On the Right

Attica, August 28—I do not doubt that passions rage, and bitterness festers, that there is inexhaustible loneliness and despair among the prisoners in Attica as they approach the first anniversary of the uprising that scarred September of last year. But it is not palpable. There is a new administration at Attica, half the inmates have been sent elsewhere (necessarily: two block areas were all but destroyed), and some of the known troublemakers are segregated. It has the appearance of a relaxed community—a spent community is perhaps a better way to put it, a year after four ritual executions (of one guard and three inmates, by other inmates), and the killing of eleven guards and 32 prisoners by the state troopers dispatched to return control of the prison to the authorities.

But Attica is strangely different from what one’s imagination anticipated. To begin with it is not an old, but relatively new prison, built during the Twenties. The inmates are not herded together four or more to a cell—the cells are individual. The visiting room (this is a post-riot innovation) is unscreened, so that prisoners can talk face-to-face with their visitors (to be sure submitting, after the visitors have left, to a thorough physical search). The refectory is clean and airy, the chapel (where a Black Muslim service was going on Thursday at noon) readily accessible, the guards and administrative personnel for the most, apparently relaxed. It requires treading the quarters destroyed by wanton fire, and staring into the E compound, just this side of the handball court, where the hostages were kept, blindfolded much of the time; or passing one’s eyes over the evanescing scars of a trench into which (it had been rumored) the prisoners intended to douse gasoline-soaked hostages if they did not get their demands, to recognize that one is strolling by what only a year ago was holocaust.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Attica, August 28—I do not doubt that passions rage, and bitterness festers, that there is inexhaustible loneliness and despair among the prisoners in Attica as they approach the first anniversary of the uprising that scarred September of last year. But it is not palpable. There is a new administration at Attica, half the inmates have been sent elsewhere (necessarily: two block areas were all but destroyed), and some of the known troublemakers are segregated. It has the appearance of a relaxed community—a spent community is perhaps a better way to put it, a year after four ritual executions (of one guard and three inmates, by other inmates), and the killing of eleven guards and 32 prisoners by the state troopers dispatched to return control of the prison to the authorities.

But Attica is strangely different from what one’s imagination anticipated. To begin with it is not an old, but relatively new prison, built during the Twenties. The inmates are not herded together four or more to a cell—the cells are individual. The visiting room (this is a post-riot innovation) is unscreened, so that prisoners can talk face-to-face with their visitors (to be sure submitting, after the visitors have left, to a thorough physical search). The refectory is clean and airy, the chapel (where a Black Muslim service was going on Thursday at noon) readily accessible, the guards and administrative personnel for the most, apparently relaxed. It requires treading the quarters destroyed by wanton fire, and staring into the E compound, just this side of the handball court, where the hostages were kept, blindfolded much of the time; or passing one’s eyes over the evanescing scars of a trench into which (it had been rumored) the prisoners intended to douse gasoline-soaked hostages if they did not get their demands, to recognize that one is strolling by what only a year ago was holocaust.