65 pages • 2 hours read
Blood in the Water
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Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Retribution and Reprisals Unimagined”
“Tony Strollo” Summary
Thompson begins Part 4 by presenting the perspective of a New York State trooper whose brother, Frank, was a CO at Attica and was now a hostage. Tony Strollo was a Democratic supporter but socially to the right of his parents. While he was desperate to retake the prison and save his brother, he had misgivings. As Thompson expresses it, “He knew that troopers had a lot more experience stopping speeders than storming a prison” (162). They had also been issued with rifles, which they had no training or experience in using.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Chomping at the Bit”
Thompson looks at the plan for the imminent assault on the prison, planned for Monday, September 13. State Senator John Dunne had helped persuade Oswald to issue a final statement to the prisoners in D Yard. Crucially, the statement, which would be delivered at 7:00am, giving the inmates one hour to respond, would not be issued as an ultimatum letting the prisoners know the full extent of what would happen if they did not surrender. It is unclear whether this approach was taken to gain the element of surprise or because Rockefeller did not want to risk having to call off the assault.
In any case, there were several other key problems with the proposed action. First, it was being conducted by New York State Police (NYSP) troopers, correctional officers, and county sheriffs. These groups had little or no training or experience in such operations, as opposed to the National Guard, which was not used, but which did have the requisite training and protocol for this. Second, there was no clear planning on how troopers would communicate with each other or their commanders. They had no radios, and they would be wearing heavy gas masks to deal with the gas that would first be dropped into D Yard before the assault. The masks would make proper communication all but impossible. Lastly, and as Thompson says, “perhaps most important, the plan had no provision for giving either a surrender message or post-assault instructions” (166-167). In other words, it would be impossible for prisoners to effectively surrender and unclear what would happen in the immediate aftermath of the retaking.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Standing Firm”
At eight o’clock in the morning on Monday the 13th, Oswald delivered his final message to the prisoners, via Rich X Clark in A-Block tunnel, exhorting the men to surrender and to “join with me in restoring order to the facility” (170). He also reiterated his commitment to the 28 demands, although, again, he made no mention that this was an ultimatum or that an armed assault was imminent. Still, Clark took this message to the rest of the prisoners, and they once more voted it down. After informing Oswald, Clark was given a further 20 minutes to convince the prisoners, a deadline that passed.
Clark was now nervous, especially as the observers committee had not been sent in. In an act of desperation, he agreed to take eight hostages out onto the catwalks above the yard, accompanied by men armed with knives and spears, to remind the state that they still had power over the hostages. As they were doing this, they heard the first roar of a helicopter’s propellers, a sign that the assault was about to start.
Chapter 21 Summary: “No Mercy”
In this chapter, Thompson describes the assault itself. It commenced at 9:46am with the dropping of CN and CS gas—actually a powdery substance that causes tearing and vomiting, among other symptoms—via helicopter to incapacitate the prisoners. This disabled most of the prisoners and meant an armed assault was now unnecessary. Nonetheless, 550 men from the New York State Police, Attica and Auburn COs, and sheriff’s deputies, “buzzing from a toxic cocktail of hatred, fear, and aggression” (180), began the ground assault. They were armed with rifles, shotguns, and personal side-arms. They also used deadly “buckshot” and unjacketed bullets and proceeded to first clear the catwalks with fire before assaulting the yard itself.
Thompson tells the story of the assault from the perspective of the many prisoners and hostages who suffered injuries or died because of the retaking. In all, 128 men were shot, some multiple times. The immediate death toll was nine hostages and 29 prisoners. There is also evidence that many of the shootings and killings occurred long after the prison had been effectively secured, suggesting that troopers engaged in the murder and execution of surrendered prisoners. Gun shots were heard from the Steward’s room, where the observers were gathered, at 10:24am even though the assault officially ended at 10:05am.
Chapter 22 Summary: “Spinning Disaster”
Chapter 22 deals with the public relations aspect of the Attica retaking. At 10:40am on the following Monday, Oswald spoke to the press. He reiterated the necessity of the assault, claiming, “The armed rebellion of the type we have faced threatens the destruction of our free society” (194). Department of Correctional Services public relations officer Gerald Houlihan spoke a few hours later, as did deputy commissioner Dunbar. The former claimed that prisoners had cut hostages’ throats and blamed inmates for all hostage deaths. A few hours later, Dunbar added the detail that one of the prisoners had castrated a hostage before killing him.
News of this, and other alleged prisoner atrocities, became front page stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. At the same time Rockefeller’s actions were endorsed privately by President Nixon, along with his idea that Attica had been a revolutionary plot “led by the blacks” (200).
Chapter 23 Summary: “And the Beat Goes On”
Thompson describes the immediate aftermath of the retaking for the prisoners. As Mancusi had not anticipated the scale of the violence, no plans were made for the additional medical supplies, personnel, or equipment that would be needed for the scores of wounded men. Severely wounded inmates lied for hours without treatment. In fact, officials even hampered efforts to get extra doctors to Attica or to transfer prisoners to outside hospitals for care.
Further, on top of the neglect, the COs and NYSP were continuing to abuse and, in some cases, torture prisoners. One inmate was found to have glass wounds around his rectum and genitals. This abuse, which went on for days afterwards, also involved the deliberate destruction of inmates’ false teeth and glasses and the forcing of them to run a gauntlet of batons when returning to their cells. Finally, Thompson notes, a legal team who had received a federal order allowing them to enter the prison to ensure prisoners’ human rights were not being abused was refused entry.
Part 4 Analysis
Thompson recounts the perspective of prisoner James Lee Asbury just 10 minutes after the assault had started: “no matter where he looked, all he could see was blood and water” (187). That the retaking had been, at least from a human perspective, a catastrophe could scarcely be denied. Over 30 men had died, and over 120 had been shot. Worse still was the aftermath. Not only were severely wounded men left without medical care for hours, but guards and troopers actively abused some of the injured. Thompson explains what happened in the case of one prisoner, who had been shot in the thigh:
He listened in terror as troopers debated in front of him whether to kill him or let him bleed to death. As they discussed this the troopers had fun jamming their rifle butts into his injuries and dumping lime onto his face and injured legs (185).
Even the state realized how bad this might all look. This is why the legal team was denied access to Attica in the immediate period after the retaking. It is also why the state fabricated stories of prisoner outrages against hostages to deflect from, and morally justify, its own actions. Indeed, in one grisly flourish, deputy commissioner Dunbar claimed that an inmate had stuffed a hostage’s genitals in his mouth after castrating him. Yet how did things come to this? Why was such brutal and excessive violence used in the assault and its aftermath? This question is especially troubling if one considers that a riot in a prison in Queens the year before had ended without a single shot being fired. The same was also true for a number of other riots in previous years that had been suppressed without fatalities.
Answers to these questions fall into two broad camps. On the one hand, it could be argued that the atrocities that unfolded were not the result of any conscious or deliberate malicious intent. This claim, in turn, has two related aspects. First, the way things developed was the result of poor planning from those in authority. As Thompson notes, the men charged with the retaking had “much ammunition and only the flimsiest of plans as to how they were going to secure the facility” (179). Of course, one can still hold Rockefeller, Oswald, John Monahan of the New York State Police, and Superintendent Mancusi culpable. Their planning both was inadequate and showed a callousness regarding human life. Rockefeller, however, may have felt he had delegated the detail of the retaking to others. On this reading, he is a Pontius Pilate figure who mistakenly washed his hands of a problematic situation.
This idea of delegating ties into the second aspect of this interpretation: the guards. They had been sent to do a difficult job, amidst a stressful and fearful situation. Further, antagonized by news of their comrade’s death, Quinn, and by stories of prisoner brutality, some overreacted. However, this begs the question, for one thing, as to why they so easily believed such stories. They were in the yard, so they would not have witnessed any of these fictitious prisoner atrocities themselves. Instead, contrary to what Thompson suggests, it was likely not the stories that caused the brutality, but the desire for brutality that justified the invention of the stories. On this view, more malign motives can be attributed to the COs and troopers who retook the prison. A sadistic desire for revenge, as well as open racism, led to many of the more flagrant abuses in the yard. This idea is certainly corroborated by evidence of racial slurs that were used against Black inmates as beatings and torture were taking place.
Moreover, following this second view, these impulses were exploited by those higher up in authority for their own purposes. This is what Nixon referred to, in his justification for Rockefeller’s actions, when he said, “you see it’s the black business…he had to do it” (199). By “the black business” Nixon was referring to the use of force and violence to terrorize enemies into submission. This was what America’s bombing campaign in South East Asia had intended to do at the time. In the case of Attica, then, the excessive violence was not an unfortunate accident, nor was it simply the result of poor planning. It was a clear show of strength, sanctioned at the highest levels of American government. It aimed to severely punish inmates for rebelling or for having the temerity to demand things. Likewise, it was intended to be a powerful deterrent to any prisoner in the US penal system who considered doing something similar. For this purpose, it was not enough simply to take back the prison. There had to be a sufficiently high price paid in blood and suffering.
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