A 30-foot-high, two-foot-thick wall stretching over a mile and a quarter surrounded the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. When the state completed construction in 1931, officials called it nearly impenetrable, designed to keep nothing in and nothing out. For 40 years, that promise held. Then, for four days in September 1971, it collapsed completely—before television cameras, radio microphones, and civilian observers the prisoners themselves had invited inside.
On the morning of September 13, 1971, the wall did what it was built to do one final time. It hid D-Yard, the exercise field where more than a thousand men had held 39 hostages for four days. Helicopters swept low overhead. Tear gas filled the air, followed by nearly 3,000 rounds fired into the smoke by state troopers and correctional officers who had been told the hostages had already been killed.
Ten minutes later, it was over. Forty-three people were dead: 29 prisoners and 10 correctional officers and civilian employees, the very people the assault was said to have been launched to save. To understand why Attica exploded in 1971, one must look back to 1929, two years before the prison opened, when unrest spread through New York’s old jail system. The state’s response was not reform but a wall of concrete.
A 1926 crime commission found New York’s prisons operating at 120 percent of capacity. Overcrowding, idleness, and inhumane conditions triggered major riots in 1929, forcing the legislature to confront a system it had ignored for years. The commission recommended expanding existing prisons and building a new one for surplus inmates. The idea of reducing the rate at which the state sent people to prison was not seriously considered.
Construction began in Attica, a small rural town in Wyoming County, in 1929. When the prison was completed in early 1931, the cost had risen to $9 million—at the time the most expensive prison in the United States. The walls were 30 feet high and two feet thick, ringed by more than a dozen guard towers. Inside sat four main cell blocks—A, B, C, and D—each a multi-tiered fortress of individual cells connected by corridors designed to prevent unauthorized movement.
The design assumed that the right walls and right amount of concrete could contain a problem that architecture could not solve. On June 14, 1931, Attica opened, built to hold 1,600 prisoners in individual cells. Newspapers called it beautiful, even a criminal’s paradise. For nearly four decades, Attica operated as large prisons of that era did: strict, silent, and unaccountable.
Prisoners spent at least 14 hours a day in their cells. Recreation was minimal. Medical care was nominal—one overworked doctor for thousands of inmates. Education and vocational opportunities were scarce.
By 1971, the prison’s population had changed dramatically, but the administration had not changed with it. The Great Migration had brought millions of Black families from the segregated South and hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican families to New York City. The criminal justice system, shaped by policing practices and punitive policies, disproportionately impacted these communities. By 1971, nearly two-thirds of the men imprisoned at Attica were Black or Hispanic.
Most came from New York City and other urban centers, hundreds of miles from the small, rural, almost entirely white communities surrounding the prison. The guards were, almost without exception, white men from those rural areas. In September 1971, not one Black guard worked at Attica. Prisoners received about 63 cents worth of food per day—a figure they cited so often in testimony that it became a symbol of the system’s contempt.
Each man received one square of toilet paper daily. Showers were allowed once a week. Mail was censored; guards could destroy letters they found objectionable. Religious practice, especially for the growing number of Black Muslim prisoners, was restricted and sometimes punished.
There was no meaningful vocational training, no effective grievance procedure. Prisoners had spent years writing about these conditions to state officials, newspapers, and anyone who would listen. Almost no one outside the walls was listening. The men who organized inside Attica in the summer of 1971 were closely watching what was happening in prisons across the country.
In August 1971, just weeks earlier, the prominent Black radical prisoner George Jackson was shot and killed by guards during an escape attempt at San Quentin. The event provoked widespread reaction among prisoners nationwide. In August 1970, the Manhattan House of Detention in New York had seen serious disturbances. For two years, unrest had spread through prisons across the East Coast.
During the summer of 1971, Black, white, and Puerto Rican prisoners—men who had every reason to distrust each other according to the prison’s informal racial divisions—began coordinating and electing representatives to work together for reform. It was an unusual solidarity in a system built to govern by keeping prisoners divided. On September 9, 1971, a minor incident in a cell block spread quickly through the prison, with word that inmates involved had been beaten. Within hours, nearly 1,200 prisoners rebelled, seized control of a large portion of the prison, broke through gates, and overwhelmed guards.
In the chaos of that first morning, officer William Quinn was severely beaten. He died two days later—the only hostage death directly caused by prisoners, according to the record. State police quickly retook the cell blocks, but about 1,300 prisoners retreated to D-Yard, the open exercise field surrounded by 35-foot walls. They brought 39 hostages—guards and civilian employees—with them, blindfolded and seated in a circle in the middle of the yard, guarded by prisoners armed with sticks and knives from the prison’s kitchen and workshops.
That day, 21-year-old prisoner Elliott James Barkley, known as “L. D. ,” stood before the gathered crowd and gave a speech that was broadcast across the country within hours. “We are men,” Barkley said.
“We are not beasts and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed. ” Four days later, when state forces attacked D-Yard, Barkley was among the 29 prisoners killed. He was 21 years old.
Inside the circle of negotiators were men including Frank “Big Black” Smith, a heavyset former college football player imprisoned for a robbery in New York City. The other prisoners unanimously made him security chief. He took responsibility for protecting both hostages and outside observers, forming a human chain to move visitors safely through the crowd. Congressman Herman Badillo, who depended on Smith’s protection during his visit to the yard, later credited Smith with keeping him safe.
Over the next two days, the prisoners organized themselves with speed and discipline that surprised officials outside the walls. They allowed a growing list of outside observers into D-Yard—eventually more than 30 prominent individuals—including Badillo, one of the first Puerto Rican members of Congress; New York Times columnist Tom Wicker; and radical civil rights lawyer William Kunstler. Badillo later compared entering D-Yard to crossing a border between two different countries. On September 11, the prisoners’ representatives presented a formal manifesto to New York’s Correctional Services Commissioner Russell Oswald: 28 specific demands, including religious freedom, an end to mail censorship, more phone access, better medical care, a functioning grievance process, and proper pay for prison work.
Oswald agreed immediately to most of the demands, but he could not grant the one that became decisive: full amnesty, guaranteeing that no prisoner would face additional criminal charges for anything that happened in D-Yard. Officer Quinn’s death made that demand legally complicated; under New York law, every prisoner inside could theoretically be charged with murder. That day, Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, whom prisoners had specifically requested as an observer, flew in from California. He refused to accept any settlement without amnesty, hardening the position.
The next day, prisoners, hostages, observers, and Commissioner Oswald himself urged Governor Nelson Rockefeller to come to Attica in person. Rockefeller refused. He never set foot in the prison during the five-day standoff, later defending the decision by claiming that his presence would set an unacceptable precedent for future prison rebellions. That evening, with amnesty unresolved and negotiation effectively dead, Rockefeller and Oswald authorized force to retake the prison.
On Monday morning, September 13, at 8:25 a. m. , Oswald sent a message to the prisoners urging them to release hostages and accept the proposed settlement. Crucially, the message was not framed as a final ultimatum.
The prisoners were not told negotiations had ended or that an armed assault was planned within the hour. They rejected the offer. With no way of knowing that Oswald’s message carried a deadline, some prisoners held knives to the hostages’ throats—a desperate attempt at survival as they watched armored vehicles and hundreds of armed soldiers assemble. At 9:46 a.
m. , helicopters appeared over D-Yard and dropped tear gas into the crowd. In the thick chemical smoke, visibility dropped to a few feet. State troopers and correctional officers on the roofs and walkways opened fire directly into the smoke.
They had been briefed that hostages were already being killed behind the smoke—a claim with no factual basis. According to official state figures, about 2,000 rounds were fired in those initial moments. Other reliable accounts, including evidence gathered for civil lawsuits, put the number at more than 3,000. In an area the size of a few football fields, more than 100 people were hit by gunfire.
In about 10 minutes, the state regained control of D-Yard. Twenty-nine prisoners were dead. Ten of the 39 hostages were dead. More than 90 people were wounded.
Some were shot not during the initial firestorm but after surrendering, while lying on the ground. In the hours immediately after the retaking, New York State officials stood before journalists and delivered an account of what had happened in D-Yard. Every specific and important aspect of that account was false. Officials told the country that the 10 hostages had been killed by prisoners during the assault, that several had had their throats deliberately slashed, that one had been castrated.
These were not vague rumors from panicked witnesses. They were statements made at official press conferences by representatives of New York State. Newspapers across the country printed exactly what they had been handed. For an entire day, the story of Attica was one of brutal prisoners slaughtering helpless hostages.
None of it was true. On September 14, Monroe County Medical Examiner Dr. John Edland completed autopsies on the 10 dead hostages and reached a conclusion directly contradicting everything the state had claimed less than 24 hours earlier. All 10 hostages had died of gunshot wounds.
Not knife wounds inflicted by prisoners—gunfire from law enforcement in the tear gas smoke. There was no evidence of throat-cutting. No evidence of castration. The state had invented a story within hours of regaining control of its prison, designed to shift blame for the deaths of its own employees onto the prisoners it had just killed.
After the assault, surviving prisoners were subjected to documented brutality. They were stripped and forced to crawl over broken glass. Many were forced to run through lines of guards and troopers beating them with clubs. Frank “Big Black” Smith, who had protected the hostages and observers for four days, was singled out.
He was stripped, laid on a ping-pong table in the middle of the yard, and beaten for more than six hours. He later said officials walking by stubbed out burning cigarettes on his body. The wounded were denied even basic medical care for hours, left bleeding on the concrete while officials outside the walls told journalists a story in which the state’s forces were the heroes of a massacre in which they had fired the bullets. State officials later filed more than 200 criminal charges against 62 prisoners for their roles in the rebellion.
Cleveland McKinley Jomo Davis, one of the prisoner negotiators, was tried and acquitted—one of the few cases that reached a jury without plea deal or dismissal. In the years that followed, the state never charged a single trooper, guard, or official for the 43 deaths or for the documented mistreatment after the recapture. One state trooper was charged, four years after the assault, with a single count of reckless endangerment. In December 1976, under mounting pressure over the stark disparity, Governor Hugh Carey pardoned the remaining prisoners charged in connection with Attica.
In the same announcement, he closed the door on any prosecution of law enforcement officers involved in the assault. The state’s greatest prison tragedy was followed by no state accountability. Tom Wicker, the New York Times columnist who had witnessed the uprising firsthand, published his account “A Time to Die” in 1975. Alongside the official McKay Commission report, it became one of the two main documents that forced the American public to accept what really happened at Attica, so different from the version the state had tried to sell in the first 48 hours.
A second state investigation produced findings that did not surface publicly for 40 years. In 1975, special assistant attorney general Malcolm Bell publicly accused state prosecutors of suppressing evidence of homicide, torture, and misconduct by law enforcement. The state formed a commission under Justice Bernard Meyer. Meyer’s team spent 10 months reviewing 33,000 pages of grand jury testimony and other evidence, producing a 570-page, three-volume report in August 1975.
Meyer’s conclusion was carefully worded: no intentional cover-up, but grave errors, omissions, and delays that had tainted the whole investigation. Only one of the three volumes was released to the public at the time. The other two, containing the specific evidence behind Meyer’s carefully phrased statements, were sealed in 1977 and 1981 and locked in the attorney general’s Buffalo office, where they sat for three decades, opposed at every step by the state police union. In 2011, on the 40th anniversary of the rebellion, New York’s attorney general finally petitioned the court to release the remaining volumes.
In 2013, a judge allowed a partial release—still incomplete, still redacted. What emerged included testimony from a National Guard member and a correctional medical official describing in graphic detail how wounded prisoners were treated in the hours after the assault. These accounts sat in a locked office for four decades while those who gave them and those they described aged and died waiting for the truth to see light. The McKay Commission’s report concluded: “Aside from the Indian massacres at the close of the nineteenth century, the State Police assault which ended the four-day prison uprising was the bloodiest one-day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.
” That was the finding of the state’s own official investigation into its own actions. A year after the rebellion, the word “Attica” had become a national symbol of state violence against the powerless—heard in the voices of protesters at the 1972 Democratic National Convention and, three years later, in the mouth of Al Pacino’s character in the film “Dog Day Afternoon. ”
Justice in the legal sense took decades and remained partial. The class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of surviving D-Yard prisoners lingered in federal court for 18 years before reaching the liability phase.
Five more years passed before damages were finalized. A 25-year-old in D-Yard in September 1971 was approaching 50 before he saw a single dollar of compensation for what had happened—if he saw it at all. Many of the 502 people included in the settlement died before receiving anything. In 1997, Frank “Big Black” Smith, who had led the fight for compensation for 26 years, won a $4 million jury verdict.
Another survivor, David Bros, was awarded $75,000. A federal appeals court overturned both verdicts on procedural grounds. The case was reassigned to Judge Michael Telesca, and in January 2000 a final settlement was reached: $8 million divided among 502 surviving former prisoners and their families, with an additional $4 million in attorneys’ fees. It was a resolution that came 29 years after the torture it was meant to compensate.
Judge Telesca later said Smith personally saved the settlement from collapsing. Smith distributed his own $125,000 share, plus an additional $250,000 Telesca arranged in recognition of his efforts, among companions who had ended up with far less. “Financially, he gave so much away to destitute former inmates that he hired a bus to bring them up to collect what they were due,” Telesca said. Frank “Big Black” Smith died in 2004 at age 70, having spent more than half his life in a specific, narrow fight for justice that no one in power at Attica in September 1971 expected him to live long enough to win.
The families of the 10 hostages killed in the recapture waited even longer than the prisoners. The state agreed in 2021 to pay $12 million to surviving hostages and the families of those who died. Compensation for injuries caused by the state’s own assault came exactly 50 years after the 10-minute attack that killed them. As one family member observed at the time, the money was nowhere near enough for what had been lost.
But after half a century of official silence, it was the state’s first formal acknowledgment that the people in that circle had been killed not by prisoners but by the state’s own bullets. Attica did not close after 1971. It remains an active maximum-security prison today. By the state’s own accounting, the changes brought in the decades after the rebellion are significant.
A technical school and gymnasium were built. Eleven vocational shops now operate, offering training in business education, printing, welding, floor covering, maintenance, painting and decorating, building maintenance, electrical work, plumbing and heating, small engine repair, and barbering. A formal education program with nine certified teachers now exists, where before there was none. In 2012, federal standards under the Prison Rape Elimination Act began governing staff training.
Correctional academy training now explicitly includes nonviolent conflict resolution and cultural awareness. At the 50th anniversary of the rebellion, the state’s own commemorative report argued that Attica today bears no comparison to the prison of the McKay Commission era. That claim has been tested in ways no one in 1971 or 2021 could have fully imagined. In December 2024, a prisoner named Robert Brooks died after being beaten by correctional officers at another New York prison, sparking renewed nationwide criticism of the state’s prison environment—a system that, by the state’s own independent monitoring groups, was already on the verge of collapse.
On February 17, 2025, correctional officers at Attica and across the state stopped coming to work in an unauthorized wildcat strike—only the second such work stoppage in the history of New York’s guard force. The strike was not sanctioned by the officers’ own union, and public employee strikes are illegal in New York. But that did not stop it from spreading rapidly through the state’s prisons. The striking officers’ grievances included chronic staffing shortages, mandatory 16-to-24-hour shifts, and fierce opposition to the 2021 HALT Act, which limited long-term solitary confinement.
According to the state’s own corrections department, inmate-on-officer attacks had nearly doubled in the year before the strike, while officer-on-inmate attacks had more than doubled in the same period. Governor Kathy Hochul deployed the New York National Guard to secure the prisons in the officers’ absence. More than 4,500 troops were involved at the peak, with authorization to expand to 7,700. Attica was specifically among the prisons under strain.
Soldiers with no special training for the work slept on gymnasium floors between 12-hour shifts and ate the same food as the prisoners they had been sent to guard. During the strike, cell blocks across the state were kept in long-term lockdown. Prisoners were denied regular meals, essential medication, and court appearances. In the three-week strike, nine people died statewide.
At least two of those deaths were directly attributed to delayed medical care caused by the strike, and one man died by suicide in his cell with no guard present to intervene. Among the dead was Messiah Nantwi, killed by guards at another prison—a repeat of the Robert Brooks killing that had accelerated the crisis weeks earlier. The strike ended on March 10, 2025, when most officers and their union accepted the state’s offer. But nearly 2,000 strikers who refused to return under any terms were fired outright.
The state’s corrections department had employed about 13,500 officers and sergeants before the walkout, below its own target of 14,600. In the aftermath, that number fell below 11,000. As of the latest reports, the cost of keeping National Guard troops deployed in the prisons was on track to exceed $1 billion, with the governor requesting an additional $500 million to continue the deployment into the next year. The department has lowered the minimum hiring age from 21 to 18 and opened positions to out-of-state applicants to rebuild a workforce that collapsed overnight.
By the state budget office’s own assessment, staffing remains “very strained” and “slow-going,” still far below what is needed to run the system without guard assistance. Fifty-four years after Rockefeller ordered D-Yard retaken, the wall at Attica still stands, 30 feet high and two feet thick, exactly where the state built it in 1931 to permanently contain a crisis. It failed in 1971, and the historical records clearly show why. By the state’s own admission, it is still struggling to fulfill that duty today.
Nearly 2,000 people remain imprisoned behind those 30-foot walls, watched over in part by soldiers standing in for a workforce the state has not yet rebuilt. The wall built to solve a problem did not solve it. It kept the problem hidden from public view until something inside broke.