sparked a well-intentioned call for new penitentiaries to reduce overcrowding, for more highly trained staffs to eliminate brutality, and for increased services to promote rehabilitation...

...Wicker, along with two other observers, received permission to visit the area and report back on conditions...

...Individual commitment may be the prerequisite for innovation...

...Yet most important, I believe, it reflects an awareness that the coalition of forces against reform is powerful enough to make strategies for improvement seem like exercises in futility...

...Until very recently, the courts refused to intervene in the administration of prisons to secure inmates even minimal constitutional protections...

...Many of them had never been inside a prison before, yet their report, exceptionally well written and widely distributed in paperback, presented a devastating picture of the irrationalities of life at Attica before the uprising, together with a grim account of the state's lack of concern for the inmates' lives as it retook the institution...

...The more familiar Wicker became with Attica, the more clearly he recognized that the problem was not with the facilities or administrators, but with the idea of incarceration itself...

...The core of A Time to Die addresses the even more difficult issue of the prisoner as person...

...No official document more compassionately or persuasively describes the essential limitations of incarceration, or the awful consequences of defining prisoners as less than human...

...That activities in and about the Nixon White House monopolized public attention for two years is not surprising...

...Prisons, it was generally agreed, were grossly inadequate...

...Moreover, it did not prove as contagious as the black ghetto riots that spread from one city to another in the early 1960s...

...This type of system, however reformed, would never rehabilitate an offender, or in the long run protect the community from the threat of crime...

...We read about Rockefeller's style and ideology, but not about his political interests, or about the groups that encouraged him to stand fast...

...Stepping back he put his hand on the youth's head and replied: "We gonna win brother...

...The steel doors afforded a greater degree of privacy than bars...

...We do not often attempt to impeach a President...

...Nonetheless, this position has yet to be translated into programs, and I, for one, am by no means confident that it will be...

...thus his education clarifies our own...

...For Wicker, this matter was further complicated by his background...

...As the metal door to C-block clanged open, he saw a flashing of mirrors from the cells...

...The product of a small-town, North Carolina upbringing, he can actually remember the first time he shook hands with a black (he was 19 and in college), or his shock at the prospect of spending 10 days with a group of blacks on an Army troop train...

...the goal of reform was to build bigger facilities and employ better administrators...

...Prisoners were aliens, not merely because of what they had done but who they were, the minority of a minority, the dangerous core of already suspect groups...

...As for the prisoners, they were often seen as different from the rest of us, not deserving of the rights and dignities we enjoyed...

...The assumptions Wicker brought to Attica represented the mainstream of good-hearted thinking about our penal system...

...The climax of his evolution came during his last few minutes in D Yard, when it was clear that the inmates would not agree to a 28-point proposal and that the the troopers would soon come in to retake the prison...

...The change began when he first entered an Attica cellblock...

...At this moment, Wicker understood both his own deep fear of the inmates-his unwillingness to grant the most minimal degree of trust-and just how bizarre the world of prisons was...

...Attica was also the first occasion for live television to go behind the walls (the rebellious inmates invited m a Buffalo TV cameraman), and the nightly broadcasts shocked and enlightened a wide public...

...In the course of his four days at Attica, Wicker came to abandon both these tenets...

...It was, after all, not our first prison riot...

...In part it reflects a revulsion against prison so strong that alternatives are never considered...

...They shook hands, and the inmate said to him: "Brother, we got to win...

...And by contemporary standards of atrocities, My Lai for instance, Attica was far from the deadliest...

...He moved, as we have moved, to a far more serious position...

...The boy smiled and nodded and Wicker walked on, thinking he was free at last free at last...

...We gonna win...

...American penitentiaries have a long history of uprisings, the late '20s and early '50s being periods of particular turmoil...

...Yet, despite all this, the rebellion has been a transforming event, altering the way many of us think about prisons and prisoners...

...At Attica, he was under blacks' immediate control, and blacks who were street people, lower-class, criminal, openly rebellious, avowedly revolutionary...

...And the education continues: This spring, no sooner were two Attica inmates convicted of the murder of a guard in the initial minutes of the uprising than we learned that the state's presentation of evidence to the Grand Jury may have been corrupted...

...His decision to narrate the book in the third person, rather than being a derivative, pseudo-Mailer device, serves to sustain his candor, and allows the rest of us to identify all the more emphatically with him...

...In these pages of human drama we read about angry guards, but not about guard unions...

...We read about enraged, bitter townspeople, but not about how that rage is translated into political leverage...

...In part this reflects the simple fact that solutions are more difficult to formulate than denouncements...

...In sum, coverage of prison life has never been more widespread or informed than in the post-Attica period...