A Rubbing From A Tombstone

IT RAINED THE night before New York state troopers and corrections officers attacked D Yard of Attica Correctional Facility and ended the prisoners' four day uprising One inmate later said that God must have been crying.

In the attack, the police killed ten hostages and 29 Attica inmates. The inmates had killed one guard in their takeover. The Grand Jury considering the matter in session from November 1971 to September 1974, indicted no one for the killing of the ten hostages, no one for the killing of the ten hostages, no one for the killing of the 29 inmates, no state official or trooper or guard for indiscriminate firing or carelessness or man slaughter, no one for failing to provide medical care--although the authorities knew the attack was coming--or for failing to prevent reprisals after the attack. Instead, the Grand Jury has indicted 61 of the Attica inmates for enmes ranging from murder to kidnapping to sodomy in over 1400 counts of criminal action.

Tom Wicker was an evewitness during most of the four days' uprising at Attica. The inmates knew of him as a New York Times columnist who offer supported civil rights and prison reform in his writing. And they requested that he and 13 others, including radical lawyer William Kunstler and Black Panther Party leader Bobby Scale, form an observers' committee through which the inmates might negotiate with the state. Four years later the Grand Jury has finished its work, and Wicker anger and despair have culminated in A Time To Die, his personal chronicle of the Attica weekend September 9 through 13, 1971.

In addition to his minute by minute account of the perceptions, tensions negotiations, and rhetoric on all sides at Attica Wicker presents his autobiography. It serves as a perfect corollats to the grim recital of events and speeches. When he needs to express the observers and inmates in tense fears of a police assault for instance, he tells a story from his childhood. Sitting on his front porch one hot summer evening, he felt an eerie tingle in his backbone, a rasping ominous sound that grew and grabbed his ears and shrieked Wicker was petrified with fear even after he saw that it was only a column of tanks on maneuvers screeching through town, because it was his first glimpse of a world beyond his placid home--a world that could kill and maim and dismember, in fact, make an industry of it.

ATTICA CAME at a turning point in Wicker's life. His marriage was breaking up, a shattering of stability he had come to depend upon. He was fat, 45, and frustrated in his ambition to be a great writer. Indeed, he was afraid that nothing he had ever written would last, that in his columns he was preaching only to those already converted. His aloof, critical onlooker's ethic, valid professionally, no longer could sustain his life. As he himself says, in the third-person prose that achieves objectivity. "His sense of self had finally required of him that he go into the pit." And once having seen the hostages huddled in their ring and having heard the impassioned speeches of the inmates, knowing that the guns ringing in Attica were ready to settle the matter in blood, Wicker became a human being first and a journalist second.

Tom Wicker went to Attica as a writer who had asked a few searching questions about his society, but who essentially was loyal to and protective of that society. He came away from Attica's tragedy shaken, stirred, and aware personally for the first time of the depth of racism that lay in his Southern upbringing, of the inhumanity of prisons, of America's reliance on violence as the ultimate recourse, of the power of guns to dictate men's actions.

Before Attica he had experienced only twinges of these feelings, as when he saw the tanks grinding through his town. Even at the first road-block on his way to Attica, he felt only a momentary shock when he noted the excessive weaponry--sidearms, rifles, shotguns, tear-gas launchers--that the sheriff's deputies and state troopers were carrying.

Wicker did not then understand that so many guns must sooner or later become a force in themselves, an imperative acting upon the men who supposedly control them. If the weapons are in hand, the question of those who have them ultimately becomes. "Why not use them?" The more weapons, the more insistent the question; and the burden of explaining why not to use them falls on those who have no guns. But those who have no guns have little credence with those who do.

The shocks multiplied. There was Captain Henry Williams, tactical commander of the state police at Attica, whose "narrow black tie had an air about it of woe to the hippies." There was the initial police response to the observers' committee--rigid indifference--as if they were only a formality to be gotten through, one more time-consuming nicety, like warning an arrested man of his rights, before the inevitable business at hand could be attended to by armed and empowered patriots. The indifference quickly turned to hostility, as the observers kept trying to avoid violence and began to sympathize with the inmates' grievances: a guard bringing sandwiches to the committee room said, "If I'd a known this was for you people. I'd a never brung it." The townspeople of Attica and most of upstate New York shared this hostility: they thought the observers had no business negotiating with those "murderers, rapists, and scum"--they weren't "normal people like you and I," a guard's wife told a reporter.

This "we versus they" syndrome is Tom Wicker's theory of violence in America. Puritan theology may be dead, he says, but Puritanism is eternal in its tendency to divide everyone into two opposed camps, the saved and the damned, the forces of light and the forces of dark, we and they. Only "they," the damned, are violent, criminal, savage, inhuman--the Indians in early America; in more recent times, the "gooks and slopes" in Vietnam. "We," on the other hand, the peaceful, law-abiding, want only to develop our civilization without hindrance, are justified in violently suppressing "their" uprisings. In the American myth of justified violence, burning or napalming villages is not really violence at all, because it is moral values defending themselves against the demons.

Wicker's analysis may be simplistic, but it has merit. For instance, it explains the urban warfare of modern America. Police are not brutal or racist when they shoot to kill, or beat up or harrass "violent subhuman beats." They are protecting normal society. They had to get Fred Hampton before he got us. It is not surprising, then, that "they" populate the Atticas of America.

THE STORY WICKER tells of America's prisons adds yet another sorry dimension to the Attica tragedy. The Quakers in the late 1700s had the notion that offenders should be locked alone in cells, day and night, so that, in such awful solitude, they would have nothing to do but ponder their acts, repent and reform. By 1825, New York had begun an entire penal system that combined individual cells and total silence with floggings, hard labor in fields and quarries, undeviating routine, and subsistence level food and shelter. As the first warden of Sing Sing had said, "Reformation of the criminal could not possibly be effected until the spirit of the criminal was broken." The nineteenth century penitentiary produced more mental breakdowns, suicides, and deaths than repentance. Dickens, writing of the prisons he had seen in America, said, "Very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment inflicts upon the sufferer." Yet the American prison system--a design to reform criminals by caging humans--has found a permanent place in American society, despite its protracted record of futility, dishonor, and inhumanity.

New York is presently spending eight to ten thousand dollars a year per inmate in its prisons. This cost might be justified if persons dangerous to society were being separated from society and kept separate, or if persons who had done time returned to society repentent and productive. But the real situation falls short of either of these goals: the national average prison term was 28 months in 1970, which implies that many were shorter; the FBI estimated the rate of recidivism (the committing of new crimes by those convicted of earlier offenses) for 1972 was 65 per cent; and the National Council of Crime and Delinquency in 1974 found that one third of all inmates released since 1970 were back behind bars. It's not even clear that prisons deter crime: studies have indicated that it's the certainty of the punishment, that is, the swift and efficient working of the entire criminal justice system, rather than the severity of the sentence, that deters criminals.

For these reasons, the Wisconsin Council on Criminal Justice recommended to the governor in 1972 that Wisconsin's prisons be abolished and that money be allocated instead to minimum security community and vocational rehabilitation programs. Wicker feels that America's prisons should be abolished: "Hate and fear have been made institutions, tax supported, government-operated, sealed with the approval of society."

MALCOLM X ONCE said that American society itself was a prison for blacks, and Wicker recognized that racism in himself. He had usually managed to compensate for it--but compensation wasn't enough in D- Yard of Attica Prison. A Time To Die has its only joyful moment when Tom Wicker conquers his racism at least for a moment: embracing a young black inmate, he said, "We're gonna win, brother," and they were two human beings solidly together and Wicker was "free at last, free at last, thank God." But when he turned to leave he saw police and guns staring from the prison walls, and his brotherhood was buried in an avalanche of fear.

Wicker always wondered later whether he could have averted the massacre. At the time, he believed in the system, that it would work things out, because it always had. He didn't realize how greatly the police and guards hated and feared the inmates, nor how deeply the inmates mistrusted the state. Governor Rockefeller condemned their radical action, but his condemnation rang hollow. He had effected no prison reform since he came to office in 1959, and not until Attica did the state promise change. Of the 28 reforms the state agreed to in the process of bargaining at Attica only three--the creation of an ombudsman's office, a grievance procedure, and allowing political activity--were real changes. The rest were either hedged promises conditional on legislative action--modernizing inmate education and applying the minimum wage to inmate labor, for instance--or changes like allowing religious freedom that Wicker thought should have been in effect all along. The inmates were holding out for amnesty from prosecution for actions taken during the rebellion. They knew of the Auburn and Tombs riots after which the state had filed grab-bag blanket charges against inmates, and of the case of the Harlem Four, whom New York was attempting to bring to court again after six years, two mistrials, and an overthrown verdict. Those were only three examples of an entire racial consciousness of dragnet arrests, trumped-up charges, manufactured or flimsy evidence, dubious identifications, legal technicalities, forced plea bargains, lack of decent or concerned counsel, delayed trials, vengeful prosecutions, excessive bail, stiff sentencing, and violating of civil rights and liberties. Amnesty was the only demand that really mattered.

GOVERNOR ROCKEFELLER refused to grant amnesty. He didn't think he had that constitutional power, and he was convinced it would be wrong anyway--it would "undermine the basic tenets of our society," that is, "equal application of the laws." This was Rockefeller's answer to the Attica Brothers, many of whom were in prison because of the unequal application of the laws--this, from one of the most "equal" men in a nation where all too many are more equal than others.

Tom Wicker tried to convince Rockefeller to come to Attica, so that he could see the awful chances for bloodshed. But the governor refused to come and refused to give the observers more time. Wicker says the "order of things" was more important to the governor than lives.

Governors must not deal as equals with lawbreakers; that would endanger the order of things. Amnesty must not be given to offenders; they must pay a debt in the order of things. If policemen and armies, being human, sometimes go too far, use unusual force, that is deplorable, but still they are the necessary enforcers of the order of things.

Rockefeller and the order of things have buried 39 people and two issues--prison reform and basic human decency--in the cemetery reserved for all the dirty little stories of American history, most of which share the same themes: racism and violence. New York Congressman Herman Badillo provided the epitaph for Attica's tombstone: "There's always a time to die. I don't know what the rush was."

Tom Wicker has ot disinterred the bones. No one can do that. He only promised us a "time for anger," and four and a half years after Attica, his book screams quietly--a stark gravestone rubbing to remind us of the grave and what is buried there, lest we forget to cry.