Prison & Punishment
The Attica Uprising: When Prisoners Took the Prison
In September 1971, 43 people died at Attica — every one killed by state gunfire. The state blamed the prisoners. It was a lie documented before the tear gas cleared.
Prison & Punishment
In September 1971, 43 people died at Attica — every one killed by state gunfire. The state blamed the prisoners. It was a lie documented before the tear gas cleared.
Prison & Punishment
Angola was a slave plantation before it was a prison. Today 73% of its 5700 inmates are Black and 75% will die there — on the same 18000 acres Isaac Franklin assembled in the 1850s.
Prison & Punishment
Eastern State opened in 1829 to cure crime through isolation. Dickens called it torture in 1842. The practice it invented now holds 80,000 Americans on any given day.
Prison & Punishment
Sing Sing executed 614 people in its electric chair between 1891 and 1963 — including the Rosenbergs — in a prison built by convicts quarrying their own marble in 1828.
Prison & Punishment
Alcatraz held Al Capone and Robert Stroud for 29 years at three times the cost of any other federal prison — then closed in 1963 because the economics no longer made sense.