On September 9, 1971 prisoners in New York’s Attica State Prison began an uprising in response to the death of black activist George Jackson, who was shot to death by correctional officers in California’s San Quentin Prison in August of that year. The prisoners took 33 hostages. Efforts were made to negotiate the release of those taken hostages. The prisoners issued a list of demands, and although 28 of them were met, their insistence that participants in the uprising be granted immunity, and that Attica’s Superintendent be replaced, were not. The prisoners then refused to surrender, outside forces were called in, and the end result was 39 people were left dead, including ten correctional officers and prison employees.
The Attica uprising created the spark that ignited the prison reform movement, but 40 years later, the prison population in America has reached 2.3 million. Conditions have improved incrementally, if at all. Racial disparity is a cold, hard fact of the criminal justice system. African Americans account for the largest number of the inmates in the U.S., although they represent only 14% of the population. A recent report issued by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that Hispanics make up 50.3 percent of the inmates held in federal prisons.
Budget cuts have ended educational and vocational programs in many prisons. Visiting hours have been scaled back in some facilities due to the lack of available correctional officers. Prison phone rates have been found to be exorbitantly high. Females have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population. Families and communities have been ripped apart as America has become known throughout the world as “The Incarceration Nation.”
In an article that appeared in the September 7, issue of the Rochester, NY City Newspaper, journalist Jeremy Moule asks two questions: “Is the justice system sending too many people to prison, and what should the role of prisons be?”
Moule writes how solitary confinement is routinely used a form of punishment, even though some criminal justice reform experts consider it torture. The City Newspaper article offers hope that prisons will be closed, if not for reasons of humanity, than to save taxpayers the obscene amount of money it costs to run them.
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