Taking Revolution Seriously

Zohra Ahmed* April, 2025

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt. By Orisanmi Burton. California: University of California Press. 2023. Pp. ix, 230. Hardcover, $95; paper, $29.95.

Introduction

Every so often, a prison strike will make national news, as it did in 2014, 2016, and 2018.¹ The media will focus on the atrocious conditions of confinement; the unchecked violence; the wages numerated in pennies; and the state’s indifference to the strikers’ modest demands for food, medical care, and human contact.

Orisanmi Burton’s² book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, urges us to process such reporting with a healthy dose of skepticism. What if prison rebellions were telling us something else, something even more important? What if they were revealing to us the portal to our collective liberation (p. 18)? Burton immerses his reader into the universe of prisoners in revolt not only to document the horrors of incarceration, but more significantly to highlight their most basic, common demand: freedom. Burton’s innovative and challenging account reveals the abolitionist political analysis that emerged from the prison revolts that rocked New York State from 1970 to 1971. Focusing on rebellions by prisoners rather than texts by legal academics, Burton challenges legal scholarship’s mainstay methods of investigation and approaches to reform.

In particular, Burton reorients our understanding of the most implausible of prison revolts: Attica. From September 9 through September 13, 1971, people incarcerated at Attica prison in upstate New York wrested control from the Department of Corrections (pp. 8–9). The inmates first gained control at the intersection of Attica’s Cellblocks A and C after a security slip (pp. 84–86). Over two thousand of the men held captive poured into the central yard, known as Times Square (p. 86). In the revolt’s first few days, these men made demands and negotiated with the state, using the guards they took hostage for leverage (p. 28). For a moment, they existed in a parallel world in which prisoners possessed a semblance of self-determination.

Before the dramatic takeover of Attica, rebellions erupted in New York City jails and the Finger Lakes’ Auburn prison. Burton begins to chart this neglected prehistory in the borough of Queens, at the Long Island City branch of the Queens House of Detention (p. 23). He continues the narrative at the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as the “Tombs” (p. 24). Each of these rebellions lasted only a few days or a few hours; but in that short time, the people inside controlled the sites of their incarceration, and city and state officials at least pretended to listen to their demands (pp. 40–42). The world watched as the rebels turned the dominant social order on its head.³

In Burton’s view, attributing the motivations for Attica to the ritual degradations of prison life misses the mark. While those revolting demanded “human treatment,” Burton describes how they also yearned for more: “[They] burned for a form of freedom that the captors had no ability to grant . . . one that had to be invented” (p. 53). Although Burton does not explicate their full set of political aspirations, the uprising at Attica, like New York’s wave of prison revolts, was a movement whereby even the most maligned citizens—those who perpetrated harm—could recapture some of their humanity.

Burton asks us to consider the rebels’ militancy in strategic terms (p. 83). Through revolt, Burton contends, the rebels proposed a vision for political community that did not rely on confinement to guarantee security—a key tenet of abolitionist political philosophy (p. 14). Burton supports his claim with interviews of the revolts’ participants. His book reflects hundreds of hours of conversations with former rebels that reveal their motivations and their distinct trajectories as political leaders. From this painstaking work, Burton has produced a layered account of radical prison organizing. His account draws on conversations with rebels since released; their correspondence; interviews with their supporters outside; and fifty-year-old social movement ephemera, like pamphlets and communiqués from underground organizations.

Burton anchors abolitionist theory in the experience and ingenuity of those who the state has held captive. He exposes his readers to seminal figures like Martin Sostre,⁴ who successfully challenged censorship and solitary confinement from the inside, while also securing his freedom after police framed and entrapped him (p. 56). We also learn about Jalil Abdul Muntaqim—Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member, poet, political theorist, and organizer—who spent over forty years in Attica (pp. 9, 216–18).

Ethnography has the power to transport readers into someone else’s world, orient them to a different moral and political compass, and radically decenter their own world view. A good ethnography pierces through the fiction of objectivity and situates knowledge, even the reader’s, in a particular social matrix. Contrary to dictionary definitions and popular misconceptions,⁵ an ethnography is never just a description of life in far flung places. Rather, it can serve as a theory of how things ought to be described.⁶ Burton’s ethnography achieves all of these. He transports us to the universe of underground prison resistance in the 1970s. He asks us to set aside our preconceived notions about prisons and assimilate the rebels’ critique. Burton neither tries to convince us that the prisoners were right nor corroborates their accounts, nor does he find fault in their analysis to test its validity. Rather, he explores how they resisted, made meaning, and survived (p. 26). Burton attends not only to what people say, but also to what they did, how they did it, and why they did it. He investigates the political and symbolic meanings the rebels conveyed through their armed confrontations (p. 125). He mines their rebellion against the prison as a crucible for formidable, uncompromising political theory.

Burton reconstructs the rebels’ theory from their practical endeavors, leveraging the strengths of ethnographic methods. The late anthropologist David Graeber made the case that ethnographic methods were particularly apt to unearth “non-vanguardist revolutionary intellectual practice,” because they tease out “the hidden symbolic, moral, or pragmatic logics that underly certain types of social action.”⁷ The kind of political theory Burton exposes is enacted as much as it is abstracted. It is schematic and constantly revised. The rebels agitate for a world in which they are free of their chains, but there is no hubris in their efforts. They act as if they were free, but there is no delusion that their work is done.⁸

I. A Brief and Incomplete Survey of the Abolitionist Canon

Burton’s account demonstrates that abolition as a philosophy is best gleaned from praxis, not abstract principles.⁹ Experiments, rehearsals, practices: these are some of the terms today’s abolitionist organizers use to describe their interventions.¹⁰ Such framing reveals their preference for the patient, deliberate work required to transform social conditions so fundamentally that prisons are rendered obsolete. In the United States, abolitionist organizers embrace prefigurative politics within the interstices of the current order, while setting the horizon for change far beyond our reality.

A. Academic Interventions: The Non-Reformist Reform

In the legal academy, abolitionist strategy has been addressed quite thoroughly. Scholars Jocelyn Simonson and Amna Akbar have documented efforts throughout the country to disrupt the ordinary machinations of lawmaking and propose a different vision for justice, grounded in abolition.¹¹ What makes a demand abolitionist? Akbar has helped make the abolitionist framework intelligible to legal scholars by defining a key heuristic in this tradition—the non-reformist reform. While the term is awkward, its aspirations are lofty: It is a “framework for reconceiving reform: not as an end goal but as struggles to reconstitute the terms of life, death, and democracy.”¹² Critical Resistance, a grassroots antiprison group based in Oakland, California reintroduced André Gorz’s non-reformist reform framework to prison reform debates.¹³ Non-reformist reforms shift power, alter social and political relations, and attack the size, scope, and legitimacy of the prison industrial complex.¹⁴ In contrast, a reformist reform might reduce harm in the short term, but it does not destabilize prison as an all-important institution for social control.

Through the framework of non-reformist reforms, Gorz, Critical Resistance, Simonson, and Akbar posit that incremental changes can lay the foundations for a radically transformed world in which prisons are rendered obsolete.¹⁵ The non-reformist reform’s obvious attraction is its proposition for incremental but radical change, well suited for mass politics. The demand to defund the police, popularized in the wake of the 2020 uprisings following George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s murders, captures non-reformist reform’s ineluctable appeal.¹⁶ The non-reformist reform, like defund, proposes the seemingly impossible: to break with the status quo, but to do so one step at a time. For example, many proposals inspired by the demand to defund sought budget reductions to police departments rather than their total elimination.¹⁷ Almost five years later, most departments, even those targeted by activists, saw their budgets increase consistent with historical trends.¹⁸ Even gradual (but nonetheless radical) reforms are hard to pass.

Deciphering what counts as a non-reformist reform, or a reformist one, is more art than science and requires patient observation. The possibilities for co-optation are imminent. Burton introduces his readers to a different strand of abolitionist thinking, one that advances transformation not through incremental reform but armed revolution.

Strategic cleavages aside, normatively abolitionists are united in their belief that state-imposed carceral punishment cannot be ethically justified.¹⁹ The abolition of carceral institutions thus serves as a unifying aspiration for a just society—a society that constantly strives to cohere as a social unit without carceral coercion.²⁰ Burton’s work fits within this normative strain by uplifting the rebels’ aspirations for this new social order.

B. Empirical Interventions

Other abolitionist interventions make descriptive claims.²¹ Abolitionist organizers have elucidated the symbiotic relationship between carceral institutions and capitalism, and have proposed achieving security through an abundance of public goods.²² For example, abolitionist organizing seeks to demonstrate that meeting people’s material needs for prosperity, health, and community diminishes the sources of interpersonal violence.²³ Vision for Black Lives, a policy platform advanced by Black abolitionist groups, urges local organizers to push their officials to shift their budget priorities: Specifically, abolitionists have demanded greater investment in the conditions for community self-reliance and divestment from the criminal punishment system.²⁴ Such a strategy implies that carceral agencies exist because governments at all levels have diminished their investments in public goods. To render carceral agencies obsolete requires robust economic and political redistribution.²⁵

Relatedly, abolitionist interventions underscore that there is no generic, transhistorical, or ontologically fixed definition of crime.²⁶ Nor do prisons mechanistically expand and shrink according to changing crime rates.²⁷ Instead, recent scholarship demonstrates that racial panics and economic crises spurred prison construction.²⁸ Criminal legal institutions emerged, expanded, and innovated in response to social panics as much as they responded to rises in crime.²⁹ The social construction of crime and the political panics about crime help to explain some of the demographic disproportionalities observed in prisons, jails, holding cells, and courts. That is, the carceral state chooses its victims from those already diminished by the stratification that capitalism produces and exploits.³⁰ Mass immiseration guarantees the existence of prisons, and prison guarantees immiseration for the masses; by suppressing wages, disenfranchising, maiming, and stigmatizing in ways that stymie demands for a more egalitarian political economy.³¹

II. Tools of Statecraft

Together, these activist and academic interventions undermine claims that law enforcement agencies are necessary to ensure security. Whereas the conventional paradigm for governance understands security as a public good that is to be achieved by carefully balancing individual liberty against the power delegated to the carceral state,³² abolitionist analysis resists the tendency to treat militarized and carceral security as a natural foundation for a political community.³³ Instead, this body of political theory approaches prisons as a tool of statecraft that “institutionalizes various forms of targeted human capture”³⁴ in order to obfuscate a host of wide ranging macroeconomic, social, and political problems.

A. Prisons as Warfare

Through Burton, the rebels further clarify incarceration’s function in the U.S. political order: Prisons are an instrument of warfare (pp. 4, 13). On the one side is the state. On the other are those incarcerated—engaged in an asymmetric conflict in which death is a near certainty (pp. 3, 52–53).

In Burton’s account, the rebels buck at a theory of governance that grounds prisons in the state’s difficult but necessary duty to punish. If the American public accepts that prisons are necessary, justified, and lawful as long as prison administrators abide by the Eighth Amendment—the rebels took pride in a very different, more critical take. They refused to endorse state-centric myths of legal constraints. The rebels insisted that prison was not designed for punishment or social control, but for elimination.³⁵ When Burton describes prisons through the lens of warfare, however, he emphatically rejects a view that renders them pitiable victims, powerless in the face of state violence. For Burton, the asymmetric conditions merely explain the rebels’ insurgent tactics, but, as he shows, those conditions did not rule out potent resistance.

For lawyers, the portrayal of prisons as war zones might be a step too far. So too for law students. When I teach criminal law, to counterbalance the sanitized discussions of theories of punishment, I ask my students to read firsthand accounts of incarceration. In the spring of 2024, one of my braver students asked the question that was likely on everyone’s mind: “How can we trust what they’re saying—aren’t these prisoners’ accounts self-serving?” Aren’t they likely to exaggerate the harms of incarceration to get out? Burton’s text addresses these kinds of questions by centering alternative formulations of the carceral state (p. 185). He seeks to counter the epistemic oppression inherent to relying on the state’s official account (p. 79). He frames the state’s accounts as self-serving, and positions those of the captives’ as analytically clairvoyant (p. 185). So, to answer my student’s question: What if both sides had agendas?

To explain the prisoners’ motivations, Burton invokes Martinican psychiatrist, anti-colonial revolutionary, and scholar Frantz Fanon throughout the rebelling captives’ first-person accounts (pp. 68, 75, 87, 91–92, 102, 126, 147). Burton cites Fanon to understand the rebels and cites the rebels to understand Fanon: what he might have meant, and whom he may have wanted to study more closely were he alive in the 1970s. By invoking Fanon, Burton suggests that the task of confronting prison’s harms is not a project of reform, but a revolutionary task comparable to decolonization (pp. 51–52). Prison rebels, like anti-colonial fighters, wage wars of freedom to unshackle themselves from a political order committed to their subjugation.

The war paradigm that Burton drives home is significant for two interrelated reasons (p. 9). First, if prison is war, prison reform may be too weak a weapon to make a difference—a legal complaint seems like the wrong kind of weapon for a battlefield. That is, the demand for a disciplinary hearing, for an attorney, and to confront evidence against you before you are incarcerated seems misplaced if the institution is committed to your death. No amount of process can make state-sponsored execution palatable.³⁶ The only right that one would assert, rather than request, would be a right to resistance.

Second, if prison is war, in U.S. prisons it is a struggle between a group engaged in racial subjugation and another seeking self-determination. Characterized this way, the nature of the armed conflict at Attica invites comparison to the wars of decolonization in Vietnam, Angola, and throughout the Global South. Indeed, Burton frequently references the rebels’ internationalist sensibilities (p. 111). In the analogies they drew, and the demands they made, the rebels characterized the prison as a colonial project. Indeed, one demand the rebels discussed was a “speedy and safe transportation out of confinement to a non-imperialistic country” (p. 110). But rebels did not universally endorse this demand, and state actors never took it seriously (p. 110).

Burton cautions against overly literal interpretations of the rebels and their anti-colonial discourse (pp. 110–11). For example, he argues that the inmates’ appeal for expatriation was not primarily directed to the state but directed to the Black underground, as a tribute to their anti-imperialist commitments (pp. 110–11). Akil Al-Jundi,³⁷ a participant in rebellions at the Tombs and Attica, explained that he saw himself as part of the movement for Third World independence and sought to display that allegiance in his local struggle (p. 111). Through Al-Jundi, Burton showcases the rebels’ abolitionist internationalism—their commitment to eliminating a global order based on coercion and domination.

B. Criminalization as Colonization

As Burton shows, for the Black underground inside and outside prison, colonization was vital heuristic that helped them better understand their daily experiences. But it is not totally clear how best to interpret the connection the Black underground drew between prison and extra-territorial rule. Is colonialism a provocative series of loose metaphors or a tight predictive model? Burton does not tell us whether the rebels were right, nor whether their analysis still holds; but in this vein, his account reminds us of the rich scholarly and intellectual tradition.

Incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson intimated that the U.S. government subordinated Black communities through a colonial apparatus—its prisons, police departments, and courts—in ways that paralleled U.S. imperialist aggression in Vietnam.³⁸ Those leading the New York Revolts likely read Jackson’s works, which drew on his long incarceration in California’s Soledad and San Quentin state prisons.³⁹ Jackson spoke of a Black Colony, containing “[t]he principal reservoir of revolutionary potential in Amerika,” because of its “sheer numerical strength, its desperate historical relation to the violence of the productive system.”⁴⁰ “For Jackson, the carceral state exists precisely to repress the Black Colony if and when it rebels.⁴¹ In a different vein, contemporary historians have illuminated the imperial origins of modern policing: Stuart Schrader has demonstrated how policing practices developed in the Philippines under U.S. rule were brought back to the United States for widespread use;⁴² Julian Go has exposed the way imperial adventures fomented domestic police militarization;⁴³ and Benjamin Weber describes the “prison imperialism” phenomenon, that is, the use of prisons to control populations rebelling against U.S. settler colonialism.⁴⁴

Similarly, Burton invites his readers to study prisons and criminal law through a colonial lens. He asks his readers to go beyond seeing the criminal law as a tool for social control—a tool that, starting in the 1970s, policymakers have increasingly favored (pp. 3, 12–13). When intellectuals like George Jackson described criminal legal institutions as colonial, he was arguing that the criminal law functioned as a totalizing form of governance that is imposed externally and illegitimately.⁴⁵ The colonialization lens rejects critiques of the carceral state founded in citizenship or belonging (p. 5). It posits an authoritarian state that governs primarily through force, rather than consent. It does not presuppose a shared polity but imagines distinct communities that interact on asymmetric and nonreciprocal terms.⁴⁶ And yet, drawing precise boundaries around groups within U.S. borders subjected to colonial rule is difficult, and their histories of subjugation distinct.⁴⁷ The colonial frame destabilizes fundamental distinctions in public law between the domestic and foreign. In turn, seeing the prison as a feature of a security state, operating seamlessly inside and outside U.S. borders, invites coalition building between anti-prison and anti-war social movements.

III. Revolutionary Ethics

Embracing a war paradigm had material implications for the rebels’ praxis. They took up arms, used physical force, and in most cases held hostages (pp. 23–33, 55, 67, 87, 100). They then issued demands that appeared prominently in The New York Times (p. 28). Their embrace of violent ends reflected a deep dissatisfaction with both their jailers and the progressive social movements outside. These movements expected them to express their grievances nonviolently and to adhere to the general public’s expectations that inmates remain passive (pp. 43–44, 47). Only in the most extraordinary circumstances would the public endorse resistance—and even then, only if it was peaceful. For the rebels, this climate all but guaranteed the inmates’ decimation.

A. The Utility and Humanism of Revolution

The rebels refused to accede to these terms of resistance. Leaders of the revolts at Queens Branch, Auburn, the Tombs, and then Attica often brought together members of the Young Lords Party and Black Panthers, as well as Muslim inmates and unaffiliated inmates—everyone who understood that their demands would be heeded only if they exercised power in ways intelligible to the state.⁴⁸ “Within this context, [the rebels] saw revolutionary counter-violence as a violence reduction strategy. Its aim was to make the wagers of war think twice before dispensing abuse” (p. 44). In other words, the rebels alleged that while their armed resistance created new forms of violence, it reduced net violence. Similarly, Burton intimates that the captives’ violence was categorically different, because it was defensive. The state always had the choice to desist from its campaign of elimination, yet it continued to prosecute its war.

Hostage taking was the opening salvo in the rebels’ insurgency. By doing so, Burton explains that the rebels sought leverage rather than revenge (pp. 101–02). Burton documents that guards (the hostages) were fed, sheltered, and provided with cigarettes (p. 103). The decision not to harm the hostages was pedagogic—the rebels were modeling their humane vision for a better world (p. 103). A Village Voice journalist who visited Attica at the rebels’ invitation argued that rebels “should be thought of as an ‘oppressed nation,’ one that was more just and less violent than the larger nation outside” (p. 103).

The hostages’ treatment was a subject of debate within the larger Black radical underground. In a communiqué issued after the rebellion, the Black Liberation Army criticized the Attica prisoners for not executing the hostages (p. 102). By contrast, a rebel spokesman maintained that preserving them was pragmatic: “There’s no point in going to the electric chair for killing a devil that can’t get away” (p. 102). In this debate, Burton seems to drive a different point altogether: In their decisions to use violence, the rebels were neither exceptionally virtuous nor cruel. Rather than opine on their morality Burton insists on their rationality: they were rational actors defending themselves against capture.

While Attica rebels expressed a policy of keeping hostages alive, their uprising was not without bloodshed.⁴⁹ One guard taken hostage died from head injuries sustained during the uprising. The rebels also relied on humiliations: The hostages were “stripped naked and marched down the corridors under threats of death” (p. 87). A small group of white prisoners were punished for hoisting a white flag to signal their sympathies with the state (p. 94). Two other inmates who provided unauthorized interviews to the media were swiftly tried for treason and incarcerated in the People’s Prison (pp. 94–95). Another white prisoner who experienced a mental breakdown was also detained in this “prison within a prison” (p. 95). By the end of the rebellion, when the state police took over, investigators discovered three of these men’s bodies—stabbed and with their throats slashed (p. 95). Burton cites this episode to underscore the incompleteness of the rebels’ abolitionist experiment (p. 95). Not only was their uprising ephemeral and limited, but it contained the seeds of its own destruction. How could they both articulate a vision of freedom that escaped coercion, while using violence to achieve it? Burton does not answer the question. He identifies a tension in the rebels’ praxis but does not press further.

B. Transcendence

In arguing that the rebellions were abolitionist and that violence was a rational strategy given the terrain, Burton turns our attention to a different form of abolition than the non-reformist reforms popularized in the legal academy. If the risk of pursuing a non-reformist reform strategy is that the chosen reform turns out to be ineffective rather than transformative, the risk of revolution, on the other hand, is new forms of bloodshed. But Burton demands that we not confuse the novelty of revolutionary violence with greater lethality. He maintains that the rebels’ actions were no more violent than the system that tortured, maimed, and caged them (p. 38). Burton draws us into a universe where prisoners believe that the only way to survive is to take up arms. We are thus confronted with the question of whether prisoners have a right to self-defense—and whether, as a matter of strategy, they should exercise this right.

While Burton confronts the danger of revolution and the near impossibility of ethics in the battlefield, he also wants us to note the new forms of sociality that made possible in Attica’s open courtyard. Burton’s research culminates with sharp descriptions of this Black Commune, to use George Jackson’s terms (p. 83). The rebels built “an autonomous site of self-organization capable of nurturing revolutionary culture and alternative modes of collective life” (p. 83). Burton names the moments of joy, care, and strategy that made Attica more than an armed rebellion that elicited a gruesome state response. He describes how Dacajeweiah, one of the rebel leaders, witnessed another rebel see the stars for the first time in twenty-three years (p. 107). These moments of exuberance, Burton emphasizes, are what sustain movements. Revolution is more than a conflict between two groups; it is transcendent and personally transformative (p. 81). Facing the most impossible odds, the rebels not only seized power, but built a different social and emotional world. This is the contradiction that Attica embodies: “[B]eneath the hard outer layer of war, the inner core of the rebellion was constituted by radically new forms of human sociality and care” (p. 84). Those two components are inextricably linked, Burton contends, underscoring the necessary conditions for prefigurative politics (p. 104).

Through this burst of creative social energy in Attica’s courtyard, Burton argues, the rebels were trying to recapture freedom. The rebels pursued their quest for freedom in complicated, contradictory and dangerous ways. But that is inherent in any movement for liberation, Burton intimates. Freedom is not a right to be granted by the state, but is an iterative daily practice of confrontation and community. Drawing on the work of Neil Roberts, Burton explains that “freedom is . . . an ongoing process of marronage rather than the static antithesis of unfreedom.”⁵⁰ It is ephemeral, messy, and exists only in the crucible of constant struggle.

IV. Revolutionary Politics

The Attica rebels paid dearly for their actions. New York State governor, Nelson Rockefeller, unilaterally bypassed the appointed negotiators and whatever progress they had made, ordering state troopers to recapture the prison (p. 183). Thirty-nine people died: twenty-nine inmates and ten guards.⁵¹ Burton uses the guards’ shooting spree to argue once again that the state was not engaged in prison discipline but warfare (p. 119). The massacre perpetrated by the state troopers was an act of retaliation—they “fired more than two thousand rounds of ammunition in less than fifteen minutes” (p. 119). The Black underground likened the state troopers’ raid to the My Lai massacre of 1968 (p. 99). In a private call to President Nixon, Rockefeller described the trooper’s actions as “a beautiful operation” (p. 132). And the reprisals had only begun. Burton reveals abhorrent incidents of sexual torture meted out by guards against Attica inmates after the rebellion (pp. 129–30). Readers are asked to see these reprisals as both escalations in the guards cruelty but consistent with the experience of incarceration (pp. 129–31). The Attica revolt and the retaliation that followed crystallized the true relationship between the captives and their guards.

A. Diversity Within the Movement and Diversity of Tactics

It would be a mistake to elevate all the rebels across the New York state correctional system as principled revolutionaries who deployed violence in strategic but restrained ways. Many were involved in more than one of the revolts Burton describes, illustrating what for many is a recurring cycle of incarceration.⁵² But we also learn that many of the rebels’ connections to radical politics inside were instrumental to their goals of getting out (p. 99). Several participants were only recently politicized,⁵³ and we learn little of their political trajectory. Furthermore, while we can presume disagreement and in-fighting, we still know little about how this heterogenous group related to the abolitionist project.

Although the rebels’ discourse transcended constitutional rights, it is not as if they refused to engage with legal form and institutions. Armed struggle was just one of the many tools that proto-abolitionists and their allies embraced. The rebels also deployed criminal procedure to great effect, to effectuate what Burton describes as a “legal jailbreak” (p. 37). In a spectacular feat, the captives successfully orchestrated a bail hearing in Branch Queens, which they secured through negotiations with the City.⁵⁴ In their initial demands, presented after taking hostages, they indicted the city courts for holding pretrial detainees for months—an ordeal, they argued, their public defenders were unwilling to end unless the detainees accepted unfair pleas that guaranteed long-term incarceration.⁵⁵ When the City reached out to negotiate the guards’ release, rebel leadership asked the City to reevaluate their commitment orders in the hopes of securing pretrial release. City officials caved and held bail hearings inside the jail, as a result of which many detainees were ultimately released.⁵⁶ Rebel negotiators carefully selected which cases they brought forward in the bail hearing, omitting certain detainees, like the “Panther 21,” whose release they knew the City would deny (p. 36).

B. Counterinsurgency

The state panicked after Attica. Although the FBI and CIA understood that prisons could radicalize rather than pacify, the captives’ success in mobilizing hundreds to resist the carceral order took even the most paranoid by surprise. Recognizing the potential for future violence, the state assembled a blue-ribbon commission to study the riot and issue a report.⁵⁷ The Official Report of the New York State Special Commission on Attica opens with the frank recognition that “Attica is every prison; and every prison is Attica.”⁵⁸ The authors decried the prison for its obsession with security at the expense of rehabilitation and its unvarnished racism.⁵⁹ Attica had never lived up to its promise of delivering humane, dignified incarceration, the report alleged. Now was the moment for change. Moving forward, “[t]he programs and policies associated with confinement,” the report advised, “should be directed at elevating and enhancing the dignity, worth, and self-confidence of the inmates, not at debasing and dehumanizing them.”⁶⁰

Burton asks his readers to doubt state actors’ sincerity and to interrogate their motivations after Attica, and the bloody raid. He contends that the state hoped making prison more tolerable at the quotidian level would deter disorder (p. 152). Burton alleges that state officials hoped that by announcing new policies, they could salvage law enforcement agencies’ reputation, after their failure to maintain control and their deadly overreaction (p. 151). Burton concludes that these reforms were not born of genuine concern for the prisoners’ humanity but were really counterinsurgency tactics (p. 150).

By counterinsurgency, Burton does not mean that state actors took inspiration from the Pentagon and its methods for prevailing over guerilla warfare, though they did.⁶¹ He engages with the term as it has been theorized by social movement scholars to reframe a panoply of reforms and interventions offered by liberal and centrist groups in response to radical, unruly demands for prison abolition. Dylan Rodríguez describes counterinsurgency as “the full spectrum of pacification, isolation, and domestication strategies that extend beyond violent state repression” emerging from a “loosely coordinated bloc that consists of large philanthropic foundations, liberal think tanks, academics, elected officials, media pundits, nonprofit organizations, celebrity activists, and social media influencers” responding to “overlapping Black liberationist, abolitionist and anti-colonial mobilizations in and beyond North America.”⁶² Similarly, Naomi Murakawa has called attention to the tactic of “repression through a politics of recognition” by elected officials that functions to quash radical demands for abolition.⁶³ The term “counterinsurgency” in these contexts is more metaphorical than literal. Burton identifies four counter-insurgency measures New York State Officials used to rehabilitate their reputation, quash future rebellions, and preserve the position of the carceral state: expansion, humanization, diversification, and programmification (p. 152).

1. Expansion

State officials asserted that prison expansion was needed to reduce overcrowding and phase out old infrastructure (p. 160). Governor Rockefeller financed the prison construction boom by authorizing bonds that did not need voter approval (p. 161). The Governor argued that profits from prison labor (license plates, highway signs, tobacco products, and furniture now being manufactured in prisons) would defray costs, but inmates’ exploitation was largely for symbolic effect (p. 162).

The prison boom had a lasting imprint on New York State’s geography. The new facilities took hold in rural, white deindustrialized communities, to whom the work promised jobs in corrections, with pension benefits (p. 163). These material interests in turn nurtured ideological commitments to punitive policies toward Black, Latinx, and poor urban New Yorkers to ensure a steady flow of prisoners and stable employment (p. 163).

2. Humanization

Humanization, as Burton describes it, refers to the measures that relaxed prison administration (p. 164). The Department of Corrections loosened the censorship restrictions for incoming mail and removed screens in visiting rooms, giving inmates the chance to be physically closer to their loved ones (p. 164). They made it easier to access soap and books in the law library. The Department of Corrections and Supervision also promised limitations on the use of force, but Burton explains that these changes were cosmetic and instrumental—efforts to salvage the Department’s reputation after its brutal recapture (pp. 164–65).

3. Diversification

A third strategy, diversification, entailed the development of new and different sites of incarceration designed to respond to the varied needs of those incarcerated (p. 168). Prison would be more individualized and thus more effective at neutralizing opposition (p. 172). To achieve this kind of customization, prison officials first categorized the different kinds of inmates (p. 169). Abnormal psychology was an able handmaiden for the Department of Corrections as it assembled its typology (p. 168). Psychologists at the Adirondack Correctional Treatment and Education Center offered diagnostic expertise, treatment, and programming for those who administrators deemed to be maladjusted to their institutional setting (p. 169).

Together, psychologists and prison officials sought to reduce inmates’ political grievances to psychopathologies, and fashioned methods of confinement that could deliver behavior modification (p. 168). The Department of Corrections’ turn to abnormal psychology followed the CIA’s efforts in the Third World, where the agency developed psychological operations designed to neutralize anti-imperial opposition, including strategies like “winning the hearts and minds” of would-be insurgents (p. 169). Through such interdisciplinary interventions, Burton reveals prison administrators’ ambitious agenda for total control: They were prepared to engage in research and experimentation in their quest for physical and mental domination over the inmates.

4. Programmification

Under the banner of programmification, Burton locates the classes, external engagements, and forms of sociality cultivated by prison administrators in the name of rehabilitation. These interventions tried to make prisons more accessible to the outside world and the outside world more accessible to those inside prisons. Volunteers entered the prison to run book clubs, Swahili classes, and Alcoholics Anonymous groups among other programs (p. 175). As many as a third of prisoners participated (p. 175). While this new programming exposed guards to greater risk of inmate escape in the short run, the long-term hope was to deradicalize prisoners (p. 181). Some prisoners interpreted these new offerings as an attempt to mollify them—“ploy[s] to move populations toward respectability and identification with carceral ideology.”⁶⁴

Burton casts a dark shadow on the brighter parts of prisons: classrooms and therapy. He urges us to see the context from which these humanizing reforms emerge. Why was the state willing to make these apparent concessions? Although these measures increased the Department of Corrections’ budget and improved its image, they were not really concessions at all. They strengthened the state’s hand. By telling this story, Burton urges organizers today to be wary of carceral bureaucrats bearing gifts.

The story of post-Attica reform suggests that while revolutionary action may have been necessary to extract the most modest changes, like more educational opportunities, those changes went hand-in-hand with investments in more sinister instruments of control. Burton’s observations amplify a historical trend. As recent histories of the rise of mass criminalization demonstrate, reforms to the criminal legal system emerged from crisis, namely the carceral apparatus’s crisis of legitimacy.⁶⁵

To contain popular opposition to the enforcement of Prohibition in the 1930s, the Hoover administration convened the Wickersham Commission to expose the rampant use of torture and selective prosecution against working-class alcohol distributors.⁶⁶ In the 1960s, the Katzenbach Commission advanced “modernizing” reforms to law enforcement and the court systems, intended to deter frequent urban riots triggered by police brutality and persistent racial segregation in the North.⁶⁷ These episodes illustrate the dialectic between crisis and recuperative reform.⁶⁸ Reforms, in each of these moments, functioned to stave off more radical transformations. It is precisely this history of instrumental reforms or what Burton calls counter-insurgency tactics—and their subsequent failure to address police, prisons, and courts’ endemic harms—that eventually pushed organizers to demand the seemingly impossible: Abolition.

C. The Social Movement Ecosystem

In a brief but revealing discussion, Burton situates the rebels in a wider ecosystem of social movement activity in the 1970s. While the NAACP, CORE, and civil rights groups acknowledged Attica as a tragedy, they notably stopped short of recognizing the prisoners’ demands for political freedom (p. 177). They also endorsed the Department of Corrections’ volunteer program and measures to recruit minority guards (p. 177). As a reader, I wanted to learn more about these inter-left debates of the past because they could be instructive for the present.

From the limited discussion, Burton’s account suggests that liberal civil rights groups compromised their own successes when they tolerated prisons as zones of exception where equal rights could be suspended (p. 177). By treating the rebels’ experience as sui generis rather than continuous with their own indignities, they revealed their misapprehensions about their own struggle. Meanwhile, the rebels could most clearly discern the true face of U.S. governance because of their proximity to the most coercive state apparatus. That is, their experience of prison revealed the U.S. government’s truest essence.

Some forty years after Attica, scholars Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman confirmed the rebels’ assessment. Weaver and Lerman have argued that empirically and experientially, Americans’ most frequent and defining interactions with their government are with its criminal legal institutions: “[C]riminal justice institutions have come to play a socializing role in the lives of a substantial subset of Americans, fundamentally influencing how they come to conceptualize the democratic state and their place in it.”⁶⁹ The rebels presciently judged this reality, even before the era of mass incarceration that began in earnest in the 1980s.⁷⁰ This is perhaps why Burton places them, metaphorically, at the tip of the spear (p. 184). They understood before most others that the prisons, police, and prosecutors would become the defining features of the state.

The rebels were not alone in their analysis. Burton situates the captives leading these rebellions in a rich tradition of “robust revolutionary culture” reverberating throughout the 1970s (p. 38). As law enforcement doggedly pursued the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army on the outside, the rebels’ critiques of the carceral state became more relevant than ever (pp. 25, 30, 212). Repression against Black nationalist groups strengthened the connections between groups inside and out. Joining the Panthers became a pipeline for underground organizing in prisons and jails, cementing carceral institution as an essential site for political action (p. 97).

Eventually, law enforcement caught on. Under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI turned its attention to the prison as a place that could fan the flames of a wider insurrection. Hoover inaugurated the Prison Activists Surveillance Project to monitor jails and prisons for radical activity (pp. 156–57). In a similar vein, the FBI’s Black Extremists in Penal Institutions followed radicals upon their release, recognizing their potential to further embolden the population on the outside (p. 16). The state intensified its repression in response to increased resistance, and for a while, Black liberation movements found new ways to agitate. The repression and resistance fed off each other in a vicious cycle.⁷¹

Conclusion

Burton’s own text now finds itself enmeshed in that same cycle. His book is a monument to an armed struggle for human dignity. Prison authorities today have taken notice. As of August 2024, prisons in New York, Florida, Michigan, and California have banned Burton’s book for allegedly inciting “violence,” “lawlessness,” “anarchy,” and “rebellion.”⁷² The irony is not lost on Burton, whose book prominently features anti-censorship activists like Sostre.⁷³ Burton penned an open letter to prison authorities writing, “What you call ‘violence,’ I call ‘counterviolence.’ ”⁷⁴ That pithy retort captures Burton’s most vital contribution. He has compiled an archive to show prisons through the lens of its most active resisters, as complicated and flawed as they are, and to confront his readership with the activists’ conclusions about prison reform: The only way to improve prisons is to eliminate them, and only countervailing force can bring the barbaric prison experiment in the United States to an end.

* Associate Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law. This piece benefited from conversations with Jonathan Feingold, Rachel Foran, Angelo Petrigh, and Jocelyn Simonson. Special thanks to Elena Schultz and Grace Vedock who so patiently shepherded this piece through publication and Nathaniel Magrath for his close edits.