After the 2016 publication of Heather Ann Thompson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the 1971 Attica prison rebellion, Blood in the Water, three New York Times reporters sought to determine whether some of the prisoners’ demands “meant to expand their rights and improve prison conditions” had actually come to fruition, and if prisoners in the state of New York had benefited in the years since. The results were, to put it mildly, bleak. “Only in recent months have prisons been prohibited from feeding inmates ‘the loaf,’ a reviled concoction of dried bread and root vegetables,” they reported, while the ramshackle medical system at the prison continued to receive “more complaints [than] any other issue.” “We have been struck by how many of the changes that were promised were never made or have been rolled back,” the reporters lamented.

At first glance, the New York Times article reads like a well-intentioned exposé of the New York prison system’s ongoing failure to provide the imprisoned with even a modicum of humane treatment. But notable omissions suggest that a good deal is missing from the article’s narrow gloss on Attica’s meaning and legacy.

It’s true that the 28 demands made by the Attica rebels included requests for “adequate food, water, and shelter for all inmates,” “a healthy diet,” “realistic, effective rehabilitation programs for all inmates,” “adequate medical treatment for every inmate,” and “true religious freedom.” Unremarked upon, however, is the Attica prisoners’ earlier declaration, drawn up on the first day of the uprising, which called for “complete amnesty” from “all and any physical, mental, and legal reprisals” for the rebellion and even a “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement into a non-imperialistic country.” Also missing is mention of the fact that when L.D. Barkley, one of the rebellion’s leaders, read out this declaration to the yard, he framed these demands not as an effort to make their imprisonment less intolerable, but rather to “bring us closer to the reality of the demise of these prison institutions that serve no useful purpose to the people of America.” (Barkley was among the inmates who were killed by the state on September 13, when state police stormed the prison.) Put in this wider context, The New York Times’ decision to narrate Attica through a selective lens of institutional reform was incomplete at best.

Orisanmi Burton would argue that much of what we know about Attica might be defined by such obfuscations. Prisoners at Attica and elsewhere had a “rational and pragmatic class of demands,” he acknowledges. But these were, as Burton writes in his recent study of Attica, Tip of the Spear, “the prison movement’s minimum demands: calls for bare survival amid genocide.” The typically outsize or singular focus on the prisoners’ “external demands on the state,” Burton writes, stems from journalists’ and historians’ uncritical privileging of state sources that only serve to neutralize the prisoners’ demands and criminalize the rebellion’s more revolutionary currents. Rooted in extensive interviews conducted with the participants in prison movements between the 1960s and the 1990s, Burton unearths a different, less assimilable history of Attica and of the prison rebellion years. The rebels at Attica and beyond did not merely advocate for “recognition, rights, humane treatment, government transparency, legal redress, and reform,” or goals that “stabilize, rather than challenge,” the legitimacy of the carceral state. They wanted to bring down the very system of the prison, which they understood as part and parcel of a broader struggle to upend racial capitalism and imperialism. As Attica rebel John “Dacajeweiah” Hill told Burton, he was “uninterested in pleading for what he called ‘antidotes’ for the population’s suffering.” What he wanted was simple and to the point: “the complete abolition of prisons and the revolutionary overthrow of the system that needs them—capitalism.”

The 1971 Attica rebellion began on September 9 and lasted through the 13th. The four-day occupation of the prison—a “protracted revolt” that included guerrilla warfare tactics such as hostage-taking, armed struggle, and sabotage—was initially sparked when a confrontation occurred between a white guard and a prisoner named Tommy “Kilimanjaro” Hicks. As Bugs, one of the Attica prisoners who were eyewitnesses, told Burton, he first saw the guard and Hicks “facing off”; soon after, he recounts, Hicks “unleashed a brutal punch to the guard’s face and followed it with a roundhouse kick to his body.”

The tensions between the prisoners and the guards had been brewing for years. Conditions at Attica were, by all accounts, appalling. As Frank “Big Black” Smith reflected in an oral-history interview conducted years later, “conditions in 1971 [were] bad—bad food, bad educational programs, very, very low wages. What we called slave wages.” Prisoners got only one shower a week, which consisted of a bucket of water. There were minimal recreational or educational programs, and the library was “outdated” and bereft of reading material. Fifty-four percent of Attica’s population was Black and 9 percent Puerto Rican, yet all but one of the correctional officers, as well as all of the prison’s administrators, were white. Racial abuse and violence were routine, and the prison continued to uphold the racial segregation of prisoners. “Dehumanizing, would be [the word] for conditions in Attica in 1971,” Smith said.

That June, five prisoners formed the Attica Liberation Faction and wrote up a list of demands. They also began organizing: After drafting proposals, they canvassed the prison blocks to educate their peers about their effort and build up a base of support. That July, they presented their demands to Russell Oswald, the commissioner of New York’s prison system, and Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The administration promised to improve conditions, but the warden, Vincent Mancusi, cracked down, increasing cell searches and censoring news into the prison. In response, prisoners participated in a series of nonviolent demonstrations, including hunger strikes, an occupation of the health facilities, work strikes, and silent fasts, to pressure the institution. But no meaningful changes materialized. As Carl Jones-El recounted in an interview in 1972, the “situation kept being the same.” So, he said, “something else had to be did.”

When the revolt finally exploded, political consciousness at Attica was at a peak, priming the way for the rebels to transition from revolt to an organized experiment in “abolition.” Burton recounts that the situation was initially disorganized and hectic, but intervention from prisoner Roger Champen, who took a bullhorn and called for “discipline, organization, and unity,” prompted the rebel masses to organize themselves into a democratic though, as Burton notes, improvised commune structure. Through their collective labor, the rebels in the Attica commune addressed prisoners’ and hostages’ needs, including medical care, and liaised with the press. An elected committee negotiated with Commissioner Oswald, getting him to agree to implement nearly all of the 28 demands. But the state’s refusal to promise the rebels amnesty led Attica prisoners to reject the proposal: Without it, they knew, they would face immediate retaliation, particularly after a guard held hostage died from injuries sustained during the uprising. The revolt ended gruesomely when Governor Rockefeller ordered the state police, aided by the National Guard, to retake the prison. Their violent counterattack resulted in 43 deaths (33 prisoners and 10 prison employees) and hundreds of injuries. The Attica rebels who survived faced brutal retaliation.

Though the actual event of the Attica rebellion remains central to his book, Burton uncovers a sustained presence of politicized and Black radical thinking in the prison system—what he calls the “Long Attica Revolt”—“circulated within and beyond New York prisons” months prior to the Attica uprising itself. Between 1967 and 1970, Burton explains, New York City’s jail population skyrocketed, due both to a “moral panic” over rising crime and because the state began to use jails as an active means to detain “politically restive populations.” Members of the New York Black Panther Party, for example, made up a substantial presence in the city’s jails after being targeted in NYPD sweeps in 1969. Together, radicalized Black and Puerto Rican prisoners in the city’s jails “organized political formations” to analyze and resist the “deep structures that produced their incarceration within these hellish human zoos.” Kicked off by a group of radical prisoners at the Tombs (a former municipal jail in Manhattan) called the Inmate Liberation Front—who led an institution-wide rebellion on August 10, 1970, that gave them control of the facility for 10 days—a cascade of prisoner revolts soon unfolded across the city. At one point, more than 3,000 prisoners in three of the city’s jails were in open revolt, controlling multiple cell blocks and holding dozens of hostages between them.

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These jail rebellions were viciously crushed, presaging the state’s response to Attica less than a year later. But this did not extinguish the resolve of imprisoned radicals organizing across the state. After wardens in the state prison system began housing their most “militant” prisoners at the Auburn Correctional Facility in the Finger Lakes region, another wave of “protracted struggle” emerged. The months of organizing culminated in November 1970, when Auburn rebels took control of the facility and held nearly 50 people hostage for eight hours.

Expanding the timeline of the Attica revolt helps elucidate the “philosophy” that made up the core of the prisoner rebels’ politics in New York in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a sort of “abolitionist ethical” thinking that informed their organized activities. Situated in this context, and against mainstream accounts that seek to neuter the prisoners’ revolutionary intent, the pattern of revolts that rocked New York State’s prisons, Burton shows, was “itself a demand,” a tactical form of revolutionary counterwarfare against racial capitalism’s primary tool of subjugation. Far “exceed[ing] the spatial boundaries of a given institution,” he writes, the prisoner rebels in New York’s prisons and jails “conceptualized their captivity as only the latest iteration of a regime that had ensnared colonized people for centuries.” Indeed, in a close reading of the Auburn rebels’ letters sent after they surrendered, Burton demonstrates that the militant prisoners viewed their incapacitation not as a legitimate practice that only needed to be locally addressed—as some histories of this era suggest—but as a “genocidal atrocity” that had to be abolished through radical force. The prisoners wrote of “being stripped naked, beaten, and made to endure the freezing cold; of gassings, macings, and forced druggings; of being sprayed with water hoses; of being starved or alternatively of being served food that was intentionally contaminated with dead insects, feces, phlegm, poison, and shards of glass, sometimes from a wagon also used for hauling garbage.” Prison guards were openly and violently racist and prejudicial, referring to the prisoners as “beasts who needed to be contained” and the jails they oversaw as “concentration camps.”

Understanding their imprisonment as a form of “invisibilized race war, class war, and genocide,” Burton writes, these politicized inmates came to the conclusion that the only effective response was not polite protestations but “carceral guerrilla warfare.” Writing against the impulse to obscure, minimize, or criminalize the Attica rebels’ violent revolt, Burton narrates their escalation as “rational” and necessary to achieve the total destruction of a prison system “that aimed to dehumanize and liquidate the racialized poor.” In this way, Burton’s book critically pushes back against the tendency of liberal histories to either gloss over the Black radical prisoners’ engagement in armed struggle or to frame such actions as the work of a fringe, as the “immature expressions of far-left adventurism.” In contrast to Thompson’s account, for example, which narrates the beginning of the Attica uprising only from the besieged guards’ perspective, Burton retells the revolt’s origins from “the perspectives of the captives who participated in it,” bringing to the fore the rebels’ use of guerrilla violence and conceptualizing it as an abolitionist act. Told this way, Burton’s account powerfully disrupts the normative, state-friendly script that narrates the prisoners’ violence as unjustified, condemnable, and thus worthy of decentering, instead framing their revolt as a quite reasonable (and arguably still restrained) reaction to “enemies who had shown time and time again that they had no respect for their captives’ humanity.”

Beyond their physical takeover of the prison, the Attica uprising also allowed imprisoned rebels to temporarily break free from the prison’s dehumanization—both physically and mentally. The rebellion’s creation of “new channels of…self actualization,” Burton writes, are not often captured in state or media sources, and thus are left out of popular historical accounts. But they unlock Attica’s meaning as an experiment not merely in demanding incremental, official reform but in radical abolitionist world-making, revealing the rebellion to be, among other things, a consciousness-raising effort. Some of the most moving sections of the book attend to the “radically new modes of sociality and care” that Attica prisoners experienced during the four-day takeover, insights that only come into focus when the Attica rebels’ accounts—the “living theories and practices of Revolt”—are taken seriously and prioritized. An anecdote shared by John “Dacajeweiah” Hill describes an elderly prisoner who began to sob upon seeing stars in the night sky for the first time in 20 years. He was only allowed to see them because he was allowed to roam the grounds of the prison freely during those four days. These “transcendental modes of consciousness, curiosity, and becoming” prohibited by the prison, Burton writes, were suddenly “nurtured through rebellion.”

Similarly, Burton challenges the state’s defamatory allegations that the commune outlawed homosexuality—one of the many sections that lay bare the state’s untrustworthiness as a source for the rebellion’s progression and meaning. The McKay Commission, the state’s official investigation into the uprising, contended that “once the rebels got organized, homosexual relations were ‘outlawed.’” But Burton draws on accounts from those present to show that the rebels actually opened up space for homosocial and homosexual exploration. They did so by creating a formal area for sexual activity (their own “red-light district”), but also by creating a space for men to freely emote and show care for one another, free of surveillance or repression. “Brothers were embracing all the time,” one Attica rebel recounted.

At the end of Blood in the Water, Heather Ann Thompson writes that Attica, and the decades of litigation the uprising produced, “spark[ed] some serious reforms of the American criminal justice system,” even as she also recognizes the “historically unprecedented backlash” against such reforms that produced the contemporary crisis of mass incarceration. Burton vehemently contests the notion that the reforms represented a “break with the violence of the massacre.” According to Burton’s analysis, the state’s implementation of seemingly benign or conciliatory reforms are the backlash, and as his book argues, Attica inspired a “multifaceted campaign of prison pacification.”

Prison reforms often co-opt radical abolitionist ideas and translate them into modestly ameliorative proposals that ultimately keep the carceral systems in place, pump them with funding, and legitimize their fundamental authority to criminalize and punish, allowing the gears of carceral repression to continue turning. But Burton makes a number of useful interventions that expand our understanding of reformism as a form of “psychological warfare,” the manufacturing of a supposed common sense about imprisonment and the capacity for change.

In a fresh analysis of what propelled prison expansion in the 1970s, Burton reads post-Attica prison construction as a calculated effort to quell prison rebellion writ large. By disrupting the possibility for any one prison to have a “critical mass of revolutionaries,” the expansion of prisons had a distinctly “counterinsurgent rationale,” albeit one that the state obscured by presenting prison growth as a modernizing project meant to “relieve tension” at overcrowded facilities and to increase economic opportunity in deindustrializing and rural areas. Similarly, the state’s simultaneous relaxation of restrictive prison protocols—such as easing the censorship of reading materials, removing screens from prison visiting rooms, and mandating that prisoners receive showers once a day—also performed a “psychological operation.” These “humanizing” reforms served as mechanisms of control and suppression by “induc[ing] the desired behavior” of prisoners “through ultimately frivolous institutional reconfigurations.”

Genuine mind control, it turns out, was pivotal to the state’s counterinsurgency, both in the form of “solicitous reforms” and through more nefarious “state-orchestrated assaults.” One of Burton’s more provocative claims is that the move to expand rehabilitation and prison education programming after Attica, such as the creation of a Volunteer Services Program that brought in outside volunteers to lead activities and teach classes, was not done in good faith. Instead, these groups, knowingly or not, “co-opt[ed] the prison movement” and “steer[ed] it toward status-quo-oriented institutional politics.” As Burton shows, prison administrators explicitly expanded programming to sever the prisoners’ connection to Black radical groups and ideas that had previously circulated in the prison and enabled organizing. An illustrative example is the post-Attica celebrations of Black Solidarity Day, which had previously been celebrated by the Auburn militants “in defiance” of administrators’ prohibitions. After Attica, the Department of Corrections recognized the holiday and allowed “aboveground, formally regulated” prisoner organizations to work with “outside volunteers” to plan programming for the day. Despite its seemingly benevolent sheen, Burton argues, such prison programming is a kind of counterinsurgency, meant both to discipline imprisoned people’s political horizons and to “propagandize the general public” into viewing prisons as legitimate, even well-intentioned, institutions.

Burton’s Tip of the Spear certainly contains kernels of hope, at least in its articulation of what “abolitionist geographies” can look like in practice, while refusing to be starry-eyed about the fact that constructing such liberatory projects within the thrall of domestic war will require a force greater than mere reform. Perhaps its greatest contribution, though, is its interrogation of how mainstream liberal historiographies of US prisoner rebellion, however well-meaning, nefariously limit the political horizons of revolutionary struggle. Burton’s treatment of the Attica rebels’ demand to be transported to a “non-imperialistic” country offers an instructive example. Burton concedes that, as Heather Ann Thompson and others have reported, the demand never rose to a level of popular endorsement (though Burton draws on the account of Attica observer and radical lawyer William Kunstler, who contended that the demand had support from a “couple hundred” prisoners, while Thompson draws on the account of Congressman Herman Badillo, also an observer, who remembered there were “fewer than 20”). But Burton argues that the demand was not intended for US officials but rather for the “anti-imperialist Black underground” with whom the Attica rebels had documented ties and who they hoped might answer their call for help. While such a result might appear unlikely, Burton finds some indications that organizers within the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army made genuine headway with foreign anti-imperialist governments to receive the rebels. He discovers that at least one contingent of the New York BPP/BLA went to Western New York to facilitate expatriation. Later, in congressional testimony, Kunstler recounted telling the rebels prior to the governor’s order to retake the prison that at least four “third world country people” were “across the street from this prison” ready to provide asylum to anyone who wanted it.

While the rebels were obviously not successful in their attempts to expatriate, recognizing the seriousness of their demands and taking account of efforts to meet them seriously disrupts the impulse to infantilize such revolutionary demands as fundamentally unserious or unrealistic. Moreover, even though a majority of the Attica rebels did not want the expatriation demand on the formal negotiating table, it’s not clear that this was “to everyone’s relief,” as Thompson writes, especially given that the commune “agreed to allow those who supported it to continue pursuing the possibility informally.” No matter the actual extent of the prisoners’ investment in expatriation, the rush to delegitimize what Burton calls the commune’s “revolutionary demands, aspirations, and conspiratorial plans” has allowed for a “domestication” of the rebellion’s politics away from a “repudiation of US empire to a palatable cry for better treatment within its dungeons.” To take seriously the demands of the prisoners, as Burton does, is to also awaken to another fact: that prisons are a front in an ongoing domestic war between the state and the people it deems as marginal and surplus.

Fleeing for more principled and welcoming shores, as some of the Attica rebels wished to do, is now a far fainter dream than it was in 1971, having disintegrated amid our present era of hardened nationalisms. But that’s all the more reason to understand the real history of Black radical prisoner struggle through the lens of the revolutionaries who threw the first punches and marveled at the stars together, who understood implicitly the racial state’s vested interest in repressing their freedom dreams. Before we can begin the work of constructing “new modes of social life not predicated on enclosure, extraction, domination, or dehumanization,” Burton writes, we have to heed what the rebels of the Long Attica Revolt sought to build. And that was a world without prisons.