[inaudible][inaudible] [inaudible] >> book tv is on twitter and facebook. we want to hear from you. tweet us, twitter.com/book tv or poster, on a facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. >> welcome to the 33rd annual chicago tribune printers lit for us. i want to give a special thank you to our sponsors. the program will be broadcast live on c-span2, but to be. if there's time at the end of the q&a session with the other

we ask that you use the microphone located at the center of the room for home viewing audiences to hear your question. before we begin the program we ask that you silence your cell phone and turn off your camera flashes. please welcome our introducer, elizabeth taylor, literary editor at large at the chicago tribune. [applause] >> can you hear me? >> i'm elizabeth taylor and i am so excited about this book with heather and thompson and lilly will be here to talk about it. i got the book it seemed like nine months ago and i read it so quickly and i found it, it was the story of the 70s. it's amazing social history. in short, it is blood in the

water and then we had the book for the printers wrote lit fest and then, how smart we looked, then she wins the pulitzer prize in history. [applause] so it's a really wonderful. it's an extraordinary book. it's about 1971 uprising but it is so much more. it's extraordinarily sociallit's history. heather is an investigative reporter. d she digs in there, get the documents in the ten years of research are shown very lightly. it's an engrossing read.yo you really want to know who is responsible, what happened and

then what the implications are for incarceration in this crazy country of ours. i'm going to turn it over to heather.and he her wonderful colleague and friend who is at cornell, heather is at michigan and they are going to get into it.real after that, i hope you'll go to the back and buy and read this book. thank you so much. [applause] >> hello. i am honored to be here today and to be in conversation with someone who is an incredible mentor to me personally and to so many young historians. i want to say it is but amazing.

i first met heather when she was a few years into the research of this book. it has been incredible to watch this unfold. it has been so gratifying to watch the book amount get such incredibly well deserved praise. also the way it has become a vehicle to bring attention to issues that are unequivocally some of the most central to our country and democracy right now. it is an honor to be part of the conversation with you about the book. i want you to tell us about attica but if you wouldn't mind for saying, how did you end up, your a labor historian, how would you to find your earliest work, how did you end up doing this research then let's talk about the actual story itself.

>> thank you for coming out to talk about the book. the book itself was a journey. some of you may know the book took 13 years to write. the story of why i started to write it and what i think the book is now are two different bk stories. i started to write the book because at the time a thought of myself as a civil-rights historian. there was an event that happened behind bars and so i was intrigued to write that history. with two caveats.on in i have very little knowledge about prison in america, as i think most americans have little knowledge about prisons. i had no idea the state of new york had certai sealed virtuallf the records for this story.

so i got a book contract and realized oh my god, not sure i can write the book because i don't how i will get access to the information. over the course of writing the book he was a research journey. also a journey of understanding how important prisons are in the country. it was a lightbulb that went o off, after 1971 which is when attica happens all of a sudden we start locking up everybody.k in 40 years we have become the world's largest jailer. with some of the worst conditions ever. so what is it about the most important prisoner rights protest that somehow we could'vs ended up in this mess 40 years later. that became part of the book which is how did we become such a punitive nation. it was also a book about this

particular protest and place in new york. so why >> so take us to the story. i think many people have heard of attica but maybe not a lot oa may be have had their understandings affected by the press accounts that happenedarty after. set the stage of what happened in of the conditions that led to attica and then what happened at attica. >> attica, new york is a tiny town upstate. and it remains a state prison where there were about 2400 men crammed in severely overcrowded, much like it is today. men were suffering some inhumane conditions, being set on 63 cents a get day, given one square of toilet paper per day, not been able to see their

children if they were not married to the mother. and having to deal with rules, i tell the story because it symbolizes the degradation, that you could earn perot but the administration would hand to this outdated phone book and say you cannot leave until you have written to an employer and that employer agrees to hire you. not too many employers were thrilled to hire someone with a postmark of attica correctional facility. you had to pay for the stamps of paper and nobody had money. so these were degrading conditions. what ultimately happens is a protest that is asking for verys basic improvements to conditions and this is the new extraordinary protest because it happens over four days and

nights and brings in observers to watch over the negotiations. tom walker of the new york times or bill counselor.rv and conservative statexed ba legislators. they all agree that these guys had legitimate claims in the state needed to deal with them and negotiate with them. the negotiations seem to be going well but after the fourthh night the state decides to take the prison with brutal force. they send in 500 state troopers, since in about 200 and corrections officers are armed.t this is it after dropping gas so everyone is already immobilized. the shooting begins and all you can here's gunfire. they kill 39 men, prisoners and.

guards alike there's a total of 128 men shot some was six or seven bullet wounds and then they torture them in for days and weeks. it was the hardest part of the book to write. probably most extraordinarilythe they step out and tell the world that something different happened which is that the prisoners killed the hostages. and that story is important to shaping what the nation thinks about prisoner rights. the story which i thought was about a rebellion turned out about the cover-up of the police crimes that go on for the next 40 years. it's about two thirds about the cover-up and the prisoner and hostas fight for justice that takes them for decades before they are heard.o -- s

>> so talk about, i'm struck about how your book ends up being about that first third,th talk about what the resolutionht was, you said there is a long fight for justice but what happened? i think that's a less know in the story continues but i know there hostages involved in efforts in incarcerated people were involved, what have those cases resolved. has it all but in the courts? talk about what happened in the aftermath. >> the extraordinary thing is the whole thing starts in 1971 and ends in five days. then for the next probably 20 years the nation doesn't hear a lot about what's going on, but the state of new york is filing cases not against the troopers

have killed people and torture people but against the prisoners for rebelling. so the first thing that happens is criminal trials against the prisoners.th their attempts to then turn themselves to the state or be heard are put on hold. they can't do anything while the trials perceived. the hostages are swindled by the state. there handed these meager checka and said get some groceries and take care of yourself, will take care of you and these $120ch checks meant they had quote on quote elected a remedy which means once they cash them they cannot sue the state. for many years the prisoners were fighting for the lives inin the criminal court, the guards have been swindled and were left in poverty and on their own. it wasn't until the criminal

trials were resolved that the prisoners couldn't launch this massive civil suit. it takes 30 years to go through the courts and in 2000 me get a jury verdict which is extraordinary, showing that the state was liable and there were damages to be had. and then they were overturned on appeal. ultimately they have to settle with the state. sounds like a powerful settlement, about $8 million for the prisoners. when all said and done divided over how many of them there were it was barely anything. that settlement brings the hostages together to fight for themselves.ly the recently the hostages had their own settlement with the state of new york. that's an extraordinary story of the resistance but it's not ovea because the state has not

admitted we responsibility or open the records. we are still demanding thehe records be open. family members want to know what happened and those are not open. >> so maybe we need to talk about the process of researching the book which heather gave a talk at where i work and i remember joking and say the talk on the history of advocates is fascinating but she could do talks on writing the book of the history because it's incredibly riveting in telling and reveals a lot in itself.f could you talk about what challenges you face when you were doing the research? in the process of the records

you use in the sources you use and what challenges you face. >> for those of you not historians you might not know how they write books.e in a b our first stop is at the archives. various institutions who save those records of the boxer folder. we go through them and then reconstruct the story and tell it to readers on the page. the problem is that the enormous paper trail of atticus. all of the paperwork to the rebellion and then the criminal trials then the investigative files that going for years, then the civil litigation, this is thousands of boxes of information and i cannot get any of it. some of it was officially sealed and some of it is not.

when you file a freedom of information request it comes back heavily redacted. i learned that you need to keep asking the question of differene people.kind o bureaucracy does it always redact the same thing in the copy of the file. you can extrapolate what just happened. i was forced to rethink how we write this time, how we write about the 60s and 70s. frankly i was humbled torstand understand that there's so much that we don't have a clue about. we don't have any idea how history actually happened. we know the results and we know the black panther party was largely decimated by the end of the 70s but we don't have a clue about what the mechanisms

were or similarly with this i was able to get quite a bit but i suspect i don't know the half of what was going on behind the scenes. i do think about who had the copy in the original when that was interesting. thank god there are survivors, they never stop talking or insisting on telling their stories and that was critically important. was also a matter of thinkingng that if the state had the autopsy reports that did the local corner still have them to and ways in which going back to the original source but ultimately i cannot answer was what i felt was the most important question, how can it be that 39 people are shot to death, 128 are shot total and then they are tortured and not

one member of law enforcement ever is held responsible? what is that story and that was a story locked in these investigative files. i was very lucky. i just happened upon the stashsh of record in the county courthouse that i don't think anyone knew where there and that allowed me to finally piece it together, what the state moved, what it did not act on that it>d knew sumac did they not know those records were available to? >> they didn't. the facts once i found them which was its own crazy moment where i'm looking around like gosh, other cameras in there to know what i saw? is a huge wall of thousands of

pages of attica documents it's in a dingy room.y this was in 2006 my student say what it you just take pictures and scan. there were no smart phones. we don't get smart phones until 2010. we didn't have the technology of event.tr it was this crazy story of trying to take notes and asking if i could please do somehich xeroxing which i gave them a $200 check thank god because now i have that check. >> why is that important? >> because right before the book came out a reporter tried to go find the same records and they disappeared. they're not there. book >> that was my deepest fear. so from 2006 until the book came out last year you want to tell anybody what was there.ear wher

what i hoped is that the book would come out in the footnote would make clear where the records were and everyone would descend on the courthouse and demand to see them. there were not have been time to get rid of them. >> and the check,. >> because it's for the copies>> of those and i wrote on theweree check, copies of attica record. >> supper that they were there. >> or at least what i said washp true which is i went there in my day and i took copies and paid for those. >> what was in those records particularly that you think was not necessarily supposed to be released to a historian? >> the investigative file. right after the retaking on the scene are members of the attorney general's office who are charged with figuring out what had gone wrong at attica.

they quickly set their sights on investigating prisoners. i could see that they had a ton of evidence against law enforcement, despite the fact -- the new york state police that retook that present or the same body that governor nelson rockefeller put in charge of investigating the scene. so, needless to say he evidences disappeared, photographs are doctored, the film was spliced, statements were changed and went missing. and what i came across the two most important things i found, one was an internal documenthe that showed that rockefeller administration had a series of secret meetings and rockefeller's pool house.t you can't make this stuff up.

over the course of three weekends with the head of the state police, the people who had retaken attica, the attorney general's office and basically to get their stories straight. so i found that document and that revealed they knew they were going to kill hostages when they went in which they denied, he revealed they deliberately did not give an ultimatum to the men before they went in. and i found the whistleblowing document. there was a prosecutor, an incredibly important hero of thm story, malcolm bell who could see that he was trying tote pri prosecute police was being blocked at every turn. he finally pieces together the reason he's being shut down is because rockefeller is sittingng in nomination hearings for the vice presidency. so he and that's when the whole thing shuts down. he wrote a 167 page document

that outlined all of the evidence the state had that it did not act on. i found that document. there are only three copies every made and i found one of the. >> it will never happen again. whatever book i choose to write that will never happen again. >> sometimes we have joked that we wish we wrote on the 13th century that there's something about writing history when there's a lot of people still live.me and w talk about the process, i'm interested in there's lot of people that were imprisoned at the time were part of the uprising that are still around. so talk about their involvement in the process of writing a may be even after the book is.ta i know you talked to some people

but imagine that's hard, such medicaments were they desperate to have the story told? what was your experience with the survivors?s? >> as historians we are not equipped as i have said, we aree not equipped to deal with contemporary live trauma. it's one thing to recount and rescue. it's a different thing to every person i've had a conversation with just broke down. it was clear to me early on that this is still traumatic and people were still suffering ptsd. the guys in that yard, whether prisoners are hostages, many cannot hear helicopters to this day without having to basically shut down. it was so traumatic.

i was not prepared for that.ater made me feel much greater responsibility for how the story would be told. with that said, i hope that what i did was i tried to tell for multiple vantage points. one minute you're in the yard with the prisoners at thein theh negotiating table and you're trying to understand what they're trying to do. you're also the hostage circle or at the house of a hostage family is there waiting word. or you are in nixon's white house when he's asking rockefeller the only question that matters to him when it's all over was basically, did the black sleeve this? was this all about the blacks? rockefeller says well, indeed it was. and he's okay with the carnage as long as it was led by the blacks are about the blacks. i know some of the survivors have not been able to read the full book. it's too much.uestions

>> i want to ask a few more questions and then how people start to come down if there interested in asking questions.r you said this book started out as a silver its history. can you talk about how -- will talk more about how we think about the story in terms of the trajectory of mass incarceration, but talk about it as part of the history of struggles against white supremacy and racial inequality and civil rights history.s a ci do you still think of it as a civil-rights story? >> i do. there's no question that everyone inside of attica, both black and white and brown, ju understood that this is not just about incarcerating people come about racial subjugation. you cannot understand the

brutality of this retaking without understanding this in racialized terms. not to mention that they were being made to do the white power salute and they were stripped and forced to crawl, the black prisoners who are considered leaders had big axes marked on their back. the racial element of this one of the guys tortured most severely, every beat of the baton, every cigarette burn and everything that happened to him, people were sodomites, this is all being punished with racial appetites. so the one hand is tremendous that prisons are sites of racial subjugation, not just about public safety or containing crime. on the other hand i did not know until he did the book that this really was a human right story. if you look at some of the photographs one thing that might

strike you the most is the pictures of the men who had been stripped and lined up. to run these gauntlets of troopers. they are not all black and brown men. there were a lot of white men in there. and they all stood together, 1300 men negotiated this. they elected leaders to speak. for them out of each of the cela blocks. they democratically elected leaders and made sure every speech was translated into spanish so the spanish-speaking prisoners could understand what was going on as well. it was a human right story. at the end of the day there so much oppression in the book you will read it just shake your head at the revelation that everybody with power who could've done something could have done the right thing. from the lowest level clerk to the supreme court of the united states, quite literally.

these people are all called upon to weigh in. everyone of them bails. on the other hand, it's an incredible human right story. these people never go away and i will and by saying when the book came out last september, as or on last august, in preparation of the 45th, prisons across this country erupted again. was very importantly on september 9 as they were were reminding us in the last 45 years because we got attica so wrong and allowed the states to tell a story instead of the people inside, prisons are worse today. they're overcrowded and people's are more solitary. and these guys as we speak onpat the stage to c-span, these guys are being held in solitary for a daring to protest.

. . ic, we pay for them, they are ours and we don't have a clue what happens inside of them. >> the walls keep us out and some in. >> yeah. >> if there's any people that are interested in writing a question, please step over to microphone and while people are going over, i'm going to ask one more question and i might not be able to resist as i jump in the next couple of minutes, but historians and this was much historians and this has receded a little bit but there's a charge if you call it historians work present is that the knife in the gut. you're too involved in the current moment and you're being too roped into the contemporaryt world. how do you think about the role of authors? and maybe historians or academic specifically.vision

for our struggles in our own individual change for social justice to you think that something that needs to be in a box and how do you think aboutse that and that charge for your work? your work is being used and i think explicitly in present conversations about crisis in man's incarceration. >> we've set up a false dichotomy when we say that somehow if you investigate something and tell people what you think the conclusion of that investigation is that somehow that is being biased or you're putting aside your scholarly objectivity and becoming a biased activist in the moment. these things are intimately related and your historian andyo you have looked at this in every possible way it can be looked at every scrap of paper there was

available for you to see, talk to anyone you can talk to and at the conclusion of that has bearing on where we are as human beings today or has bearing on where we might go i actually think we have an obligation to share it and speak about it toic keep these things isolated. i think that's where the criticism should go. if we have something that helps us understand where we have been or sheds light on where we might go. we need to share that this other book that has just come out onit the same question, how do we get this punitive moment and how do we get the stuff politics that we have just embraced but has let us down this terrible path. you can't read your book, julie, as well without saying now i get what we did wrong and even better how i might do it differently. that book is beautifullyearch

researched, deeply -- highest level of research integrity. >> thank you. i will go over here and will start right out the back as you were speaking, i thought about what is going on currently on a national level. you are talking about a a state-level suppression of evidence basically and more currently, temporarily, we have the torture report from the united states senate and we have never seen the actual report. we've only seen the summary from dianne feinstein and right now the head of the intelligence committee i think his name is for, the one that was just interviewing comey has calledou all those reports back from all copies of the report back from the various agencies and basically they are trying to suppress it. so, that we will never know thao

one of the basic issues and that report is that torture doesn't work. yet, if you interview most americans most will say yes, it's bad but it works. that is not true. i wonder if you are basically so wiped out from having done this years of research, is this it for you? or is there some other brave reporters will go out and get the real story.l, i certainly hope so. >> thank you for calling attention to the current lack of transparency in our federal government right now. i think that probably won't be me but there's no question that it will be somebody. the fact of the matter is that whether you are a republican or democrat or the left or the right, if you're a part of the

body politic and you are a taxpaying citizen of the country or president of this country you have responsibly and a right to know what is going on and people will continue to demand it and continue to prod them both until we know.mo we do need to think and ask much more clearly about persons or torture of having more access, more access to make those secrets a lot harder to keep. thank you for that. >> i have a similar question. part of your story was suppression of the investigatiot and last week we had probably coming out and explaining how he was fired. my question is know the system and the people would believe the so-called comp-russian investigation to suppress to the level that we never know everything about it. yes. not to the level that will never

know anything about it. again, i have this incredible faith between reporters and investigators and citizens demanding answers -- i don't believe any secret stays secret forever. that the fear they have to. is it a cover-up? of course. the idea is to make sure that people who have benefited themselves financially or benefited politically aren't held accountable and it's a question about accountability and transparency that transcends whether were talking about presents or local government or federal government. we have a right to know those things. >> i would like to preface my questions by telling you that i spent eight years as a rehab counselor at three differentig persons in wisconsin. my experience was that the older officers basically felt -- and

probably many other wants to felt that if you did the crime, you do the time and that was it. some of them were not very happy to see us come in and providing things like services while they are there and rehab plans when they get out like halfway house placement and purchase of work clothing and evaluation at the workshops and training and so forth. they thought we were bleeding heart liberals at any rate, we never had obstruction and we had a pretty accepting overall environment and i don't think there were things going on they are at the maximum security prison in wisconsin. for instance, that they weren't going on in other places, collusion between officers and inmates in terms of drugs or anything like that. so, i'm wondering now what the

outlook is because of the outlook and i stopped working there 40 years ago i don't know what is going on there now but what is the outlook in general across the country. we hear about the prisons in california and arizona and places like that and what is the outlook for actual rehab services taking place, educational training, the kinds of things we did then? >> that is a great question. there's many people who could speak to this besides me for working on it very, very directly, lawyers were trying to improve prison conditions and prisoners themselves. people are trying to make them more rehabilitative and people trying to improve the conditions within them. the fundamental problem that this book underscored to me isth that we have to completely rethink how we deal with this question of so-called wrongdoing

or cry making in this country. for starters, there has to be aa much greater attention to equal justice under the law that is to say we have a justice system needs to be just. secondarily, we have to rethink this idea that we make our society safer and better by putting human being in cages. there is no evidence that it works and there is abundant evidence that it doesn't work. why we might tinker around those edges and might improve the conditions inside for people -- and i'm all for that --hows i ultimately, what atticus shows in any trip inside a prison shows is that there is better ways of dealing with social problems and putting people in cages makes guards less safe, prisoners less safe, communities less safe, people it destroysfos families -- i hope we're headed for is not a discussion on howve we improve prisons more although

that is part of it. i hope you have a discussion about how we imagine dealing with social problems differently other than putting people in cages. [applause] >> heather, i knew one of the survivors of attica from detroit. his name was shingle. his mother was rosie smith. they and the attica rising inspired a generation of revolutionaries like me and people all over the world. first off, thank you for this book. today we face -- we are under a regime even more brutal and vicious than john d rockefeller's new york state. what would you say to today's

resisters here and all around the world? for example, there is a strike going on right now at folsom prison and i urge everybody to support that. thank you.u. >> thank you for that.nd 70' yeah, i think that. of the 60s and 70 shows is that ordinary human beings when they stand together can in fact change policies and culture and ideas but it has to have extraordinary faith and imagination to that change can happen. i think young people have no faith anymore that change can happen so it probably starts with having that faith. this is not permanent andes nothing is permanent anyway. everything changes so let's make sure it changes in a more humane and progressive direction. what atticus shows us and tell our own history and get the story straight. if you allow people to tell the

media, the press what happened and it isn't correct -- if it is true that you have a generation turn again this generation too. it's about hope. i don't mean that in some slipway but imagining that we can do this differently. [applause] >> did the guards union assist the hostages in overturning those agreements that they had signed? isn't the modern union which is progressive but represents thousands of correctional officers facing a dilemma because if there is significant reform that means layoffs and closing of persons and losing jobs? >> i get this a lot because i do labor history up as well. my position on this is that we create a false problem when we put corrections officers against prisoners in this configuration of reform. the fact of the matter is thaty

some of the guard unions have been incredibly repressive in this discussion. i actually think that most of those affected more like employer associations than unions. if you look at the worst states in terms of peace and build up they don't have guard unions. this all on the guard unions is a bit of a red herring. that said, my experience talking to guards in unions is that they don't actually want to work in h prison but they want to work. if you see this is a working-class issue both the working-class issue for the guards -- that is everyone deserves a safe working conditions and desserts to come home at the end of their ship in one piece and you see it as a working-class issue that everybody on the inside is now rendered permanently unemployed having a criminal record -- there is common ground here. i was gratified when the anti- clo at their convention two

years ago when i was there use the term mass incarceration numerous times in the. [inaudible] to condemn it and say this is not good for any of us. we have to figure out jobs thatd do not depend on harming other people and locking them up. i think a lot of guards agree with that but we've got to have these discussions across these lines. it does not serve our purposes to make this adamic against them. back i see this as a pendulum, i have a couple of sunset have been incarcerated and one lost his eyesight. the pendulum is ronnie king that made cameras on police best and we have disclosed what's going on in the field how do we get that in penal institutions so that the guards feel safe -- i guess the editorial here is that

we want the balance for the policeman to feel they can go into a neighborhood and eradicate a bad guy but we don't want people that haven't doneer serious crimes to be persecuted. >> for small, i'm sorry to hear about your son because your story unfortunately is the story of countless, countless, countless american families. so, the answer to how we get transparency is that all of those countless families are supported to speak up and say if i pay for this institution and you put my children in this institution or my mother or my brother or sister, we, the public, have a response ability and right to know what goes on inside of them. period at the local legislative level, the state level, the federal level, that should be a demand. that should be access should be

a right in a demand so, that when someone is inside and thero at the utter mercy of their captors that we have some sense of assurance that they are getting healthcare when they need it, that they aren't being abused, and that we know they won't come out worse off than when they went in. right now we have none of that. thank you for speaking up. [applause]ions and >> thank you all for those who ask questions and those of you who are here. thank you, heather, for talking about this book. so, i'm excited that this willth continue to advance his conversations which are so important. thank you.pplause] [applause]

thank you for attending today. book and book signing will be out by the state here. thank you. [inaudible conversations] connect the sa where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created to as a public service by america's cable television companies. it is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. joining us on the tv is pamela