I’m from New York, and I had never heard of the Attica prison uprising, a fact which speaks volumes about the whole incident. It seems that there were no bounds to the deviousness of the state government in covering up the fiasco. It took Dr. Thompson 13 years to write the book because it was so difficult for her to find the information from archives about the event. In fact, she had to spend most of her time researching the incident interviewing parties involved, both guards and prisoners. The tale that they told demonstrated the vast dichotomy between what the state told the public about the event. This lack of archives about the event ended up hurting almost all of the parties involved because it was impossible for those hurt to defend themselves in court because the state could deny what happened. There were a number of false witness statements which cluttered the facts.

Dr. Thompson told us that the most important lesson from Attica is that we need to dig and search for both sides of the story, and not just take what the media presents us with as fact. The good in the whole Attica story is that the determination of ordinary people matters, while the bad is that the true history is not always told right away and every day.