Attica Diary

Description

Bill Coons had an unusual background for a prisoner. An instructor in English at Skidmore and the City University of New York, he was sentenced to three years in a maximum security prison, Attica, for the possession of LSD. He spent 15 agonized months in Cellblock D, which became the focal point of the bloody uprising in September of 1971. He got out in the nick of time. His book is a diary of the day-by-day horrors of prison life, made up of the notes he was allowed to keep and what he was able to reconstruct from his coded messages to himself, and his memory. He struggles to keep his sanity alive against the hostility of the guards and the white prisoners who hate him for associating with the black prisoners—and all on the brink of riot and disaster. He tells of the conflicts with his wife, the agony of not seeing his children, his strange love affair with another woman, and in a spirit reminiscent of Celine, he vents his rage at his inhuman debasement at the hands of a society that is as devoted to cruel punishment as it is afraid of crime. This private journal by a man now on parole should rock not only the reader, but also the warden who presides over the Attica jungle, the correctional authorities who correct nothing in this heart of darkness in the middle of New York State, and the coward in the Governor's mansion who whitewashed the premeditated murder of 43 human beings, prisoners and guards alike, whose lives were ostensibly in his care.