On the morning of September 9, 1971, in Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York, prisoners refused to return to their cells after breakfast. They had grievances — chronic inadequacies in food, medical care, and conditions of confinement; a culture of guards' violence and abuse that went unaddressed by the administration; the indifference of the system to their humanity. The protest was orderly at first. The men gathered in the exercise yard and articulated demands. The superintendent of the prison and officials of the Department of Corrections came to the yard and promised to hear those demands. For four days, from September 9 to September 12, the uprising proceeded without serious violence. Negotiations continued. The Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald, came to the prison in person. The state's negotiating team made concessions. A path toward a bloodless resolution appeared possible.
On September 13, at dawn, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state police to retake the prison by force. He did not attend the negotiations himself. He did not come to Attica to assess the situation. He issued his order to retake the prison and then waited to hear the results. The assault lasted approximately fifteen minutes. When it was finished, thirty-nine people were dead: twenty-nine prisoners and ten correctional officers and civilian employees who had been held as hostages. The state's official statement claimed that the prisoners had slaughtered the hostages, cutting their throats in a final act of desperation as the assault commenced. The claim shocked the nation. But within hours, the medical examiner, John Edland, began to report his findings from the autopsies. Every one of the ten hostages had been killed by gunshot wounds. Not a single hostage had a slashed throat. Not a single hostage had been murdered by a prisoner. The state had killed them all — its own employees, slain by its own gunfire in the course of retaking control of the prison.
And yet, in the years that followed, the state prosecuted sixty-two prisoners for the violence that had occurred during the uprising — charging them with assault, murder, and conspiracy. The men indicted were inmates, none of whom had fired a shot, none of whom had possessed weapons, all of whom had been confined in a prison with no possibility of access to firearms. The state did not indict a single trooper, a single guard, or a single state police officer for the forty minutes of gunfire that had killed the hostages and the prisoners. The prosecutorial apparatus of the state, which had the power to charge the men who had ordered and executed the assault, instead directed its authority entirely toward the men who had been confined within it. This is the story of how the legal system converted a state massacre into an indictment of the prisoners it had shot.
The Conditions and the Uprising
Attica Correctional Facility, located in a rural area of western New York, was one of the most notorious prisons in the United States. The conditions in which men were confined were designed to minimize their humanity. The cells were small, filthy, and infested with vermin. Medical care was minimal — a single doctor for more than two thousand men. Food was inadequate and of poor quality. The violence of the guards toward the prisoners was systematic and unpunished. Beatings occurred in the corridors and in the segregation units. Men were placed in solitary confinement for trivial infractions. The system operated with the understanding that prisoners were not citizens entitled to constitutional protections but warehoused humans against whom the guard force could do almost anything with impunity.
The uprising on September 9 was not spontaneous. It was the product of months of organizing by prisoners, primarily Black and Latino men, who had studied the conditions, articulated their demands, and prepared for the possibility of collective action. When the moment came, the uprising proceeded with surprising order. The prisoners took control of the exercise yard — the large open area where men were permitted to gather during exercise periods. They identified approximately thirty-six correctional officers and civilian employees as hostages and removed them from the general population to a secure location within the yard. The hostages were kept under guard, but they were not abused. They were fed. They were protected. The prisoners, understanding that the hostages' lives were their only leverage with the state, made clear that the hostages would be harmed only if the state attacked.
The demands articulated by the prisoners were not radical. They requested improved medical care, adequate food, elimination of the mail censorship system, protection against guard violence, and cosmetic changes to prison rules that had become symbols of the system's arbitrariness and humiliation. The Commissioner of Corrections, Russell Oswald, came to Attica and indicated that the state was willing to negotiate. For four days, the prisoners' representatives and the state's representatives met and discussed possible settlements. A written agreement, later known as the Oswald agreement, began to take shape. It appeared that the uprising would be resolved without serious violence.
Rockefeller's Decision and the Retaking
Governor Rockefeller, however, had other intentions. He was concerned about the optics of negotiating with prisoners. He believed that allowing the uprising to conclude through negotiated settlement would signal weakness to the rest of the prison system and to the nation. He made clear, from a distance, that he intended for the state to retake the prison by force. The Commissioner of Corrections, Oswald, urged caution. The negotiators on site urged a continued diplomatic approach. Rockefeller was unmoved. On the evening of September 12, he issued his order: retake the prison.
The assault began at dawn on September 13. State police and correctional officers, many of them armed, many of them inexperienced in tactical operations, entered the yard from multiple points. They moved forward with the intention of regaining control. The prisoners, recognizing that the negotiations had failed and that the state had chosen violence, scattered in the yard. Some of the prisoners attempted to harm the hostages, understanding that the hostages were their only bargaining chip. Others attempted to flee. Many had no weapons and no way to resist the armed force moving toward them.
What happened next was, by accounts preserved in later investigations, a scene of chaos and indiscriminate gunfire. The state police and correctional officers, many of them afraid, many of them untrained in riot control, fired into the yard. The gunfire was sustained and voluminous. Men fell — both prisoners and hostages, who were in the same space, indistinguishable in the confusion. After approximately fifteen minutes, the assault concluded. The yard was under state control. The bodies remained where they had fallen.
The False Narrative and the Medical Examiner's Autopsies
In the immediate aftermath, the state's official account was clear: the prisoners, upon seeing that the state was about to retake the prison, had murdered the hostages in a final act of defiance. Some of the accounts described the hostages' throats being slashed with makeshift weapons. Some described systematic executions. All of the official accounts placed responsibility for the hostages' deaths on the prisoners. The narrative was compelling because it fit the established prejudices: prisoners were animals; they would kill without hesitation; they had to be controlled by force. The media reported the state's narrative without significant skepticism.
But within hours, the autopsies began. Medical Examiner John Edland, conducting examinations of the ten hostages who had been killed, found something that contradicted the state's narrative entirely: every single hostage had been killed by gunshot wounds. Not one of the ten had a slashed throat. Not one bore evidence of an assault by a prisoner with a makeshift weapon. The wounds on all ten bodies were consistent with gunshot entry and exit wounds — the signature of bullets fired by state officers using state-issued weapons.
The implications were extraordinary. The state had killed its own employees — the very employees it claimed to be protecting by ordering the assault. The narrative of prisoner violence could not survive the evidence. The guns that had fired the shots that killed the hostages were state weapons. The hands that had pulled the triggers were the hands of state police officers and guards. The responsibility for the deaths lay with the state itself.
The revelation was shocking, but it was not sufficient to change the legal response that followed. Rather than triggering an investigation into the conduct of the state police and correctional officers, the discovery that the hostages had been killed by state gunfire simply meant that the state would have to prosecute prisoners for other acts of violence that had occurred during the uprising — beatings, assaults, and alleged murders of guards by prisoners. The fact that the prisoners had not killed the hostages did not prevent the state from charging them with murder for other acts, or from using the murder of the hostages as evidence of the prisoners' propensity for violence, even though the prisoners had not committed that murder.
The Prosecutions: Prisoners Indicted, Troopers Untried
In the aftermath of the Attica uprising, the state convened a grand jury and charged sixty-two prisoners with crimes arising out of the uprising. The charges included assault, attempted murder, and murder. The grand jury's work was systematic and thorough in one direction: it examined the conduct of the prisoners and returned indictments against dozens of them. But the grand jury conducted no investigation into the conduct of the state police. It called no state officers to testify about who had fired, at whom they had fired, or why. It examined no weapons records. It made no attempt to trace the bullets that had killed the hostages and the twenty-nine prisoners to the guns that had fired them.
The prosecutions of the prisoners proceeded in the following years. Many of the cases were tried before juries of men and women who, like the nation generally, had been shaped by the state's initial false narrative — that the prisoners had murdered the hostages. Even when the autopsy evidence was introduced, showing that the hostages had been killed by state gunfire, the juries did not interpret the evidence as a reason to withhold conviction. Instead, they convicted the prisoners charged before them, on the theory that the prisoners' uprising and their violence toward guards justified the state's retaliatory violence.
Some of the cases were dismissed or resulted in acquittals. But the simple fact remained: the state's prosecutorial apparatus was deployed entirely in one direction — toward the prisoners — and not at all toward the officers who had ordered and executed the assault. Not a single state trooper was indicted. Not a single guard was tried. Not a single officer was charged with the murder of a hostage or a prisoner, despite the fact that the bullets that killed them came from state weapons and were fired by state hands.
The Meyer Report and Its Suppression
In the years following the uprising, various investigations were conducted into the events at Attica. The most comprehensive of these was the Meyer Report, a detailed examination of the causes of the uprising, the conduct of negotiations, the decision to retake the prison, and the violence that followed. The Meyer Report was compiled and completed but was never fully released to the public. The state, citing confidentiality, privacy, and national security, withheld large portions of the report from disclosure. The portions that were eventually released — sometimes years or decades later, in response to litigation or public pressure — revealed evidence of misconduct on the part of state officials, evidence of the availability of less lethal alternatives to the assault, and evidence that the decision to retake the prison by force was made for political rather than security reasons.
But the full Meyer Report has never been made public in its entirety. Large portions remain classified or restricted, even decades later, as if the events at Attica were matters of national security rather than a public incident in a state prison in a democratic nation. The suppression of the report meant that the full historical record of what happened, who ordered it, and why the decisions were made remained obscured. The public's understanding of Attica was therefore constrained by the information the state chose to release — information that was heavily shaped by the state's interest in protecting its officials.
The Amnesty and the Settlement
In 1976, five years after the uprising, Governor Hugh Carey issued a proclamation of amnesty for all persons — prisoners and state officials alike — involved in the Attica uprising. The amnesty was unprecedented in its scope: it covered both the prisoners and the guards, both the men who had been charged with crimes and the officials who had ordered the assault. The amnesty closed the books on Attica. Prosecutions ceased. Convictions that had been obtained were not overturned, but no new cases would proceed.
The amnesty was, in effect, the state's declaration that it would not account for what had happened at Attica. The prisoners were not acquitted; the charges against them were simply abandoned. The state officials were not exonerated; rather, they were granted immunity by executive decree. Everyone was formally forgiven, as if accountability and resolution through trial were burdens the state could simply shed through an act of political will. The message was clear: Attica was closed, its history was settled, and neither prisoners nor officials would be required to explain themselves through the processes of the law.
But closure through amnesty is not the same as justice, and the amnesty did not end the civil claims of the prisoners and the families of the slain. In 2000, the state settled the prisoners' civil lawsuits, paying approximately eight million dollars to the surviving prisoners who had been injured during the assault. In 2005, the state settled the claims of the families of the ten slain hostages and correctional officers, paying approximately twelve million dollars. Money replaced accountability. Settlement replaced trial. And the books on Attica remained officially closed.
The Question of Responsibility Without Trial
The Attica case raises questions that go to the heart of how a legal system can avoid accountability. The first is the question of prosecutorial discretion. The district attorney who had jurisdiction over Attica was a representative of the state — the same state that had ordered the assault. The prosecutor's office was therefore asked, in effect, to investigate and prosecute the state for its own actions. The result was predictable: the prosecutor examined the prisoners' conduct meticulously and prosecuted them aggressively. The prosecutor examined the state officials' conduct not at all and prosecuted them not at all.
This is not a failure unique to Attica. It is the normal operation of a system in which the same government that commits the act is responsible for investigating and prosecuting itself. A federal investigation might have been different. A state investigation might have been different. But as long as the investigation and prosecution are conducted by the government that committed the act, the outcome is largely predetermined: the violence committed by the state will be characterized as necessary; the violence committed against the state will be characterized as crime.
The second question is the role of executive amnesty. Governor Carey's proclamation of amnesty was well-intentioned, in the sense that it was designed to allow the prison system to move forward and to end the cycle of recrimination. But it also amounted to an exercise of power in which the elected executive simply declared that accountability would not proceed — that neither the state officials nor the prisoners would be required to answer for their conduct through the courts. The amnesty short-circuited the legal process and substituted the governor's will for the judgment of courts and juries.
The third question is the role of money in the settlement of claims that involve deaths. The state paid approximately twenty million dollars in settlements to the prisoners and the families of the slain. That money was real and represented a significant expenditure by the state. But the payment of money did not establish guilt; it did not determine responsibility; it did not provide the transparency and public accountability that a trial would have provided. It was a purchase of closure — a way to buy back the authority of the state without submitting to the scrutiny of courts and the judgment of juries.
The Architecture of State Violence
Attica stands as a model of how the legal system can protect state violence from accountability. The first element is the initial misrepresentation — the claim that the prisoners had murdered the hostages when in fact the state had. The second element is the medical examiner's courageous refusal to endorse the false narrative — but the refusal of the prosecutor to act on that evidence by indicting the officers responsible. The third element is the use of the prosecutorial power to charge and convict prisoners for peripheral involvement in events while declining to investigate the state officials who had given the orders and pulled the triggers. The fourth element is the suppression of the documentary record — the Meyer Report kept hidden from public view. The fifth element is executive amnesty — the deliberate decision by the governor not to prosecute. And the sixth element is the settlement — the payment of money as a substitute for accountability.
Working together, these elements amount to a system in which the state can kill thirty-nine people, initially lie about how they died, suppress the documentary evidence, prosecute the victims instead of the perpetrators, issue an amnesty protecting its officials, and settle the civil claims with money — all while never submitting to trial, never answering questions under oath, and never being held accountable for the decision to use lethal force.
What Attica Demands
The reformation that Attica requires is structural. It is not enough to have independent medical examiners who will refuse to endorse false narratives — though that is necessary. It is also necessary to have prosecutorial independence, so that when the government commits violence, the investigation and prosecution are not conducted by agencies responsible to the government that committed the violence. It is necessary to have automatic federal investigation whenever state officials use lethal force in circumstances where the legality of the force is questionable. It is necessary to forbid executive amnesty in cases involving deaths caused by state action — amnesty should be available only in circumstances where its purpose is to vindicate the rule of law rather than to evade it.
And it is necessary to restore the trial itself as the forum in which such questions are determined. The settlement of civil claims with money may be appropriate as a remedial measure for the survivors, but it should not be a substitute for criminal accountability. If the state kills thirty-nine people, the people deserve to know, through the processes of a trial, who gave the orders, who pulled the triggers, what was considered before the decision was made, and what alternatives were available. A jury, properly instructed and properly composed, should determine whether the force used was lawful and whether those who ordered it should be held criminally responsible.
On September 13, 1971, at dawn, Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the state police to retake Attica prison. In the assault that followed, the state killed thirty-nine people — its own employees and the prisoners under its care. The autopsies proved that the state had killed them all. And yet, not one state official was ever tried for those deaths. The legal machinery of the state, working through prosecutorial discretion, suppression of evidence, executive amnesty, and settlement, ensured that the violence would be absorbed into the system without accountability. This is not a failure of law. This is how the law, operating exactly as designed, ensures that the state's violence becomes invisible and irreversible.