Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer at Attica Correctional Facility — home of the deadliest prison riot in American history. In Part 2, the conversation goes deeper: from the daily realities of working inside one of America's most dangerous institutions to the political decisions that shaped how officers and their families were treated for decades.
Rick opens the episode with a story that sets the tone for everything that follows. Three days into a law library assignment, an inmate told him he planned to murder him when he got the chance. Rick turned around and said: "Nah, that's not gonna happen." That response — measured, unflinching, rooted in experience — defines how he approaches every subject in this conversation.
The numbers are hard to hear. Around 300 inmate-on-inmate assaults per year at Attica — nearly one per day — were quietly suppressed by a department more concerned with appearances than accountability. The families of officers killed in the 1971 Attica riot were pressured into signing away their right to sue in exchange for six months of workman's comp. Two decades later, those same inmates received a $12 million settlement while widows were waiting for roof repairs. Rick helped organize the Attica Forgotten Victims group as a union leader and credits Governor George Pataki with ultimately doing right by those families.
The conversation covers ground that rarely gets an honest treatment: the debate over reopening Alcatraz and what 40,000 released New York inmates actually means for crime, the Jeffrey Epstein suicide watch and the systemic failures that made a 14-minute window possible, the CO strike that put 10,000 officers on the picket line, and what unprocessed stress quietly does to the men and women who spend careers inside those walls. Rick closes with a warning a psychologist gave him as a rookie — one he credits with saving his life.
This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation with Rick Harcrow. Part 1 covers his early years at Attica and the assault that nearly cost him everything in the law library. Both parts are available now.
