Attica: the largest prison massacre in U.S. history reaches the Oscars. A Hispanic witness, Jorge Nieves, tells his story

“There were 25 policemen on each side with bats and sticks and I had to run between them. They hit me on my head, my back, my ribs, my hands and legs. I fell over but I got up again and kept going, limping in terrible pain.”

In an interview with Univision, Jorge 'Che' Nieves, one of the survivors of the bloodiest prison massacre in the United States recalled his experience at Attica, a prison in a rural area of New York State, which has become a symbol for violence and police brutality.

It was September 13, 1971 and state police opened fire to retake the prison from an uprising that had lasted four days. Richard Nixon was in his first presidential term following a campaign based on “law and order” and a hardline rhetoric against delinquency.

Nieves is one of the many voices that recreate the events in Attica, an Oscar nominated documentary by Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry. The awards ceremony is set to take place in Hollywood on Sunday.

Thirty-nine people died at Attica from gunshots fired by law enforcement. 10 of them were guards who had been taken hostage by the prisoners to force a negotiation. Hundreds more were wounded. And police retaliated against the prisoners with an excessive use of force.

“They came into the prison firing bullets. There was lots of smoke in the yard. What need is there to start shooting when you can’t even see who is coming towards you? They fired bullets and more bullets. That is why they killed the hostages. Because they didn’t know who was who,” said Nieves.

Latinos politicized against discrimination

Nieves’ story, as told to Univision, represents only a fraction of the abuse that close to 1300 prisoners, most of them African Americans and Latinos, suffered at the hands of New York State Police following the four-day uprising seeking to denounce terrible prison conditions.

Nieves, who was born in a Puerto Rican community of New York, ended up in jail at only 14 years old, for a murder he says was in self-defense. He was transferred to Attica in his early twenties.

His experience during the insurrection made him one of the witnesses in a lawsuit against the state of New York that lasted nearly 30 years and culminated in the year 2000 in a settlement for 12 million dollars, a sum many lawyers consider ridiculous given the large number of victims.

According to some sources, nine percent of the prisoners at Attica were Puerto Rican. But little is known about the role Latinos played in these events.

In her Pulitzer prize winning 2016 book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, historian Heather Ann Thompson - who acted as a consultant for the documentary - provided evidence of the discrimination that Spanish speaking prisoners were subjected to.

She also drew attention to the role played by the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican pro-independence group considered radical at the time, in organizing prisoners and ensuring that there was translation into Spanish of the negotiations between insurrectionists and prison authorities in the days leading up to the massacre. They also made demands for the Spanish speaking prison population such as improved medical access and a Spanish library.

Medical attention was particularly deficient for Latinos and language barriers meant that Spanish speaking prisoners were punished when they didn’t understand prison regulations. Letters or publications in Spanish that arrived by mail were often torn up on arrival.

Visiting rights were also affected. According to Thompson, over 25% of Puerto Rican prisoners were in common- law relationships that were not recognized by authorities.

Jorge Nieves mentions this kind of “abuse” as one of the most intolerable: “ If I have a girlfriend and I get her pregnant before going to jail, can’t she come and visit me? Because according to prison laws we aren’t married?”

Latinos were also present at the negotiating table. The late republican congressman Herman Badillo (1929-2014) who was the first congressman of Puerto Rican descent elected to the House of Representatives was part of the group of mediators.

Attica: well-known but poorly documented

The uprising and retake of Attica is a poorly documented - and often distorted - episode in the history of the United States. The day of the massacre, the prison authorities said a in public statement that the guards taken as hostages had had their throats slit by the prisoners and that one of them had even been castrated.

The false piece of news was published by the press at the time. Civil rights attorney Margaret Ratner Kunstler said of this episode: “They made a false statement. And a wildly horrific public statement stays in people's minds.”

But autopsies revealed that the 10 guards had actually died at the hands of the State in the shooting which was part of the effort to regain control over the prison.

In a conversation with Univision, Joe Heath, one of the lawyers in the case who appears in the documentary, highlighted his campaign to make the records of these events public.

“They still don’t want to tell us what went on in there. That tells you how bad it was,” said Heath, echoing the complaints from families and lawyers alike over the past 50 years.

A large part of those records are not accessible and Thompson, the historian, considers this lack of access to public records another barrier to the truth. She claims to have had access to documents that were later withdrawn from the public eye.

New York State has never admitted responsibility for the massacre. And to date, no member of the police or other authority has been sanctioned.

That is why Heath says the State needs to “admit the historic facts to begin with and apologize to the families and open up all the records […]”

Racism at Attica and the prison system

Experts interviewed in the documentary and later by Univision agree that systemic racism was a key factor in the events’ bloody outcome.

With the exception of one Latino guard, all the guards were White and 65 to 70% of the inmates were Black or Latino.

Racism not only permeated the penitentiary institution but reached the very top.

The documentary reproduces an audio conversation in which president Nixon congratulates Nelson Rockefeller, then Governor of New York, for having done “the right thing.”

Nixon asks Rockefeller “ Are these primarily Blacks that you’re dealing with?” to which Rockefeller responds: “Oh, yes. The whole thing was led by the Blacks.”

The Attica prison massacre and its legacy

Over half a decade later, Nieves reflects on his role in the insurrection and the police brutality that almost cost him his life.

“We had to do what we did […] to let the world know and understand what was happening inside the prison. And not only at Attica. What happens in one prison happens in all of them.”

Many experts say that due to a lack of reform in the country’s criminal justice system little has changed since then.

When looking back on Attica’s legacy, Traci A Curry, the documentary’s co-director, recognizes that there have been some positive changes such as a reduction in violence at the Attica prison thanks to the installation of cameras.

But she highlights that with over 2 million prisoners, the U.S. still has the highest incarceration rate in the world.