Inside Attica: Corruption and Reform

Title: Inside Attica: Corruption and Reform
Original Publication Date: 11/22/2023
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/bWpV7Wwemxf
Description: Joe Pascone from the Turning Tides History Podcast joins us to delve into the gripping story of the Attica prison riots and their lasting impact on the landscape of prison reform. Unravel the layers of this historic event as we explore its catalysts, the unfolding of events, and its reverberating effects on the criminal justice system. Discover how the Attica uprising sparked a national conversation on prison conditions, human rights, and the pursuit of justice. Join us in this insightful conversation shedding light on a pivotal moment in history and its enduring significance. #AtticaPrison #PrisonReform #TurningTidesHistory #CriminalJusticeReform
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris.
Welcome back, guys. I am very excited to be joined by a very special guest today, Joseph Pascone, host of Turning Tides History Podcast, and he did a really special episode, or a series of episodes, on the Attica. Uprising from the early 1970s, and I thought that tied together really well with what we're talking about in organized crime and the punishment [00:01:00] aspect of organized crime as well, and crime in general.
So thank you so much for coming on, Joe. If people have listened to my other podcast, the History of the Papacy podcast, Joe Picon did a really helpful. Full primer on the resurgent Mento, and he has a really detailed series on that. So definitely go and check those out and then check out all of his other work as well.
Hey, thank you so much for having me on Steve. And yeah, I did a, maybe a bit too detailed of a series on the risk argument though but I definitely did it. It was a lot of fun and the Attica one just came out. And I'm just chugging along here over on my end. I think that this is a really interesting topic, the Attica uprising, because it brings together so many threads of society, crime, and in a lot of ways, it's touched our lives personally being New Yorkers who are expats from New York.
And so it gives us a, I think we have. A very interesting way to look at this objectively and [00:02:00] subjectively, especially being that it, the incident happened well before either of us was born. So I think we have a little bit of perspective on it, but it's also close to both of us as well. Yeah, in a historical sense, it happened yesterday.
Basically, it may as well have. It happened, the retaking and the uprising happened in a few days in September 1971 at, like you said, Attica. And this wasn't like an insular event. This was a culmination of basically the 60s. This was all the best and the worst parts of the 60s kind of thrown into a pot and it just exploded over into the deaths of 44 people.
And it was probably the biggest mass shooting, if you could call it that, up until the present day. And it was completely sanctioned by the state. I think the best place you could probably start the story is, I started, at least in my series, with 1865, because that to me is when race relations sort of start in [00:03:00] America.
Previously to that, there were a handful of free African Americans, sure. But the vast majority were enslaved peoples who were treated literally like property. Supreme court decided these people were property. You could bring them across state lines, just like you could bring a chair across the state line and it still counts as yours.
After the civil war. Millions and millions of free blacks were given the right to vote. They were given civil rights. They were elected to Congress. They were elected as representatives. They were elected as governors. In 1870, there was a black governor in Louisiana, for example, once reconstructing, reconstruction sort of ends with Rutherford B.
Hayes that's it all the reforms of the previous era go out the window black codes, Jim Crow laws, they come into effect, not just in the South, but in the North as well. It's just the segregated. In the north as it is in the south, just in a different way. It's not the same overt racism like, oh, this is the good old [00:04:00] south.
So this is how it's going to be. It's oh your economic status is maybe a little lower than mine because of whatever reason and because of that, you need to live in this much worse neighborhood than I get to live in. So that's where the idea or the start of Attica happens.
The Attica state is built in the height of the Great Depression. It's in 1931. It's finished in a year there, or less than a year. For the time, it was a state of the art institution, but basically what happens is over time, the facilities just degrade because time passes. It's 40 years later. It's the late 60s, early 70s, and Attica is a much worse place to live.
It's way overcrowded. There's about 2, 000 people there. In a facility that was probably only built to withstand maybe a thousand thousand two hundred tops. And in America, the continual rise of radicalization, the Vietnam War has started.[00:05:00] JFK has been assassinated. Nixon has been elected in a very controversial presidential election.
Police riots the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Attacks on civil rights the civil rights movement. You see the Klan Come back with a new renewed force, which was super powerful, caused millions of black people to leave the South in the pre or in the post Civil War era.
And these all kind of all these forces come together into a very disgruntled population, and it wasn't just. For political reasons, there were obviously political prisoners who were deeply interested in black liberationist movements and anti war movements and were the rock bed of the uprising that's about to happen.
But for the most part, they were just regular people who've done the wrong thing in their life. And for the most part, they were kids. For example, John Hill, [00:06:00] who is the accused killer of William Quinn, he was in Attica because he turned 19 while he was still in juvie. He didn't rob a bank and then...
Set fire to an orphanage or something. That's all that happened. He was in juvie because, I don't know, could have stole something from the store. It was five cents. Another guy, Charles Pernassilis, he was in Attica because he didn't inform his parole officer about an out of state trip. And that's how he ends up in Attica.
So it wasn't just cut and dry. Oh, this is a place for murderers. This is a place for rapists. That's what it turns into. That's what the. The press and the state tries to turn this place into it's just this horrible place. And eventually it even becomes that. And after this period, people talk about Attica is a really dangerous place even today.
And I think it's interesting because it. The uprising takes place during a bunch of other uprisings and a big mess of problems throughout the [00:07:00] country. In 1970, in Soldad Prison, there's a guy called George Jackson. He was a very famous prisoner slash political activist. He wrote a book called Letters from Soldad, where he talks about his experiences in jail.
Basically, what happens one day is a CO or a guard, a …