ATTICA, N.Y. — On the evening of Aug. 9, 2011, one month before the 40th anniversary of the bloody Attica prison riot, a guard in that remote facility in western New York was distributing mail to inmates in C Block, one of the vast tiers of cells nestled behind its towering 30-foot walls.
The prisoners were rowdy that night, talking loudly as they mingled on the gallery outside their cells, a State Police inquiry found. Frustrated, an officer shouted into the din: “Shut the (expletive) up.”
Normally, that would be enough to bring quiet to C Block, where guards who work the 3 to 11 p.m. shift are known for strict, sometimes violent, enforcement of the rules. This night, somewhere on the gallery, a prisoner shouted back, bellowing “You shut the (expletive) up.” Emboldened, the shouter taunted the officer with an obscene suggestion.
Inmates were immediately ordered to retreat to their cells and “lock in.” Thirty minutes later, three officers, led by a sergeant, marched down the corridor. They stopped at the cell of George Williams, a 29-year-old African-American from New Jersey who was serving a sentence of two to four years for robbing two jewelry stores in Manhattan.
Mr. Williams had been transferred to Attica that January following an altercation with other inmates at a different facility. He had just four months to serve before he was to be released. He was doing his best to stay out of trouble. His plan was to go home to New Brunswick and try to find work as a barber. That evening, Mr. Williams remembers, he had been in his cell watching the rap stars Lil Wayne and Young Jeezy on television, and missed the shouting on the cellblock. The guards ordered him to strip for a search and then marched him down the hall to a darkened dayroom used for meetings and classes for what they told him would be a urine test.
Mr. Williams is 5-foot-8, and a solid 170 pounds. But corrections officers tend toward linebacker size, and the three officers towered over him. The smallest was Sgt. Sean Warner, 37, at 5-foot-11, 240 pounds. Beside him was Officer Keith Swack, 37, a burly 6-foot-3 and some 300 pounds. A third officer was standing behind the cell door. Mr. Williams thought it was Officer Matthew Rademacher, 29, who had followed his father into the job six years earlier. Officer Rademacher was six feet tall and weighed 260 pounds. All three men are white and had goatees at the time.
Mr. Williams was wondering why a sergeant would be doing the grunt work of conducting an impromptu drug test when, he said, a fist hammered him hard on the right side of his rib cage. He doubled up, collapsing to the floor. More blows rained down. Mr. Williams tried to curl up to protect himself from the pummeling of batons, fists and kicks. Someone jumped on his ankle. He screamed in pain. He opened his eyes to see a guard aiming a kick at his head, as though punting a football. I’m going to die here, he thought.
Inmates in cells across from the dayroom watched the attack, among them a convict named Charles Bisesi, 67, who saw Mr. Williams pitched face-first onto the floor. He saw guards kick Mr. Williams in the head and face, and strike him with their heavy wooden batons. Mr. Bisesi estimated that Mr. Williams had been kicked up to 50 times, and struck with a dozen more blows from nightsticks, thwacks delivered with such force that Mr. Bisesi could hear the thud as wood hit flesh. He also heard Mr. Williams begging for his life, cries loud enough that prisoners two floors below heard them as well.
A couple of minutes after the beating began, one of the guards loudly rapped his baton on the floor. At the signal, more guards rushed upstairs and into the dayroom. Witnesses differed on the number. Some said that as many as 12 officers had plunged into the scrum. Others recalled seeing two or three. All agreed that when they were finished, Mr. Williams could not walk.
His ordeal is the subject of an unprecedented trial scheduled to open on Monday in western New York. Three guards — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — face charges stemming from the beating that night. All three have pleaded not guilty. An examination of this case and dozens of others offers a vivid lesson in the intractable culture of prison brutality, especially given the notoriety of Attica, which entered the cultural lexicon as a synonym for prison havoc after 43 men died there in 1971 as the state suppressed an uprising by inmates. This account is based on investigative reports and court filings, as well as interviews with people on both sides of the bars at Attica, state officials and prison reform advocates.
After the beating ended, an inmate who was across from the dayroom, Maurice Mayfield, watched as an officer stepped on a plastic safety razor and pried out the blade. “We got the weapon,” Mr. Mayfield heard the guard yell.
Mr. Williams was handcuffed and pulled to the top of a staircase. “Walk down or we’ll push you down,” he heard someone say. He could not walk, he answered. His ankle was broken. As he spoke, he was shoved from behind. He plunged down the stairs, crashing onto his shoulder at the bottom. When guards picked him up again, he said, one of them grabbed his head and smashed his face into the wall. He was left there, staring at the splatter of his own blood on the wall in front of him.
When an inmate is accused of serious violations in one of New York State’s maximum security prisons, standard procedure calls for him to be placed in solitary confinement in the Special Housing Unit. Stays in “the Box,” as the unit is called, can last weeks, months, even years. But when the detail arrived at the Box with Mr. Williams that night, the officer in charge refused to accept him, telling the officers to take him to the prison infirmary. “We can’t take him in here looking like that,” Mr. Williams heard the officer say.
At the infirmary, Katherine Tara, a nurse who had been working at Attica for just 10 months, saw cuts over Mr. Williams’s eyes and blood on his mouth and clothing. He told her his vision was blurry and that he thought his ribs were broken. With officers nearby, he said nothing about how he had been hurt. Ms. Tara later told investigators that she had treated other inmates in what are called “use of force” cases. This one was excessive, she said. She called the prison’s medical doctor, who agreed with her: Mr. Williams needed to go to an outside hospital.
This article is by Tom Robbins for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.
As Mr. Williams waited in the infirmary, several guards involved in the episode arrived, including Officers Rademacher and Swack. Mr. Williams heard someone boast that there would be no consequences for the beating: “The (expletive) that happened upstairs isn’t going to be nothing.”
Mr. Williams was taken first to a hospital in Warsaw, the county seat of Wyoming County, where Attica is. But the injuries were too severe for the doctors there to treat. Packed up again, he was driven to Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, 50 miles away.
As he rode the highways of western New York that sweltering night, Mr. Williams worried that if he were to return to Attica, he would be killed. He asked a medical attendant to lend him his cellphone so he could call his family. The attendant refused.
In Buffalo, his injuries were tallied: a broken shoulder, several cracked ribs and two broken legs, one of which required surgery. Doctors realigned it, using a plate and six screws. Mr. Williams also had a severe fracture of the orbit surrounding his left eye, a large amount of blood lodged in his left maxillary sinus, and multiple cuts and bruises.
One doctor who treated Mr. Williams asked a guard what had happened. He should not have had the weapon, the guard replied.
Back at Attica, the same explanation was entered on official reports. In what is known as an unusual incident memo, guards detailed Mr. Williams’s alleged infractions, including the razor blade and ice pick-like shaft they said they found on him. On C Block, an inmate named Raymond Sanabria, who worked as a porter mopping the gallery, was ordered to “hurry up and clean up the blood.” Officers warned him to keep quiet, Mr. Sanabria later told investigators.
Another inmate said Officer Rademacher had ordered him to clean up more blood from inside the office of the C Block hall captain, where guards had gathered after the beating. The inmate, Peter Thousand, said he had also been told to bring a bag of blood-soiled shirts to a courtyard where officers kept a barbecue pit. Prison officials later concluded that the shirts had been burned there.
The inmate witnesses told investigators something else: If the guards were looking to punish the prisoner who had shouted out the curses earlier that night, they had grabbed the wrong man.
To George Williams, the astonishing thing is that the charges of savagery and cover-up stemming from that hellish night have not been buried, but will be recounted in the weeks to come before a jury in the village of Warsaw, 14 miles from the prison.
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In a 2012 case, the department tried to fire an officer accused of having struck an inmate “35 times with a baton, then twice more after he was handcuffed,” and then filing a false report about the confrontation. An arbitrator ordered a seven-month suspension.
The department’s negotiated settlements are often mild as well. Five correction officers charged in 2011 with using force on a shackled inmate and then lying about it to the inspector general were allowed to resolve the matter by paying fines ranging of $1,800 to $3,000. The specifics of these disciplinary cases are another secret of the state prison system. Under New York’s civil rights law, personnel records for corrections officers (as well as for many police and fire departments) are deemed confidential and “not subject to inspection or review.” Individual records like Officer Pritchard’s emerge only when subpoenaed in lawsuits, and then are usually kept under seal.
Even when it comes to deciding where officers should work, prison administrators have little leverage. James Conway, the former Attica superintendent, said he had tried at one point to get Officer Pritchard into a job where he did not interact with inmates. But under the officers’ union contract, Officer Pritchard did not have to give up his post. Officers choose their job assignments based on seniority, and Officer Pritchard had won his job by bidding for the position.
“He develops his own little posse in C Block,” Mr. Conway said. “The younger officers would look up to him because he had this reputation of being a tough guy, a by-the-book guy.”
In September, Mr. Annucci became the first commissioner to attend the annual memorial ceremony at Attica for corrections workers killed in the riot. “Time does not heal all wounds,” he told the small crowd. “Certain wounds and scars went too deep to ever heal.”
It was a simple and somber event held on a grassy plain outside the arched, gothic doors of the prison’s main entrance. There was an honor guard of corrections officers, a bugler playing taps and an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace.” The center of attention was a tall granite marker that listed the names of the 11 prison employees who died. The 32 dead inmates were unmentioned, their names nowhere to be found inside or outside the prison. The reason, several participants in the ceremony said, was simple: The inmates caused the riot.
Michael Smith, a former corrections officer who was one of those taken hostage during the standoff, saw it somewhat differently. Mr. Smith was 22 at the time of the riot and had been at Attica for just a year. He got along with most inmates, he said as he sat in his living room 30 miles south of the prison. “I treated everyone respectfully and I expected to be treated with respect in exchange.” But tensions had built throughout summer 1971. “You could just feel it,” he said.
A few weeks before the riot, two inmates showed him a letter they had drafted to send to the corrections commissioner at the time, Russell Oswald, and Governor Rockefeller. “They wanted better education, more religious freedoms and more than one roll of toilet paper a month,” Mr. Smith said.
On Sept. 8, officers mistook a pair of sparring inmates for a serious fight. It proved the riot’s spark. When guards tried to take the men to the Box, prisoners began to throw cans. The next morning, inmates who were returning from the mess hall erupted at Times Square, as the intersection of the prison’s four tunnels is called, fatally beating Officer William Quinn, 28, a father of three girls. Mr. Smith was guarding men in the metal shop when the siren wailed. Within minutes, a surge of rampaging inmates had burst inside. Mr. Smith was knocked to the floor and kicked repeatedly until a pair of inmates intervened. They led him out, through a prison that was spiraling into chaos. “They were lighting anything that would burn, beating up anyone who was administration,” he said.
At Times Square, other prisoners grabbed Mr. Smith, taking him and 37 other hostages to D Yard. Prisoners were gathering weapons, he said, “clubs, hammers, baseball bats, knives.” A group of Muslim inmates became the hostages’ protectors. Blindfolded, they heard speeches over the next two days by inmate leaders and outside observers summoned by the rebels, including the radical lawyer William M. Kunstler; Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party; and State Assemblyman Arthur Eve of Buffalo. The inmates issued a list of demands, many of them from the letter Mr. Smith had seen. Added to the list was amnesty. Officer Quinn’s death was a deal-breaker.
On Sunday, his third day as a hostage, Mr. Smith was interviewed by a television crew that had been allowed into the yard. He called for Governor Rockefeller, who had refused to come to Attica, to “get his ass here now.”
By then, the governor had decided to end the standoff. On Monday morning, under an ominous sky, Mr. Oswald, the corrections commissioner, issued an ultimatum to the prisoners. The inmates responded by grabbing eight hostages at random, including Mr. Smith, taking them to a catwalk above the yard and threatening to execute them. Mr. Smith was seated in a chair, surrounded by three men armed with a hammer, a spear and a knife. He realized that one of the armed men was Don Noble, an author of the letter to the governor. A helicopter made two low passes overhead, followed by a popping sound as a gas was dropped into the yard. Gunfire erupted. “All hell broke loose,” Mr. Smith said.
In a hail of gunfire, the New York State Police regained control of Attica Correctional Facility on Sept. 13, 1971, ending a four-day prisoner revolt. Forty-three people died.
State troopers armed with rifles and shotguns did most of the shooting, but corrections officers fired as well, despite being ordered not to. As bullets whizzed past, Mr. Smith felt Mr. Noble yank him off the chair. Mr. Smith believes the action saved his life, but he was still struck by five bullets, four of them from an AR-15 automatic rifle. The gunman, he is sure, was a fellow corrections officer who had gotten the weapon from the prison arsenal and had mistaken him for an inmate.
He lay on the catwalk, unable to move as the firing continued. “It seemed like it was going on forever,” he said. Later, an ambulance took him to a hospital in nearby Batavia, where he had multiple operations over the next six months.
Shortly after the clouds of gas lifted, a state official said that the slain hostages had died from slashed throats. Michael Smith, the official said, had had his testicles severed and stuffed in his mouth. None of it was true. Two hostages suffered severe cuts from would-be executioners, but the wounds were not fatal. Autopsies performed by medical examiners confirmed that gunshot wounds were the cause of death in all of the hostage fatalities. And none of the inmates had guns.
Still, the vivid pronouncement by the authorities stuck in many minds. Deanne Quinn Miller, whose father, William, was the riot’s first victim and who, with Michael Smith, helped found a group called Forgotten Victims of Attica, said that many residents continued to believe the stories. “You can’t have that conversation with them,” she said. “It’s what they’ve decided.”
For many years, inmates observed Sept. 13 by sitting in silence at breakfast in the mess hall. Sometimes there would be a slow, dirgelike drumming of spoons. But the protests gradually faded away. “Either they don’t know, or they’re scared,” one Attica inmate said.
George Williams knew about Attica’s history but had not concerned himself with it. “I wasn’t there for that,” he said during an interview in November in a New Brunswick restaurant. Now 32,, he is a good-looking man, with a broad face, wavy, close-cropped hair and a bright smile. As he talked, he dabbed steadily at his nose, a residual effect of the sinus damage from the beating three years ago. Other mementos included a left eye more sunken than the right, and a leg that, he said, “is always bothering me.” Less visible are the headaches and nightmares. “I still can’t sleep,” he said.
After he was released from the hospital, Mr. Williams was sent to a different maximum security prison, near Buffalo. He finished his sentence in January 2012 but was soon behind bars again, in New Jersey, for a probation violation. Doctors there said he had post-traumatic stress disorder after he described flashbacks and waking from nightmares in a sweat.
He still does not know why he was singled out at Attica. “I was doing my time,” he said. “I was ready to go.” He was released from jail in New Jersey just before Thanksgiving. His crimes, he said, were a product of being “young and dumb.” In the hospital, he worried that if he died, his family would assume it was “because of something I did.”
Mr. Williams is now trying to raise money for barbering school tuition. Of the criminal case against the Attica guards, he expressed wonder that it was still active. “I don’t want it to be a cliché, but I just hope that justice is served,” he said. “That’s it.”
The trial is scheduled to begin Monday. The defendants — Sergeant Warner and Officers Rademacher and Swack — have retained some of western New York’s top criminal defense lawyers, thanks in part to help from fellow officers. The fourth guard, Officer Hibsch, was given immunity to testify, but lawyers for the defendants have indicated that they are not concerned with his testimony. “There were all kinds of plea offers,” Norman Effman, who represents Officer Rademacher, said. “Our clients could walk away if they were willing to resign their jobs. They maintain their innocence; they did nothing wrong.”
Officer Hibsch returned to work at Attica after an arbitrator ruled in May that his use of force in the dayroom on the day that Mr. Williams was beaten was “not unjustified.” After hearing from 39 witnesses, including Mr. Williams and several other C Block inmates, the arbitrator ordered Mr. Hibsch reinstated with back pay. Corrections officials said that, as a personnel matter, they could not discuss the decision.
Inmates still incarcerated at Attica said there were high hopes that the case would spur changes in how the prison was policed. Those hopes have since ebbed. The only way to get attention, they said, is something dramatic. “We feel Albany doesn’t give a damn,” one inmate said, voicing despair rather than menace. “No one on the outside is going to change anything. Guys say: ‘We need a riot. It’s the only way to stop it.’ ”
This article is by Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice issues.
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