I never completed my minor in American Studies, for whatever reason unable to enroll in a final course. For me, the subject was a blend of mostly African-American Studies courses and the history of labor. But in the spring of 2002, I took an elective called “American Voices: New York City Film and Literature,” which featured the city as a cultural nexus, taught by a woman who embraced this fully. I recall telling her where I was from, that I’d grown up nearby in Attica, and her response was, “That must have been so hard.” I recall thinking at the time that it hadn’t been hard, not particularly, but maybe also enjoying some sense of this presumed hardscrabble upbringing. I think the rough interpolation is that she may have known Attica to be a working-class town, an economically depressed little burg. She may have associated it with the 1971 prison uprising. She may have correctly understood that these things were braided together in my experience, that my identity was molded in a place that paid rural white men to guard urban Black men. She may have understood what I did not—namely that there were marks from my hometown I would have to get away from—which I was doing in college—that I’d need to face and try to understand.

My father began his career with the New York State Department of Corrections at Attica Correctional Facility, the same year I began kindergarten. He never went to college and I don’t think I was consciously aware during my time in college of intellectualizing issues that were deeply personal: class, labor, race. But I see it now: I took classes and read texts about the unionization of industries in the early twentieth century and the closure of factories in the latter twentieth century. I would not have had the sophistication at the time to understand the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery being manifest in the Attica prison, that the shift for Black Americans was often one not of kind but degree; different systems of criminalizing blackness, using the law to advance the original myth or inherent vice of America, white supremacy. 

Attica Correctional Facility was built during the Great Depressionn with WPA labor, an economic boon to a tiny rural town. It was built, too, with inmate labor. The prison is often described as looking like a castle, which is accurate albeit incomplete. Its concrete walls are topped with parapets and crenellations; its guard towers are capped like medieval castles or church steeples. But these walls are also blank and imposing, an erasure. The world inside and the one outside are visibly divorced. 

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My dad grew up working on the family farm that had been in my family for generations, back to the mid-nineteenth century, when my earliest ancestors came to the US. The work he did was shared; from predawn milking to after-school feeding, the whole family had a role. But by the late seventies, my dad understood two intertwined realities: he had gotten married and my parents hoped to have children and the $200 or so he made a month on the farm was not enough. Also, by that point the small, family farms were beginning to be swamped by larger ones. So he applied at Westinghouse, which paid roughly double what he made on the farm, got the job and took it without thinking much about the change. 

The Westinghouse plant in Attica made electric motor parts and my dad’s job there included pouring molten iron into molds, removing hot castings from a sieve that shook them loose from the sand molding, grinding down any imperfections on the castings. He says of it, “Westinghouse was a big brick building and inside was dreary. The foundry was very hot from the iron furnaces in the summer; it was probably 100 degrees in there.” It was a union job, so his move from the farm meant he now had benefits (my mom worked until my sister was born, in 1979, and then stayed home until the late eighties when we were all in school). But by 1985, the year I went  to kindergarten, Westinghouse had been downsizing for years–my dad estimates the workforce had gone from 200 to 75 by the time he left–and the end of the plant was obvious to all. 

My dad took the NYS exam, moved to Fishkill and when he returned, it was in dress gray, with steel-toed boots, a nameplate, and a guard’s toque. He did well, worked his way up, passed tests, and retired a Lieutenant. Of that change, he says he was “not sure what I was getting into. Many times the first couple years,” he says, “I’d wonder what did I take this job for?”

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At Westinghouse, the work was machine work, mechanical; humans were the power and the precision of vast mechanical systems. See the history of labor in the early twentieth century. It is a dehumanizing idea of work, literally placing the men in the factory where the computer precision and robotic arms would serve a decade later. It is true that technology has replaced jobs as it is true that decades prior, those jobs made men into machines. 

But what is the work of Attica? 

Coming on shift, my dad would empty his pockets and pass through a metal detector, then iron bars that were mechanically operated by a CO. He’d put his things in a locker and arm himself and begin a shift of walking and watching. Just as Westinghouse had made him a machine, placing fittings into a machine, repeatedly, the State of New York made him an inhuman avatar of punishment, a walking manifestation of the rules, however petty and humiliating. And he felt this, they all did. Men who worked there took on a corrupted sense of power from inhabiting this subject position, or felt the dehumanizing twist of it and how it made them simply another part of the prison, gray like the wall, pacing like the delimiting bars. 

After my dad retired from the New York State Department of Corrections, in 2010, he told me he had an idea for a memoir about his experience. He wanted to call it Depraved Indifference, using the criminal charge as a metaphor to indict—though that’s too strong a word—the whole system. The crime of depraved indifference means basically acting with no regard for human life, not a will to inflict injury but a complete lack of concern as to whether injury occurs as a result of one’s actions. I’m paraphrasing, but you can read New York State’s Penal Code §125.25 for the exact language. What my dad had seen and wished to explore was how the job of being a corrections officer essentially necessitated an attitude of depraved indifference toward the incarcerated men in one’s charge: it wasn’t that you wished to ensure their safety or well-being or stop them from doing something they shouldn’t (and it certainly wasn’t rehabilitative); it was simply to prevent  whatever bad would happen from happening on your shift. The correctional system itself instilled a lack of regard for, and a lack of recognition of, the basic humanity of the inmates. Charles Dickens, in “American Notes for General Circulation”—anthologized in Writing New York, my textbook for New York City Film and Literature–wrote, “Look at them, man—you, who see them every night, and keep the keys. Do you see what they are?” 

I think the degree to which guards and employees must learn to unsee the humanity of the inmates is separate from the type of indifference—true indifference, an utter lack of regard—we the American people have for the incarcerated men and women living in our country. I don’t mean to suggest that inmates are always innocent or that there is an injustice inherent to imprisonment; I mean only to say the vast carceral state we allow to exist illustrates the depravity of our democracy, the willingness to unsee the human cost of this inhuman institution. 

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Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with a lurid, violent description of an execution to illustrate that punishment used to involve, as a deterrent, a public element, to inflict a body with pain so that all could see. The fear of this pain was meant to discourage crime; though by the nineteenth century, he writes, this changed: punishment ceased to be about the body and instead became both an economic and civic penalty. “From being an art of unbearable sensations, punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.” It had, Foucault  says, “gradually ceased to be a spectacle.” 

One of the important and sustaining elements of our current carceral state, and one of the key reasons America has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country in the world, is that punishment has ceased to be a spectacle, has ceased to exist in the public domain, and has largely become an abstraction, invisible. Even in Attica, the world behind the walls was not a real one to me; I knew of the lives of the men inside in only the vaguest terms. The point is that this is our extant system of punishment: the incarcerated are not only deprived of rights, liberty, money, and so on, but they effectively disappeared from public view. Far from being publicly forced to endure pain to their bodies, the effects on their bodies and souls—including the forced labor—are to a great degree kept from us, the public. 

Reginald Dwayne Betts notes this invisibility also means a further form of trauma is inflicted on the incarcerated with our indifferent permission: solitary confinement. “All around us there are men and women made invisible, their spirits wiped out by policies that we don’t notice.” He points to Eastern State Penitentiary’s policy that all men confined there be in solitary confinement; that “no prisoner is seen by another, after he enters the walls.” 

Built in 1829, Eastern State Penitentiary—in Philadelphia—was the first modern prison, and the expression of a theory of justice and punishment held by the Quakers. Dickens, when he saw men in solitary confinement on a visit to Eastern said he couldn’t endure the thought of that punishment, of any man anywhere suffering it, that he couldn’t “lie me down upon my bed at night” while a prisoner suffered in solitary, “in his silent cell, and I the cause, or I consenting to it in the least degree.” The fact that seeing so troubled Dickens relates to Foucault’s point about the spectacle of punishment: it could create sympathy with the punished and with those who carried out the burden of punishment. Rather than erasing them, it made them human and moving; the deterrent effect of punishment was the pain, which deterrence did not require dehumanizing the person who suffered it. It is not that we should all be made to see solitary confinement—or experience it—but that no one should have to endure it. Benjamin Ewing, in “Socializing Justice,” actually advocates that seeing, that experiencing: he proposes a system in which a “penal draft” would send each of us in turn to “serve their country as inmates, probationers, or parolees” justified in part on the recognition that none of us is innocent and the problematic idea of guilt is just another means of making the incarcerated invisible. If not as inmates, he goes on, perhaps we should all perform “a brief period of mandatory public service in prison.” 

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In Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, a piece of NYC in film, it is Al Pacino’s character Sonny who famously chants, “Attica! Attica!” when he has stumbled into a hostage situation and is encircled by armed policemen. He is riling up the onlookers, calling on them to see systemic injustice, reminding them of a recent image of sickening police use of force, the murder of thirty-nine unarmed men who were entrapped within prison walls. The chant comes when Sonny is attempting to negotiate with Brian De Palma and calls out an officer nearby with his gun drawn. “He wants to kill me so bad he can taste it,” Sonny says. 

“What a waste of human power, what a waste of human life,” John Lennon sang. “Attica State, Attica, we’re all living in Attica State.” After the retaking of the prison in 1971, protesters in NYC chanted, “We are all Attica.” The Official Report of the NY State Special Committee on Attica reads, “Attica is every prison; and every prison is Attica.” 

For so long, I tried to hide or deny how Attica shaped me; or that is, I got to college and in my writing and American Studies classes—where I intellectualized the world I’d live in order to situate myself outside of it—and I created an unconscious rift between my past and present (and future) selves. I was now, I wanted to believe, defined more by college and as a writer than I was by the town where I’d spent my formative years, pushing against the boundaries. So I wanted to see that I was shaped but not by Attica; I wanted to see that I was an anomaly, an escapee, that I had outgrown the place  that marked all I’d known. And I only needed to move a half hour away to do it. 

But Attica marked me in other unseen ways, privileges more than limitations. A study released in 2015 showed that Wyoming County (in which Attica sits) was the single best place to be raised in the state, in terms of economic mobility and opportunity. So where I saw a shuttered Westinghouse, men in gray corrections uniforms, and the near horizon of professional dreams of the highest achievers in my school, I did not see the invisible hand lifting me up by virtue of my parents living and working in a county, that for whatever reason was successful at increasing the future salaries of its poor, working, and middle-class children. 

And of course as that hand invisibly lifts, it also suppresses. In my hometown, a prison built by incarcerated men to contain other men, a majority of whom were men of color, was the primary employer in a post-agricultural economy. Attica’s  businesses were sustained by the money the state was sending home in paychecks for guarding imprisoned Black men. Our schools ran on tax dollars extracted from those paychecks. Not just the labor of those men in prison but the labor of imprisoning them made Attica possible. The farms died. Westinghouse shipped jobs overseas. The economic mobility I enjoyed came from our capacity to contain men whose freedoms have been removed, whose citizenship has been restricted, whose labor is the state’s to enjoy with virtually no pay. Attica is complicit in this structural disadvantaging of Black men and thus the original American sin of white supremacy passed down from the invention of race. But, then, so am I. And even an incomplete look at American Studies suggests Attica is every prison and we are all living in Attica State.

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Michael Sheehan is the author of Proposals for the Recovery of the Apparently Drowned, and an assistant professor of creative writing at SUNY Fredonia. His work is forthcoming or has appeared recently in Permafrost, Electric Literature, Agni, Juked, Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.