Understanding their imprisonment as a form of “invisibilized race war, class war, and genocide,” Burton writes, these politicized inmates came to the conclusion that the only effective response was not polite protestations but “carceral guerrilla warfare.” Writing against the impulse to obscure, minimize, or criminalize the Attica rebels’ violent revolt, Burton narrates their escalation as “rational” and necessary to achieve the total destruction of a prison system “that aimed to dehumanize and liquidate the racialized poor.” In this way, Burton’s book critically pushes back against the tendency of liberal histories to either gloss over the Black radical prisoners’ engagement in armed struggle or to frame such actions as the work of a fringe, as the “immature expressions of far-left adventurism.” In contrast to Thompson’s account, for example, which narrates the beginning of the Attica uprising only from the besieged guards’ perspective, Burton retells the revolt’s origins from “the perspectives of the captives who participated in it,” bringing to the fore the rebels’ use of guerrilla violence and conceptualizing it as an abolitionist act. Told this way, Burton’s account powerfully disrupts the normative, state-friendly script that narrates the prisoners’ violence as unjustified, condemnable, and thus worthy of decentering, instead framing their revolt as a quite reasonable (and arguably still restrained) reaction to “enemies who had shown time and time again that they had no respect for their captives’ humanity.”
Beyond their physical takeover of the prison, the Attica uprising also allowed imprisoned rebels to temporarily break free from the prison’s dehumanization—both physically and mentally. The rebellion’s creation of “new channels of…self actualization,” Burton writes, are not often captured in state or media sources, and thus are left out of popular historical accounts. But they unlock Attica’s meaning as an experiment not merely in demanding incremental, official reform but in radical abolitionist world-making, revealing the rebellion to be, among other things, a consciousness-raising effort. Some of the most moving sections of the book attend to the “radically new modes of sociality and care” that Attica prisoners experienced during the four-day takeover, insights that only come into focus when the Attica rebels’ accounts—the “living theories and practices of Revolt”—are taken seriously and prioritized. An anecdote shared by John “Dacajeweiah” Hill describes an elderly prisoner who began to sob upon seeing stars in the night sky for the first time in 20 years. He was only allowed to see them because he was allowed to roam the grounds of the prison freely during those four days. These “transcendental modes of consciousness, curiosity, and becoming” prohibited by the prison, Burton writes, were suddenly “nurtured through rebellion.”