When prisoners at Attica rioted in 1971, it sparked one of the bloodiest jailhouse confrontations in New York's history. Ultimately, 43 inmates and hostages would be killed in the retaking of the prison by state troopers and National Guard troops.
Four decades later, we still don't have the full story. And we don't have it because two-thirds of the official investigation remains sealed.
Unfortunately, the State Museum and State Archives have now carried the secrecy even further by refusing to allow public access to a trove of artifacts from the riot that had been stored and forgotten for 40 years.
The forbidden material ironically includes many of the same kind of artifacts and personal documents that have just been placed on public display at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
The good news is that state officials are pressing to make more information public. Only last month, for example, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman won a court ruling allowing him to release more of the official report, excluding grand jury transcripts.
The absurdly slow pace of the document release is especially galling for the Forgotten Victims of Attica, a group made up of former prison employees and relatives of the guards who were killed. They say it's long past time for all material to be made public.
The group is aptly named, because the guards were truly ignored in the left's rush to both mythologize what happened in Attica and romanticize the inmates, who touched off the "uprising" by savagely beating a guard to death.
Not until 2005 were families of the guards given any compensation. And that was five years after the dead inmates' families were paid a court-ordered $8 million settlement.
Granted, the retaking of the prison was botched by state authorities. But the inmates — who had rioted over political demands such as the right to read Black Panther newspapers — were the perpetrators, not the victims. Storming the prison may have been unnecessarily bloody, but it's not clear what good alternative there was.
In the end, we do know this: The inmates became the heroes and the dead guards were forgotten or ignored. After 43 years of secrecy, it's high time to set the record straight.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Free the Attica records!
Dengan url
http://susuvirus.blogspot.com/2014/05/free-attica-records.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Free the Attica records!
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar