By Jean W. Yeager

“A new documentary goes behind the walls of the deadly 1971 uprising. More than a thousand prisoners organized to overtake the notorious prison, hold guards hostage, and use them as a bargaining chip to get better living conditions. Filmmaker Stanley Nelson and former prisoner Arthur Harrison reflect on the five-day revolt, and its lasting legacy. The film is ‘Attica.’” Excerpt from the NPR ‘Fresh Air’ promo.

 

Malcolm Bell, a former New York State Special Assistant Attorney General who sought to bring charges against Attica guards and state troopers after the riot said, “Stanley Nelson and his co-producer Traci Curry have made a powerful film about the five days of the 1971 uprising. At the end, the film notes that the police whose gunfire created the carnage were never prosecuted; viewers may wonder why? Here is my take on how the violence and attempted prosecution went down.”

“During the riot, inmates savagely murdered one guard and three inmates; and they injured thirty-two more prison employees, many seriously. Claiming that four days of negotiations had failed, then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered an armed assault to recapture the prison. At the outset, police snipers shot inmates who were holding knives to the throats of several hostages in an effort to deter the assault. Those bullets saved those hostages’ lives, though other bullets promptly killed two of them.”

“The inmates had many crude weapons but no guns, and teargas dropped from two helicopters quickly immobilized most of them. Since they offered little resistance, roughly half the assault force of 211 troopers withheld their fire. But the other half plus several corrections officers fired, mostly without justification, at least 450 rounds, including many multi-pellet loads of buckshot, which sent at least 2,200 deadly missiles across the crowded prison, killing 29 inmates and ten hostages and wounding 89 other men. The only officer seriously hurt was a lieutenant shot through the leg.”

Bell recounts the full story in his book “Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Coverup, and the Pursuit of Justice” published in 2017.

“Troopers and corrections officers then tortured more than a thousand inmates after they had surrendered. Terrible as the inmates’ riot was, it was lawless police who made Attica a massacre.” (Turkey Shoot, p. 372)

“By the time I joined the Attica special prosecutor’s office two years later, it had indicted (i.e., charge with a crime) 62 inmates but no police. Given who had done what to whom, the disparity was painful. The next spring, because I had worked hard and wanted equal justice for convicts and law officers, I had become chief assistant to the special prosecutor and was put in charge of a fresh grand jury.” (Bio Notes, p.1)

“The closer I came to securing the indictments of a large number of troopers, though, the more obstacles my superiors placed in my path, until I reluctantly concluded that they were arranging for the prosecution to look honest but to fail, and there was no more I could do from inside it to straighten it out. In December of 1974, I resigned in protest and charged a cover-up, first by going through official channels, and after three fruitless months of that, by going to the New York Times’s Tom Wicker, who had been a negotiator at the prison during the uprising. The cover-up story ran for ten days in the Times as officials scurried and postured.” (Bio Notes, p.1)

The eventual result of Bell’s stand and the information that he disclosed was that in 1976 then-Governor Carey tried to “close the book” on Attica by absolving all the inmates and police.

“This was a travesty of the equal justice I had sought,” Bell says, “but far better than if I had played the official game. Had I not spoken out, I am fairly sure that officials would have falsely claimed that most of the law officers’ shootings were justified and that police detectives had destroyed too much evidence to prosecute the proverbial ‘few bad apples.’” (Bio Notes, p.1)

“Malcolm Bell is an American hero, a brave man who risked his livelihood, his profession, and the good opinion of his peers for the sake of truth and justice.” wrote the late Tom Wicker (1926-2011), award-winning political columnist for the New York Times, in the forward of Bell’s book The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Coverup, and the Pursuit of Justice.

As bad as the five days of carnage in 1971 were, the more than five years of coverup from the “whistleblower’s” point of view, recounted in Bell’s book, may as damning than Stanley Nelson’s film.

Malcolm Bell lives in Vermont.

NOTES:

1. The Attica Turkey Shoot: Carnage, Cover-up and the Pursuit of Justice, Skyhorse Publishing, 2017
2. MB bio notes for Jean Y, 9/26/21

Malcolm Bell is represented by Amaryah Orenstein at GO Literary, amaryah@go-lit.com, 617-981-5151.

By Jean W. Yeager, Rutland, VT

[email protected], 802-855-8877