Rick Harcrow spent 37 years as a correctional officer in the New York State prison system — 30 of them at Attica Correctional Facility. He wasn't there on September 9, 1971, when the riot began. But he worked with the men who were. He heard their stories, sat with their families, and spent three decades living in the shadow of the deadliest prison riot in American history. This is what he knows.
The Attica Prison Riot lasted four days. When it ended, 43 people were dead — seven of them correctional officers. What's less understood is that 39 of those 43 died not during the riot itself, but during the state's retaking of the facility four days later. Approximately 1,500 rounds were fired into a 100-by-100-yard yard packed with hundreds of people, hostages included. A judge later ruled it excessive force.
Rick walks through the conditions that made it inevitable: 2,200 inmates crammed into a prison built for 1,200, one roll of toilet paper a month, and a bureaucracy that refused to hear its own officers. He covers the warning signs — multiple supervisors went to the superintendent weeks before the riot and told him it was coming. He refused to act. On the morning of September 9th, a group of veteran officers called in sick. Everyone knew. The riot started because of a worn-down gate key that opened the wrong lock. When that lock popped, an officer said, "Oh damn, we're in trouble." He was right.
Rick also describes what it means to work inside a facility where nearly half the population is serving time for murder or manslaughter — and how that shapes the daily reality of corrections work in ways most people never consider. He talks about CO William Quinn, used as a battering ram by rioting inmates and left to die. About Sergeant Edward Cunningham, who spoke directly to a film crew in the middle yard — warning the governor that people were going to be killed — and was killed days later. About what the four-day standoff looked like from the perspective of the men who worked those walls afterward.
In Part 2, Rick Harcrow takes us further: the inmate who looked him in the eye and said he'd be dead before the day was out, the violence the department tried to bury, and what 10,000 corrections officers finally did to force the state to listen.
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