Town Accepts Risk : In Attica, Prison Is Just Place to Work

Life in this village on the pastoral flatlands to the lee of Lake Erie proceeds in a gentle seasonal rhythm, much as it does in any rural American town.

In the Agway store, where the air is redolent with the spicy sweetness of molasses-laced grain, a gray cat darts furtively among burlap sacks to avoid the boots of farmers picking up winter stocks of feed.

Along Main Street, a mother tows a toddler and a sack of groceries in a wooden red wagon, past gingerbread-trimmed Victorian homes and gnarled, spreading maples.

Around the corner, shaggy pinto ponies forage along the white rail fence of the rodeo arena, where riders from across the country compete in August.

A few blocks from where the ponies graze, the scene is starkly different. Within a clay-gray wall 60 feet high and as deep underground in places is another community, nearly as large as the village outside. It has a gate of heavy scrolled steel and red-tile turreted towers like those of a medieval castle.

In contrast with the overwhelmingly white, rural folks who inhabit the village, the nearly 2,000 residents of the 53-acre Attica State Correctional Facility are mostly black, mostly urban. Many are violent criminals.

While other towns vigorously fight proposals to build such a place nearby, fearing for the safety of their children and the character of their community, this village, whose name is inevitably linked to the nation’s bloodiest prison riot 13 years ago, welcomed plans for the new 500-cell prison that’s going up next to the 50-year-old facility.

“It’s a shot in the arm for the economy,” said Dale Slocum, the part-time mayor. “This town sat dormant for a while; now it seems to be growing.”

Slocum, the son of a retired guard and uncle of two guards, added: “A Rochester outfit wants to put in a housing complex, and there’s a new 30-unit motel (Attica’s first) going up across from the Super Duper.”

The payroll of nearly 1,000 employees at the prison helps village businesses, Slocum said. “The prison also buys water from the village, and the state’s helping to build a new sewage plant.”

Inside the Yester Year co-op, with its crates of apples and potatoes and barrels of granola and brown rice, Sally June smoothed her white apron and leaned against the rough wooden counter. “People basically forget it’s there,” she said, referring to the prison. “It’s a place of employment, that’s all.”

“I grew up outside Rochester, and I’d much rather raise my kids here,” said her co-worker, Judy Wood. “There’s less crime and drugs here--it’s all inside that wall.” Her husband works in the prison metal shop.

“It’s a friendly town--I guess all rural towns are,” Wood said. “Maybe there’s more prejudice, although less so than at the time of the riot. Still, I don’t think a black family would feel comfortable living here.”

The women vividly recall the 1971 riot, which ended with 43 lives lost, including 11 prison employees, after state police armed with tear gas and bullets ended a four-day inmate takeover in D Yard.

“There were rumors that black militants were going to take over the town,” said June, the wife of a teacher. “There was talk of shutting down the school for fear they’d grab the kids.”

Riot Worries Do people worry that another riot could erupt?

“People don’t admit it, but I think it’s in the backs of their minds,” June said. “After something like that happens, you don’t forget it.”

A commission cited overcrowding as a major problem leading to the uprising. Today, officials say, there are about 2,100 inmates at Attica--1,500 of them black or Hispanic. The maximum capacity, said counselor Dave Mangus, is 2,211, “if every bed is used, including the infirmary.”

“Prisons are at 116% of capacity statewide,” said Mangus, a tall, bearded, bespectacled man who is greeted heartily by inmates watching television in a cellblock lounge, mopping a beige-walled corridor or working in a welding class. “Ideally, we’d prefer to have 300 to 400 fewer here. But overcrowding in itself isn’t a problem, as long as we provide sufficient jobs, medical care, recreation and programs for inmates.”

Nationwide Problem Prison crowding is a problem nationwide as well. The Justice Department said America’s prison population was a record 454,136 on June 30, nearly 10% above capacity and double what it was 10 years ago.

“The best way to keep things under control is to keep the inmates busy, and to provide privileges to those who earn them,” Mangus said. “Inmates complain it’s hard for their families to visit--it may take two months to get a ride on the bus from New York (an eight-hour ride). But I tell them transferring closer to home is a privilege they earn, like anything else.”

Overcrowding “slows everything down,” said James Mann, local president and statewide vice president of the corrections officers’ union. “Meals used to take 45 minutes. Now they take twice that. It cuts the time inmates can spend in programs. But I don’t feel there’s any organized discontent.”

Job Security Mann, 42, an imposing figure with broad shoulders and a square jaw, said he was attracted to the work for its relatively high pay and job security, just before the Westinghouse plant where he had worked laid off 1,800 people.

“It’s dangerous work, you can’t get around that,” said William McAnulty, Attica’s deputy superintendent for programs. Although once rare, assaults on guards--who are unarmed unless they choose to carry a baton--now average eight to 10 a year. “But the pay is good--a guard can make $30,000 to $40,000 a year with overtime. More young people are getting into it.”

At the junior-senior high school, a low, modern building near the prison work farm, Assistant Principal Ernest Lusky said at least a third of the students have parents working at the prison.

“We find they come from very traditional homes, very conservative, regimental,” he said. “Consequently, we have very few disciplinary problems. These kids really value their education.”

Social Life “Like most any other small town, the social life revolves around the high school,” Lusky said. “The football games are crowded with people who graduated from here 20 years ago. And the kids really get involved . . . this is the only school I know of where at half time, football players and cheerleaders will change uniforms and march in the band.”

Rick Stevens, along with his father, runs the 800-acre dairy farm directly across from the prison farm. There has been only one escape from behind the prison wall, but numerous trustees--nonviolent criminals--have walked away from the farm over the years.

“Sometimes when there’s an escape, they search our farm, search the barn and the hay mow,” Stevens said. “It doesn’t really worry us, though. When they escape, they don’t hang around here.”

Escapee Caught in Town “I remember only one who was apprehended in the village,” said Dan Norcross, village police chief in a department of four full-time and five part-time officers. “He was hiding in a boxcar on the railroad siding. They don’t usually stay around town, with all the guards living here.

“With the new construction, traffic has increased almost threefold,” Norcross added. “And drunk driving arrests are increasing, with the new younger guards, but also because of the state Stop DWI program.”

“There’s more drinking per capita here than anywhere in the United States,” said Francis Paul Patti, who, at age 59, has lived in town for 31 years. “The guards, when they get off work, they like to socialize, and the taverns downtown is where they do it--like any small town.”

Pausing from his work on the loading dock at the Agway, Patti leaned on a stack of salt licks and wrapped his calloused hands around a coffee mug. “My son was a police officer in the village, but when you’re married and have two kids, $13,000 doesn’t go far. Now he’s a guard, makes over $20,000 plus benefits. But I told him he was crazy to go inside the wall.”

“The town’s leery of the young guards,” said Stan Maslowski, hustling beers at Ye Olde Stage House, down the street from the prison. “But, look, working inside the wall, the tension builds up. They come in here to let off steam. As far as I’m concerned, these guys can do no wrong.”

The Stage House is a Wild West-style saloon with a splintered front porch, cracked, smeared window panes, a back-room pool table obscured by smoky haze. Over the crowded bar a sign in fluorescent paint reads: “Welcome to Oblivion”--a reference to a magazine article relating how the guards get off work and “drink themselves into oblivion.”

Maslowski, the proprietor, was a guard for five years--until he was carried out, unconscious and bleeding, on May 13, 1977. He bears a long scar down one hollow cheek from the makeshift blade of one of the inmates who jumped him. But he wants to go back inside.

“I love it,” he said. “There’s a sense of comradeship. It gets in your blood. I’d go back tomorrow if they’d take me.”

“The guards really stick together,” Mann said. “When there’s a problem, it’s us against the world. Right now, it’s inmate allegations of brutality. A good part of my job is defending officers against this kind of garbage.

“People always want the criminal off the street--but once they get behind the wall, it’s, ‘Oh, the poor fellow.’ And we always come out on the bottom as the bad guy.

‘Forget Rehabilitation’ “You can forget rehabilitation,” Mann said. “That issue came up after the riot. But how are you going to rehabilitate someone who’d murder? Although there are a lot of inmates I have a good rapport with--it’s hard to see how they ended up in there.”

Mann agreed that drinking is a problem among younger guards. “There are some hotheads, kids who think they’re still in high school, get drunk, get into fights. They used to hire them 18, 19 years old, but now they raised the minimum to 21.”

Like the mayor, Mann said the prison’s main effect on the village is that it’s “good for the economy. Prisons are almost all in small towns where there really is no other major industry.”

“It’s just an employer,” Lusky said as the corridor outside his office filled with teen-agers raucous in their rush to noon-hour freedom. “We’re not an unusual town. . . . We’re just a rural small town, like hundreds of others across the country--a good community to grow up in, to raise kids in.”