The Attica Turkey Shoot

The Attica Turkey Shoot tells a story that New York State did not want you to know. In 1971, following a prison riot at the Attica Correctional Facility, state police and prison guards slaughtered thirty-nine hostages and inmates and tortured more than one thousand men after they had surrendered. State officials pretended that they could not successfully prosecute the law officers who perpetrated this carnage, and then those same officials scurried for shelter when a prosecutor named Malcolm Bell exposed the cover-up.

Bell traveled a rocky road to a justice of sorts as he sought to prosecute without fear or favor—in spite of a deck that the officials had stacked to keep the police from facing the same justice that had filled the Attica prison in the first place. His insider’s account illuminates the all-too-common contrast between the justice of the privileged and the justice of the rest.

The book also includes evidence from recently uncovered tapes that Governor Nelson Rockefeller knew his order for troopers to attack could cost the lives of hundreds of inmates and all those hostages. The Attica Turkey Shoot highlights the hypocrisy of a criminal justice system that decides who goes to prison and who enjoys impunity in a nation where no one is said to be above the law.

Malcolm Bell, a former corporate litigator, decided in mid-career to seek greater fulfillment by pursuing criminal law. While serving as a New York State prosecutor, he bravely blew the whistle on the state’s refusal to hold law officers accountable for the extensive torture and murder that they committed during the 1971 Attica prison riot. Heather Ann Thompson is a native Detroiter and historian on faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy won the Pulitzer Prize for history.