This week this year marks the 52nd anniversary of the Attica Rebellion. To commemorate this year's anniversary, Critical Resistance (CR) uplifts some movement updates, events, actions and resources in hopes of strengthening cross-wall abolitionist organizing, especially outside solidarity for prisoner-led resistance today.
Artwork by Anu Biswas for The Attica Project Zine: Repression, Resistance, Social Transformation,
by Critical Resistance New York for the 45th anniversary in 2016.
The pinnacle of the revolutionary prisoner movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the Attica rebellion remains a monumental moment in movement and abolitionist history. The rebellion while powerful and historic was a culmination of years of prisoners organizing, studying together, uniting and forging strong alliances across racial and political lines through prisoner unions, study groups and skill shares, councils, self-improvement and “cultural awareness” groups, newspapers, inside-outside revolutionary organizations, and national networks to fight for prisoners’ political self-determination. This slow, multi-year work built a united revolutionary “prisoner-class” that crystalized in the rebellion and permeated through prisons state to state.
The makings of the Attica rebellion are especially pertinent to today also because the rebellion marked the beginning of the development of what we now call the prison industrial complex (or PIC). While repression breeds resistance, understanding the Attica rebellion as a mark to the onset of the PIC then helps us calculate how strong resistance that threatens the security of a prison or the PIC at large will continue to be met with more, brutal repression. And even our victories in each fight will be countered in force. The current swinging increase in repression inside and outside of cages across the US—from the city of Atlanta’s response to referendum canvassing to stop Cop City, to the banning of gender-affirming care and access for queer, transgender people, and women alongside the targeting of abolitionists in prisons, and attacks on critical race theory and ethnic studies across institutions—is evidence of this.
The settlement was a direct outcome from the 30,000+ strong prisoner hunger strikes that rocked the globe the 2011 and 2013 and codified many of the victories against solitary confinement made by imprisoned people.
While this decision ended the past six years of legal monitoring of CDCR solitary confinement regulations that resulted in many hunger strikers being released from long-term security housing units into general population (and now could be returned to SHU), it does not erase all the advances of prisoner-led people power that was built, particularly the re-emergence of a unifying “prisoner-class” as was with the Attica Rebellion, or more specifically the historic Agreement to End Hostilities that hunger strike leaders of the Short Corridor Collective created as a strategy for uniting the prisoner class across prison-manufactured racial divisions and is still in place.
As CR moves forward in our various anti-imprisonment campaigns and projects, we continue to ground our solidarity with imprisoned people now in memory of the Attica rebellion. Our work producing The Abolitionist newspaper two times per year remains in the tradition of the Attica rebellion, working to ignite and fortify prisoner-led resistance and strategies for PIC abolition inside and outside of cages. Providing direct communication, organizing and political education support to imprisoned people also through our mail programs and phone lines, CR builds politicized relationships with people inside, with the aim of rebuilding the inside-outside ground work needed for a winning abolitionist movement with imprisoned people participating in leadership, which the PIC works tirelessly to suppress.
As George Jackson said: “The point is…in the face of what we confront, to fight and win. That’s the real objective: not just to make statements, no matter how noble, but to destroy the system that oppresses us. By any means available to us. And to do this, we must be connected, in contact and communication with those in the struggle on the outside.”
Long live the Attica rebellion!
Free them all!
Abolition NOW!
Onward,
- Critical Resistance
MORE ANNOUNCEMENTS
Join CR September 21 for a webinar on reproductive justice & abolition:Our Bodies, Our Freedom - Abolishing the PIC Post-Roe Fifteen months ago, the US Supreme Court eliminated the right to abortion. Join us as we examine CR's most recent issue of The Abolitionist, Issue 39 on Reproductive Justice and bring together expert contributing authors of the issue from Movement for Family Power, Interrupting Criminalization and Beyond Do No Harm Network, Iranians for Abolition, and more.
Kentucky: Sign On to stop Legislators Fast-track new Federal Prison!
Imprisoned people, outside organizers and anti-prison advocates in Kentucky are working to stop the fast-track construction of a new 1,408-bed federal prison in Letcher County. The legislature is bypassing the environmental review process, and stripping citizens of their constitutional rights to provide public comment on the proposed construction of an unneeded federal prison.
In Washington State: Prisoner Organizing Under Attack!
Washington Department of Corrections is working to repress prisoner support and organizing by shutting down prisoner-run cultural awareness groups (CAGs). For decades, WA prisoners have used CAGs to survive imprisonment, empower each other, building solidarity, and organize. Read more about the issue and check out calls to action and resources to uplift prisoner organizing in Washington all on our website here.
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