Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water reconstructs the Attica Prison uprising from the inside, beginning on September 9, 1971, when roughly 1,281 incarcerated men seized control of the facility and took 42 staff members hostage. Thompson follows the demands the men raised over four days of negotiation, for better medical care, fairer visitation, decent food and basic religious freedom, and the state's refusal, under Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to meet those demands or grant amnesty.

The book gives its fullest, most difficult attention to September 13, when state police and correctional officers retook the prison in an assault that lasted only about twenty minutes but killed thirty nine people, most of them from law enforcement gunfire, including hostages state officials initially and falsely claimed had been killed by the men holding them. Thompson traces the decades long cover up that followed, including investigative records the state kept sealed until 2015, and the long legal fight that eventually produced settlements: eight million dollars for surviving prisoners in 2000 and twelve million dollars for the families of correctional employees in 2005.

Thompson builds the book from more than a decade of research, drawing on interviews with survivors on every side of the uprising alongside previously unreleased state records, and reading it means following the uprising and its cover up as one continuous story rather than a single violent day. It suits a reader who wants Attica understood as the origin point of arguments about prison conditions and accountability that still shape the country's criminal justice system.