As events at Attica focused public attention on the lack of healthcare inside prisons in the US in the early 1970s, Castle, a Kentucky State Penitentiary publication, devoted two full pages in the June/July 1972 issue of the paper to reprinting a piece, “MEDICAL UN-CARE FOR PRISONERS.” In the piece, Dr. Frank Rundle, who previously worked as the chief psychiatrist at Soledad Prison, claims to have been fired because he put the medical needs of prisoners above the needs of the institution.
Ominously, Rundle translated the anxiety after the Attica uprising into a forecast for the future:
[S]o long as prisons as presently constituted exist, in which a man’s life is almost totally controlled by the state, his total helplessness in seeking medical care must be considered and reasonable efforts made to provide decent levels of medical care. … If this is not done, a problem area which has contributed to violence and death at Soledad, San Quentin and Attica will continue to smoulder [sic]- – – – and bring further destruction of life within prisons.
Prison administrations shared his fears, and contributors to prisoner newspapers, understanding what was at stake, paid attention. The January 22, 1972, issue of The Weekly Scene includes an article reprinted from Columbia magazine with comments from a chaplain at the correctional facility in Elmira, New York, and the president of the American Correctional Association. Both called for separation of cooperative and recalcitrant prisoners “after the Attica riots,” and the chaplain championed the establishment of “a maximum security institution for about 150 hardcore, militant, Marxist revolutionaries.” Though wildly divergent, it was a time of strong opinions around how to modify the nation’s approach to incarceration.
Interest in Unconventional Paradigms of Justice
Interest in different approaches to justice and incarceration surged around the time Attica exploded. With the implementation of a different system at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, where prisoners were granted authority to govern themselves, juxtaposition with Attica became common in the pages of prisoner papers .
Although a guest editorial that appeared in Best Scene a few months later tempered enthusiasm for the program—mistakes within the justice system, “whether too bad as in Attica, or ‘too good’ as in Walla Walla,” can elicit the ire of an entire country—the penal press nevertheless noticed Walla Walla’s promise, framing it as an alternative to the suffering Attica wrought.
A contribution to the April 1972 issue of Cummins Journal, disseminated by prisoners of the Arkansas Department of Corrections, reprinted from a prisoner paper in Rhode Island, quoted the incarcerated council president at Walla Walla, Johnnie Harris, who suggested, “If self-government hadn’t come when it did, we would have had another Attica, or San Quentin, or Soledad.”