COMMENTARY: Prison officials setting stage for another Attica

c. 1997 Religion News Service (Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the Gallup International Institute.) UNDATED_ In September 1971, an inmate uprising over living conditions at Attica Correctional […]

c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the Gallup International Institute.)

UNDATED_ In September 1971, an inmate uprising over living conditions at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York resulted in the worst bloodbath in the history of U.S. prisons.


After four days of negotiations between inmates and New York state officials, an assault team of state troopers stormed the facility in a successful attempt to recapture the prison. When the smoke cleared, more than 40 inmates and their hostages lay dead, virtually all of them the result of gunfire by the troopers.

In the wake of Attica and similar incidents, prison reform became a national concern.

Legal assistance and educational and social rehabilitation programs for inmates were implemented in correctional facilities around the country. While certainly not a panacea, such programs did reduce prison tensions while making inmate populations somewhat easier to manage.

Today, however, the reform movement is over. A new”get tough”spirit is sweeping the land _ and threatens to take the nation’s prison system back to pre-Attica conditions.

Many states, for example, are reducing or eliminating prison counseling and treatment programs. In some states, regulations have been developed that drastically affect inmate privileges, including telephone calls and food packages provided by loved ones.

Chain gangs, once outlawed as an inhuman symbol of the Old South, have begun to reappear. At both the federal and state levels, laws are being proposed that restrict an inmate’s avenues of appeal and the time periods within which such appeals can be made _ even if new evidence has been found.

As one inmate told me, conditions are returning to the same level that led to reform in the first place.

Moreover, these changes are often being implemented over the objections of the very people who run the prisons. In 1994, then-Sen. Paul Simon, D-Ill., sponsored a survey of 157 prison wardens in eight states to determine the effectiveness of the nation’s crime policy.


According to Simon,”Eighty-five percent of those responding said that politicians are not offering effective solutions to the nation’s crime problem.”The prison wardens called for”additional prevention programs, smarter use of prison resources, the repeal of mandatory minimum sentences, and an expansion of alternatives to incarceration.” Given greater financial resources, most wardens, according to the survey, would expand funding for education, vocational training, drug treatment, and psychological and religious counseling. For Simon, the survey was meant to serve as a”reality check”for Congress.

Three years later, Simon has retired from the Senate and the survey, in the words of one congressman I spoke with, had”no impact”on Congress.

We are told that program funding cuts and increased regulation of inmate activities are necessary to facilitate fiscal and administrative efficiency, increase prison security and reduce prisoner abuse of the corrections and court systems.

Granted, prison inmates are nothing if not innovative. They _ like many of us in the outside world _ often find innovative ways to bypass rules and regulations. Depending on the situation, prison security can be breached and dangerous incidents can occur.

However, such incidents can be more dangerous if they involve prisoners who feel that they have been dehumanized and, consequently, feel they have less to lose. When effective educational and treatment programs are not renewed and hard-won privileges are systematically taken away, the inmates’ incentive to behave is reduced. At such times, inmates and corrections officers tell me, prophecies of violence can be self-fulfilling.

It is said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. But for those who remember Attica, once should be enough.


MJP END ATCHISON

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