Tom Robbins talking:
An inmate rebellion that took place amid a very restless, political summer in Attica, inmates who were trying to petition the governor at the time for better conditions. They wanted more than one shower a week. They wanted more than one roll of toilet paper a month. They wanted the right to get letters that were sent to them by family members that were written in some language other than English, because the guards were throwing them all away. They wanted better education programs. They were asking for just sort of basic human rights.
And tensions within the prison that summer around those issues, because the governor and his corrections commissioner, Russell Oswald, didn’t respond, eventually spiked. And one small incident, as these things sometimes do, set off a riot on September 9th, that led eventually to—there’s a nexus of the—Antonio could describe it—these four tunnels, as they call it, that crisscross in the middle of this huge institution. They call it Times Square. And inmates who were being brought back from breakfast that morning rioted, and they assaulted a guard who was in charge of the bubble, they call it, right there, controlling the gates, and assaulted him. He was fatally beaten. He died a couple days later. His name was William Quinn. He was the father of three little girls. They then rampaged throughout the rest of the prison, took it over, took some 40 hostages initially. Some were released because of their injuries. But the standoff with the state police went on for the next four days, until Governor Rockefeller decided to send in the troops.
they were asking Governor Rockefeller to come. that was the big demand, was we want Rockefeller to come here. One of the former hostages that I interviewed, a guy named Mike Smith, who still lives just a few miles away from Attica, who had been a guard there, a young first-year guard, talked about how he had been a hostage at the time. And there was a camera crew that was allowed into the yard on Sunday night, before the Monday retaking. And Mike Smith was put in front of the cameras, and he said, “Governor, you need to get your ass here now.” Everyone could tell, apparently—I mean, if you read any of the accounts—Tom Wicker wrote a marvelous book called A Time to Die, that I commend to everyone. Everyone knew that this was going to end terribly unless someone intervened. And sure enough, there had been virtually no planning as to how to do it, we later learned.
In one of the most enormous lies that was ever told, after the retaking—and they had suffered these terrible casualties on their own side. They had managed to kill 11 of their own, and if—the official spokesperson for the Department of Corrections went before the press and said all of those victims died from having their throats cut. And they said that Michael Smith, who was then 22, one of the guard hostages, had had his testicles severed and shoved in his mouth by Frank Smith. None of it was true. It was one of the most amazing lies told. It went around the world. I’ll never forget the front page of the Daily News that day. And I picked it up. They slit throat. They made it up. Two hostages did suffer severe throat cuts, but they were not fatal. Everybody died of gunshot wounds. And the inmates did not have guns.
— source democracynow.org
Tom Robbins, reporter with The Marshall Project. His investigation, “A Brutal Beating Wakes Attica’s Ghosts: A Prison, Infamous for Bloodshed, Faces a Reckoning as Guards Go on Trial,” was published in collaboration with The New York Times.