Against ‘law and order’ lockup: the 1970 NYC jail rebellions

‘Let them out’

On 11 August 1970, roughly 800 inmates ¹ at the Manhattan House of Detention for Men, popularly known as ‘the Tombs’, rioted, taking over four of the facility’s fifteen floors and holding guards hostage. Central to their demands was that the Department of Correction immediately address the handwritten list of grievances released the day before. Invoking ‘as human beings the dignity and justice that is due to us by right of our birth’, their petition had called for changes in the Criminal and Superior Courts, the Legal Aid Society, and officers’ treatment of both inmates and female visitors. It had also highlighted the poor quality of food, the facility’s pest infestation, the lack of access to the jail’s law library, the dearth of clean clothing and the irresponsible practices of the medical staff. Lastly, the authors had requested that inmates involved in ‘this protest’ not face repercussions. It was signed, ‘We are One People, the Inmates of the 9th Floor Tombs Prison’. ² After eight hours of negotiations, the inmates released their hostages with a guarantee from the Correction Commissioner George F. McGrath that there would be no reprisals, jail conditions would be investigated and a report would be made public within three weeks. In the interim, Tombs inmates employed a range of tactics to demonstrate their grievances, ultimately launching a more organised series of hostage-takings on 1 October that spread quickly through five facilities in New York City’s (NYC) jail system. It was only after Mayor John V. Lindsay combined a public acknowledgement of the legitimacy of these grievances with the threat of a violent retaking of the jails that inmates released their hostages.

On 12 January 1971, the New York Times published a letter from Geraldo Rivera, a young reporter for WABC-TV and a recently appointed member of the Board of Correction, a civilian committee charged with reviewing the management of the city’s jails. The Board, once defunct, had recently been reinstated in direct response to the Tombs rebellion. Now, just a few months after his appointment, Rivera publicly announced his resignation citing the more than 7,000 men and women, 90 per cent of them black and Puerto Rican, held in ‘Bastille-like conditions, all being denied the most fundamental dignities’, simply because they could not afford bail as low as $100. ‘For a hesitant moment’, Rivera wrote, ‘the lid on the garbage can is lifted. We look inside, see and smell the muck we’ve probably known was in there all along.’ But the public had already begun to move on to other issues while the window of opportunity was closing. Thus, Rivera concluded: ‘after spending hour after hour inside the Tombs and speaking with hundreds of inmates, I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps there is only one meaningful reform: Let them out.’ ³

Drawing on this oddly impassioned call for tearing down one of the US’s most notorious jails, this article examines the process by which those held in the city’s jails lifted ‘the lid on the garbage can’ and exposed what was taking place behind bars. As Rivera’s letter suggests, this was not simply a problem of inhumane conditions, but also the manner by which the broader system of criminal justice – including the city’s police, jails and courts – were being used to effectively incapacitate its poorest and most restive residents during a moment of rising crime and social unrest. Yet, the work of exposing this, the ‘muck we’ve probably known was in there all along’, occurred not at the Tombs, but, rather, at the Long Island Branch of the Queens House of Detention, where, on 2 October, inmates demanded a series of emergency bail review hearings. Conducted inside the facility and televised on the nightly news, these hearings demonstrated how the aggressive policing of the metropolis’s poorest neighbourhoods had joined with the routine levying of unaffordably high bails to leave thousands overcrowding its jails. Taken together, these law enforcement practices amounted to an unofficial policy of preventive detention.

Few accounts of the rebellions explicitly link them to this aspect of law and order policies. ⁴ Rather, the rebellions at the Tombs and other jails in NYC are often referred to as precursors to the 1971 Attica prison uprising. As historian Heather Ann Thompson notes, this connection is a direct consequence of the way in which city officials ‘decided that the quickest way to deal with one of the most obvious prisoners’ complaints – overcrowding – was to send as many men as possible to upstate facilities … to push the problem up the line rather than solve it’. ⁵ Dozens of prisoners who had been involved in the NYC rebellions, like Herbert X. Blyden and Akil Al-Jundi, were sent to Attica, where they carried out what became the most prominent in a wave of prison rebellions that swept across the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

During this period of sustained organising and overt resistance by prisoners, the incidence of boycotts, strikes, hostage-takings and other ‘collective disorders’ rose sharply each year. Where 1967 had passed with only five recorded prison riots, this number quickly increased, so that by 1972 there were forty-eight collective disorders, more than in any other year in American history. ⁶ Though earlier periods of prison unrest had articulated calls for reform, these radical prison movements drew upon the discourses of human rights, multiracial unity and national liberation. These strikes, boycotts and riots couched fundamental challenges to state authority within calls for prisoners’ rights and incremental reform. Consistent with the idealism and defiance of the times, prisoners spoke out against not only poor conditions and inhuman treatment, but also joined calls for broader social transformation. Radical academic Angela Davis observed that

During all of the rebellions across the country, the prisoners have indicated that their oppression is not simply a matter of overcrowded prisons, filthy conditions and guard brutality: but that it is centered in the institutionalized racism and class discrimination of the judicial system itself. Behind their concrete demands for relief there is a radical political consciousness. ⁷

Yet the NYC jail rebellions were slightly different from many of the prison revolts of this period. As citizens presumed innocent and held in jail only to guarantee their presence in court, these inmates could more easily call upon constitutional guarantees and human rights. Some of those held for trial were political activists, jailed with the general population because of their arrest for allegedly non-political crimes. As such, members of the recently established Young Lords Party, a revolutionary nationalist Puerto Rican organisation, and the Black Panther Party (BPP), its inspiration, helped to plan or served as key leaders during several of these rebellions. In contrast to the rural isolation of most prisons, NYC’s jails were located in the city itself and their inmates had a much easier time attracting both popular attention and mainstream media sympathy.

It is worth noting that alongside the legitimation of ‘no knock’ warrants and wiretapping authority, preventive detention was a key feature of President Nixon’s vision of law and order. Often associated with Nixon-era attacks on political dissidents, preventive detention was also an important aspect of that administration’s crime control policies. Although he was unable to impose these policies on states across the country, his administration used Washington DC, ‘the only place the federal government had street-level law-enforcement authority’, as a laboratory in which to experiment with more repressive legislation. Within weeks of his 1969 inauguration, Nixon allowed judges to deny bail to presumptively ‘dangerous’ criminal suspects, a measure signed into law as sixty-day ‘preventive detention’ with the 1970 DC Courts Reorganisation Act – marking this practice’s first appearance in the US criminal code. ⁸ ‘For Nixon’s officials, the preemptive policy offered a “reasonable and necessary approach to the crime problem” by ensuring that accused criminals were behind bars and thus unable to possibly commit crime’, writes historian Elizabeth Hinton. ‘Because most of the people who were detained as a pretrial measure were too poor to make bail, the opponents of the practice charged that it violated the equal protection clause and prohibitions against excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment under the Constitution.’ ⁹ In spite of these objections, this law effectively upended the presumption of release established by the 1966 Bail Reform Act, a principle that would later survive legal challenges on its way to being adopted in almost every state.

The 1970 jail rebellions exposed the way in which this policy, while legal only in Washington DC, had become the unofficial policy in New York City, by taking advantage of the way in which its application to both radical activists and everyday suspects created an exceptional organising opportunity. In a 1970 Black Panther article entitled, ‘Preventive Detention and Political Prisoners’, an inmate in Philadelphia’s Detention Center argued that across the US there were ‘untold numbers of political prisoners in jails (concentration camps) … the vast majorities of these prisoners are in fact revolutionaries conscious of their situation’. For the author, preventive detention was supposed to be ‘an invincible weapon … to keep the prisoner incarcerated to prevent him from spreading the concepts and beliefs that he is there for’. Echoing the insights of the Panther’s Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, the author argued that prolonged incarceration only helped to steel the resolve of those already committed to ending the oppressor’s role: ‘like a shot of adrenalin, it only makes the revolutionary that much stronger’. ¹⁰

As other aspects of Nixon’s law and order regime were called into question and discarded, the concept of preventive detention remained firmly embedded in the US legal framework. ¹¹ Most ominously, this principle has undergirded part of the government’s argument for prolonged detention without trial of terrorism suspects held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. ‘The militarization of the police and state violence variously applied bode ill for all of us, no matter our gates, no matter our so-called security from “terror”’, argues literary scholar Colin Dayan. ‘To the extent that “probable cause” and “due process” protections of the Constitution are evaded in the hyperlegality of the war on terror the penalty of “preventive detention” endangers us all.’ ¹² Indeed, the history of the 1970 jail rebellions demonstrates not only how this danger can manifest itself on the home front, but also the ways in which it has become routinised in the long-term confinement of poor and working-class people, particularly people of colour, who lack the means to afford bail. Most recently, the tragic deaths of Sandra Bland in Texas and Kalief Browder in New York have called attention to the ways in which the bail system preys upon those of little means, not only incapacitating them, but compelling them to plead guilty as a means of securing some resolution to what might otherwise be an open-ended period of incarceration. ¹³

Constructing the Tombs

The name of it, the Tombs, that’s the best name in the world for it. You couldn’t think of a better name. Because that’s just what it is: A big old tomb full of mummies. Just sitting there. You walk in and look at the guys, see them sitting at tables, staring into open space, some of them playing cards like dead people. ¹⁴

Of all men, Junius Ellis Avery was perhaps best qualified to comment on life inside the notorious Tombs jail. Roughly one month prior to the first rebellion, the New York Daily News crowned Avery the ‘World Greatest Living Expert on the Tombs’, having been held there for three years, one month and two weeks while challenging an extradition order. In an interview granted just a day after his release from jail, he described how he passed his time in the temporary detention facility, studying law, responding to letters, and writing short stories. Until his last day in the Tombs, Avery maintained his innocence, fighting his transfer to Baltimore on a burglary charge. ‘All Junius Avery wanted from New York City’, the reporter concluded, ‘was the item that is written down in the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution. The item is called due process.’ ¹⁵

This brief account of life in the Tombs speaks not only to the problem of prisoners’ constitutional and human rights, but also its notorious reputation. For Manhattan’s only jail had long been infamous for its brutal and harsh conditions, ‘a symbol of much that was wrong in correctional institutions’. ¹⁶ This notoriety had dogged the institution since its inception. In the early 1840s, Charles Dickens visited the jail that would later lend its name to the Manhattan House of Detention as part of his tour of the country. Collected in the book American Notes, Dickens’ reflections were particularly striking:

What! Do you thrust your common offenders against the police discipline of the town, into such holes as these? Do men and women, against whom no crime has proved, lie here all night in perfect darkness, surrounded by the noisome vapors which encircle that flagging lamp you light us with, and breathing this filthy and offensive stench! Why, such inadequate and disgusting dungeons as these cells would bring disgrace upon the most despotic empire in the world! ¹⁷

Dickens’ opinions were not of the same jail as Avery’s, but rather of a predecessor. Officially known as the Halls of Justice, the first jail to occupy the same general site was completed in 1838 and given its unofficial title because of the architectural style, copied from a photograph of an Egyptian tomb. ¹⁸ The name stuck and ‘the reasons weren’t entirely architectural’, one writer would later comment. ‘The Tombs plumbing was as infamous as the Tombs rats and the Tombs dank gloom.’ ¹⁹ Within four days of its opening, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, called for the structure to be closed down. With only 200 cells, the jail soon proved inadequate. Within five months, city officials discovered that its foundation had been built on a swampy landfill and that the jail was sinking into the ground. Fifty-nine years later, Bennett’s controversial demands were realised, but not before the overcrowding marked the jail, foreshadowing what would occur with its successors. ²⁰

In 1902, a second Tombs was built on the same unstable foundation and was soon marked by a similar infamy. The jail was closed again in 1938. Three years later, New York City erected the third incarnation of the Tombs as part of an $18 million criminal justice complex. Built on a sturdier plot of land at 100 Centre Street, the twelve-storey, maximum-security facility was situated in the heart of the Civic Center. Inmates awaiting trial were held in single occupancy cells averaging 4’10” wide by 7’11” deep, each enclosed in solid steel on the sides with bar gates forming the back wall. On this back wall, the bars ran vertically from the ceiling to within roughly three feet of the floor, where it became solid steel. To the left of the back wall were a toilet and a washbasin as well as two metal shelves that could be used as a table and a stool. By 1965, a second bunk had been installed in each cell, providing a 932-person capacity on eight floors. ²¹

These floors were actually organised in two-storey units around a central lockout area, which served as the space in which inmates were to be locked out of their cells for eight hours a day. Guards could use a catwalk running above this common area to oversee inmates whether they were locked in or out of their cells. Cell blocks on the east and west side of building were separated by a central hallway. This floor plan left little room for recreational activities as well as access to fresh air or daylight. Rather, each floor was intended to be an autonomous series of cells, holding forty to sixty inmates in a secure ‘city within a city’ without requiring their transfer to other parts of the facility. ²²

Within a week of the opening of the ‘New Tombs’, the jail was filled to capacity. ²³ In 1954, the New York Times carried a three-part investigative study of the overcrowding in the city’s jails, with particular attention given to the Tombs and its unsanitary conditions. ²⁴ Soon, a mattress was placed on the floor for a third cellmate. By the mid 1960s, the correction officers were regularly packing four defendants into a cell, filling the Tombs to more than double capacity: ‘once again the old familiar cries of Tombs-gone-by were being heard as detainees complained of “favoritism by guards, poor food, dirty beds, little recreation, roaches, lice, rodents, and bed bugs”’. ²⁵ As conditions worsened and complaints increased, guards increasingly used force to squeeze inmates into packed cells, particularly black and Puerto Rican inmates.

However, overcrowding did not only plague the Tombs. On 7 August 1968, Correction Commissioner McGrath wrote to Lindsay to report an alarming rise in the population across the city’s jails. Rising incidences of crime and urban unrest over the previous three years meant political pressure on police to make arrests. For much of the 1960s, there had been a regular increase of eighteen prisoners per month, but between January and August 1968, the daily average of prisoners had jumped from 4,509 to 6,484, following an average increase of 282 prisoners per month. To accommodate these new detainees, the Department of Correction had been forced to transfer over 2,000 detainees to Rikers Island, a prison annex at that time reserved for convicted and sentenced felons. ²⁶ A year later, a report by the Vera Institute of Justice cited the rise in arrests as well as length of pretrial detention as the cause of a 27 per cent increase in the average daily detention population in 1968. ²⁷ In addressing the court delays that lengthened the time spent in jail, the report cited a steadily rising length of average stay in jail from 18.5 days in 1965 to approximately 30.1 days in 1968, but acknowledged that these were conservative figures skewed by the large of number of cases where individuals were able to post bail shortly after admission: ‘While data was not available on the duration of custody of all defendants detained for the entire pretrial period, it is known that on August 1, 1968, the average detained defendant in the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court had already spent over 140 days in jail.’ ²⁸ Inefficiencies in court procedures were dragging out the duration of trial. These long stays in jail not only contributed to overcrowding, but also made it more likely that those being held, overwhelmingly poor and non-white, would be sentenced to jail. ²⁹

In its findings, the report also suggested that judges were denying pretrial parole and imposing higher bails on the pretext of holding defendants believed to be dangerous to the community. Though money bail is meant to ensure that defendants appear at trial, judges were imposing higher bails to keep those deemed dangerous off the street, a form of preventive detention, ‘which is neither authorized by the Code of Criminal Procedure, or based on reliable indicia of dangerousness, nor evenhanded in its impact on the poor and non-poor’. ³⁰

With the increasing arrests, primarily of low-level offenders, and increasing court delays, the problem of overcrowding only continued to grow. In 1970, Henry Ruth Jr, the President of the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, decried the fact that the number of cases disposed of by the courts had not increased, while the number of arrests had increased by 20 per cent. That year, New York City, which claimed only 4 per cent of the nation’s population, was projected to spend $650 million on the New York Police Department, comprising 16 per cent of the nation’s municipal police budget. In contrast, only $70 million was budgeted for the Department of Correction and less than 4 per cent of correction officers in the country worked in New York. ³¹ In the months prior to the Tombs rebellion, mayoral aide Barry Gottehrer observed that

The Correction Department was squeezed from both ends. No new prisons were being built, while the police, thanks to greater efficiency within the department and better police methods, were making more arrests. At the other end, the courts were slowing down. The case backlog left many prisoners waiting in the Tombs for a year or more before they were assigned a trial date. ³²

The late 1960s were marked not only by rising crime rates and arrest, but also the intensified police harassment and repression of radical organisations, particularly the BPP, following the wave of urban rebellions that marked Dr Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination. Though a variety of groups were undermined by the Federal Bureau of Intelligence’s Counter Intelligence programme (COINTELPRO), the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally targeted the BPP as ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country’. At the close of 1969, an ‘estimated 30 Panthers were facing capital punishment, 40 faced life in prison, 55 faced terms of up to thirty years, and another 155 were in jail or being sought’. ³³ In NYC a series of pre-dawn arrests resulted in the capture of twenty-one members of local BPP chapters on 2 April 1969. Constituting much of the Party’s East Coast leadership, the ‘New York 21’ were charged with conspiracy to blow up department stores, police stations, and the Bronx Botanical Garden − accusations largely based on informer testimony. The courts held each on $100,000 bail, an explicitly political form of preventative detention.

While the ‘New York 21’ and other better-known radicals were kept away from the rest of the jail population, ³⁴ countless members of radical groups were herded into the general population as police repression increased. Reflecting on this phenomenon from inside California’s notorious San Quentin prison, George Jackson wrote that ‘because Amerika’s thought-control program allows for no political prisoners, the men and women who criticized the system, in the language of those who call for re-distribution of wealth and power, are crowded into these concentration centers in the name of the established law’. Though incarcerated, many of these women and men continued to organise, directly engaging other inmates about the conditions they confronted. In particular, Jackson noted, ‘Black Panther Party members are sent to prison with one clear intention; to silence them. The process has affected every black man in prison, since the political soldier must teach; and further, just because being seen with one will be cause enough to share in his impending ordeal.’ ³⁵ The combination of an increasingly radical political consciousness among prisoners together with their contact with more seasoned militant activists created the mix that would give rise to the numerous prison rebellions of this period.

Despite the halting efforts of Mayor Lindsay and New York State Governor Nelson Rockefeller to shift hundreds of prisoners from the Tombs to nearby state prisons, overcrowding continued and the conditions at the Tombs continued to deteriorate. On 9 March 1970, off-duty correction officers with the Correctional Officers Benevolent Association (COBA) picketed and on-duty officers conducted a work slowdown to remind the Mayor of his promise to add 130 guards and to reduce the rising inmate population of 14,000 in a jail system with a capacity for only 7,993. ³⁶ One month later, Congressional representative Ed Koch conducted an uncensored survey of Tombs inmates, which found that more than 40 per cent had seen guards assault an inmate and roughly half said three men were assigned to their cell. Fewer than one in ten had a mattress and blanket during their first days at the jail, and half claimed they had to wait at least a week after entering for a blanket. Ninety per cent of men described their blankets as filthy and an equally large percentage complained about the problem of rats, roaches and body lice in their cell as well as a lack of soap. ³⁷ Then in May, the Association of Legal Aid Lawyers organised a three-day walkout to dramatise the crisis conditions in courts. ³⁸ Each of these warnings went largely unheeded.

During his confinement in the Tombs in the early summer of 1970, Sam Melville, an activist who would later plead guilty to a series of politically motivated bombings, was overwhelmed by the poor conditions and poor prospects for change. In a letter dated 28 May, he described the beating of a Black Panther by several guards, supposedly for attempting to organise prisoners: ‘things are very tense here. The hacks act with impunity … I don’t know what recourse we prisoners have of dealing with them. The inmates are too frightened and untrusting of each other to form alliances. The hacks demand and get instant obedience & they expect a good attitude as well.’ ³⁹ On being transferred to Sing Sing prison in early July, Melville explained that ‘the last several weeks at the Tombs were not pleasant and I lost too much weight. It’s much better and some sunshine. But best of all: quiet! The noise at the Tombs was its most oppressing aspect.’ ⁴⁰

Yet something must have changed among Tombs inmates in the months prior to the August rebellion. In spite of the jail’s conditions, or perhaps because of them, some of the men found a way to come together. When asked to comment on his most recent stint in jail, former Tombs inmate Julio Senidez said he sensed a new spirit in the jail in the last two months: ‘The other times I was in, prisoners were sort of conditioned to brutality … There was the feeling that if you said something or complained you were a punk. It’s different now. People are not giving in.’ According to Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff, ‘part of the difference … came from identification with the Black Panther party and the Young Lords’. For at roughly the same time that Melville was in administrative segregation, several inmates in the general population had begun to organise a response to the jail’s conditions. According to Victor Martinez, a member of the Young Lords Party, inmates began to organise as early as May 1970. In an interview with the Liberation News Service, he described how ‘we began as a committee of two people, which grew to four and then kept multiplying until we were able to organise the complete ninth floor.’ For Martinez, organising was not simply a question of forming a group and delegating tasks, but also of educating inmates about their circumstances. For months, Martinez and other inmates met clandestinely for political education:

We had a series of classes, morning or afternoons. We would gather in the shower or we would take the last cell on the floor and sit on the floor. Or we would sit at a table and spread out a deck of cards. If a guard came by he would assume that we were playing cards, while we were really discussing political science. ⁴¹

From his account, it is unclear what changed the Tombs in the summer of 1970 that now made the jail more conducive to inmate organising. Perhaps there was no change and inmates outside of administrative segregation received less scrutiny. Perhaps Martinez and others had learned from previous organising efforts, becoming more adept at concealing their efforts. What is clear is that as conditions worsened in the jail, the Tombs, in a sense, produced its own grave-diggers. The very crises of rising arrests, court backlog and jail overcrowding exacerbated infamously brutal circumstances ultimately making it easier for prisoners to come together. As Martinez explained, ‘All of us were locked up and were being deprived of basic human rights. As soon as we were able to explain this to the men, they couldn’t go along with the guards.’ ⁴² As the Tombs neared double capacity and average time detained lengthened, it had a relatively stable population, rather than a rapidly fluctuating group of temporarily held detainees. Inmates not only had common grievances around which to build unity, but also the conditions conducive to building a critical mass.

On 29 July 1970, a group of inmates sent a petition to Lindsay and McGrath detailing the problems they faced from overcrowding, unhealthy conditions and limited contact with the outside world. ⁴³ Not only did the government not offer an official reply, but ‘almost two weeks went by and no attempt was made by the “power structure” to redress the prisoner’s [sic] grievances’. ⁴⁴ With no positive response from the Department of Correction, inmates were forced to take matters into their own hands.

‘No more long court dates’: launching the first rebellion

Early on the morning of Saturday, 8 August, 1970, David Felder, an inmate, got into a dispute with a correction officer. In the middle of breakfast, the two exchanged harsh words. When Felder struck the officer, other guards physically removed him from the ninth floor. Believing he was being brutalised, roughly thirty black prisoners took two white prisoners hostage and beat them, demanding Felder’s return. When their demand was met later that afternoon, the prisoners released their hostages. ⁴⁵ Here, racial solidarity dictated the trajectory of the initial rebellion as black inmates demonstrated the power they could wield when working together in opposition to a nearly all-white guard staff and a small population of white prisoners, who they claimed benefited from preferential treatment.

There were no repercussions for the beatings or the hostage taking. And in the hours after Felder’s release, inmates on the 9th floor planned another rebellion, preparing a carefully hand-written list of grievances, complete with a prologue and conclusion. ⁴⁶ On 10 August, the Tombs held 1,991 though it only had capacity for 932. ⁴⁷ At 6.30am, a group of inmates took five guards hostage, locked them in two cells, and erected a barricade around the entrance to the cell area. White inmate William Hickey testified at an 18 August hearing of the State Senate Committee on Crime and Correction, that, even though black inmates had assaulted him, there was no serious racial tension two days later: ‘It was, more or less, inmates, black and white, trying to get things changed.’ ⁴⁸ During this moment of racial solidarity, someone wrote on a piece of paper: ‘We are holding a captain and four correction officers. No harm will come to them if we are not attacked. We want to see the mayor and the Press.’ The note was tucked inside the pages of a paperback book, stuffed in a sock, and dropped out to the street. ⁴⁹

Following some initial confusion, the Mayor’s counsel, Commissioner McGrath and three reporters ascended to the 9th floor to assure the inmates that there would be no reprisals if the officers were released unharmed. In return, they listened as an inmate read their list of grievances. Towards the end of their list, the inmates conceded that ‘the manner in which we chose to express our grievances is admittedly dramatic, but it is not as dramatic and shocking as the conditions under which society has forced us to live. We are indignant and so, too, should the people of society be indignant.’ A New York Times reporter promised to have the grievances published unedited in the next day’s newspaper. ⁵⁰

In three days, the unrest at the Tombs had spread in stages from several dozen black inmates to a large proportion of those held on the 9th floor. On the next day, the rebellion flared up once again, this time at 3pm, beginning with inmates on the 8th floor taking three guards hostage. ⁵¹ ‘Several other floors joined in the rebellion and attempted to bring their plight to the people.’ ⁵² Later, one man claimed that he had started the rebellion on the 5th floor after correction officers had denied commissary for the day: ‘The food is bad and the inmates look forward to pies and cupcakes and candy bars. So when they can’t have this …’ The reporter noted that the man’s voice trailed off at the end of the sentence, as if to emphasise obviousness of his point. ⁵³ Where the previous actions had been tightly organised, this rebellion seemed almost chaotic. Inmates set fires, smashed the building’s three-inch brick glass windows, and rained books, furniture, the bodies of dead rats and other debris onto Centre and White streets. Through a broken window, two men held a bed sheet reading ‘All we want is to be treated like human beens [sic]. There are no medications for the sick. Unhealthy cells. Unhealthy food. Three men in cell built for one.’ Signed, ‘The People’. ⁵⁴ Inmates hung another sheet with ‘Power to the People’ and a giant fist from the 4th floor window. ⁵⁵ Still another, smaller sign read simply ‘No more long court dates.’ ⁵⁶ In the midst of this seeming chaos, inmates collectively demanded that the list of demands issued the previous day by men on the 9th floor be met immediately.

From the open windows of the jail, inmates sought to directly convey their grievances to the hundreds of onlookers below. From the upper floors, the men shouted that they were living four to a cell and waiting long months for trial. ‘The prisoners wrote notes to the people and tossed them out of the broken windows in order to let the people know exactly what was going on’, wrote Brenda Hyson in The Black Panther. ‘Of course the notes were quickly seized by the police.’ ⁵⁷ That evening, CBS news broadcast video of inmates chipping away at entire sections of the jail’s opaque windows, setting fire to white sheets and letting them hang out of the window. Below, columns of riot-helmeted policemen ran, ducking for cover from the falling debris, inside the front entrance of the jail. Broadcaster Walter Cronkite also mentioned that police had shot tear gas canisters into the building, only to have inmates throw them back.

Just as the structure of the Tombs confined inmates to their floors, preventing them from moving to other parts of the building or escaping en masse, it also limited the ability of correction officers to retake the facility. ⁵⁸ Storming any portion of the jail required taking the elevator up to a particular floor, a slow process that would leave guards at a strategic disadvantage. Once again, McGrath negotiated with rebelling inmates, promising that an investigation of city jail conditions would be completed within three weeks. Though these negotiations secured the release of the hostages by that evening, correction officers were not able to regain control of the entire jail for the next week and a half. ⁵⁹ In the interim, inmates continued their protest by other means. Some continued to break windows and drop notes to the ground. One read, ‘Peace and Love, Everything back to normal and everything is looking up. We hope it stays this way. The Inmates.’ ⁶⁰ Men also refused to go to their court hearings. On 16 August, ninety-four prisoners in the Tombs sat down in their cells and refused to leave for trial. The next day, fifty-two Tombs inmates boycotted their hearings. Thirteen men at a Queens jail boycotted their hearings ‘in sympathy’. ⁶¹

The Tombs rebellion continued until 20 August, when correction officers were able finally to re-enter the floor where inmates had gained control, to check locks and search for contraband. In twelve days, an inmate rebellion had grown in fits and starts, spurred forward by various acts of solidarity. It expanded in stages from the 9th floor to four floors of the Tombs, to inmates in two other jails. Yet, this solidarity had limitations. Indeed, Tombs inmates harassed those who did not go along with the boycott, allegedly beating at least four. Thirty inmates, most on only minor charges, demanded to be transferred to another jail; at least twenty-one were sent to Rikers Island. ⁶²

‘We had a local newspaper’: preparing for the second rebellion

In the six weeks that followed the initial Tombs hostage taking, inmates continued to seek some change in the conditions of their confinement. In late August, Mayor Lindsay received a handwritten petition signed by 122 inmates from the 9th floor as well as forty-two from other floors, stating that ‘the grievances presented to a member of your party by an inmate of the ninth floor of the tombs were not in spite of the rambunctious way they were presented, the grievances of a fanatic or radical individuals, but the grievances of the entire ninth floor and institution’. Requesting a written acknowledgement of Lindsay’s support for their grievances, the petition sought to convince the Mayor that though the jail’s conditions prevented ‘100% representation here, we assure you we speak for all’. ⁶³ It concluded with the hope that Lindsay would move quickly to resolve the jail’s problems.

There was no reply and, in the weeks that followed, the Lindsay administration took few steps to ameliorate conditions. Rather, officials prepared a series of reports investigating inmate grievances. ⁶⁴ Correction officials also arranged for the transfer of several hundred inmates to other city jails, quickly moving those identified as the leadership of the August rebellion as a security precaution. Meanwhile, city and state officials clashed publicly over who should be held responsible for the persistent overcrowding. On 11 August, Lindsay had personally appealed to Governor Nelson Rockefeller to place inmates in state correctional institutions and then criticised the governor’s decision to take only 670 inmates. Similarly, Commissioner McGrath clashed publicly with State Senator John Dunne during a hearing on the Tombs rebellions. ⁶⁵ As the days passed with few changes, some defendants complained that they could only get justice through UN intervention. ⁶⁶

Bypassing city government, inmates also sought to engage the federal government. On 10 September, James Rhem, Robert Freely, Eugene Nixon and Leo Robinson initiated a federal class action on behalf of all those held at the Tombs, alleging that the treatment of detainees as well as physical conditions deprived them of their first, sixth, eighth and fourteenth amendment rights. Prepared with the assistance of the Legal Aid Society, ⁶⁷ it charged McGrath, Lindsay, Rockefeller, the Warden of the Tombs, the State Commissioner of Correctional Services, and the Presiding Justice of the Appellate Division, First Judicial Department, with responsibility for the overcrowding, guard brutality and unnecessarily restrictive security measures. ⁶⁸ Though it was years before a verdict was reached on this class action suit, its filing went on to have a significant impact on the future of the Tombs itself.

‘None of the men belonged in jail’: winning bail review

In the Branch Queens courtyard, the negotiators made headway. During their first meeting with correction officials in late afternoon, the six-member committee demanded to meet with city officials on live television that evening. Arriving at the jail in the early afternoon, mayoral aide Barry Gottehrer complained that the sets of demands presented were ‘far more political than those from the Tombs’, speculating that participation in the last rebellion had made some inmates even more militant. ⁷⁹ From 7 to 9pm, the Branch Queens inmates held a televised press conference in the visitors’ lounge. They released two hostages – one of whom was notorious for his harassment of inmates and had tried to hang himself in his cell – as a sign of good faith and pressed a number of demands. ⁸⁰ The three Black Panthers included on the committee had wrapped towels like a Muslim kufiya to conceal their identity and demanded the restoration of bail for fellow Black Panther Afeni Shakur and more black people on their jury. ⁸¹ The rest of the negotiators requested that a number of prominent individuals come to the jail as independent observers, a list subsequently shortened to Representative Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, former Bronx Borough President Herman Badillo, and Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. Afterwards, Balagoon commented that ‘among the demands was that a judge from the so-called Supreme Court come to the jail and immediately begin hearings on bail reductions. The pigs tried to bypass the issues, saying that it was impossible to submit to anything so close to justice.’ ⁸² Initially, city officials derided the demand for an immediate bail review hearing as part of ‘a new and more bizarre series of demands’, ⁸³ but events would soon overtake them and force the government’s hand.

‘Strict Gestapo-style lockup’: quelling the jail rebellions

With rebellions at five facilities involving some 4,000 inmates and the possibility of losing the Bronx House of Detention or Rikers Island, city officials changed their strategy. At 3pm on 3 October, Mayor Lindsay called an emergency meeting of his advisers and city officials at City Hall. Just as the men in the Tombs and Branch Queens had found McGrath and Lindsay untrustworthy, those who had participated in the negotiations now described the inmates as unreliable for breaking earlier agreements. By 6pm, Lindsay had chosen a harder line to contain the rebellions; addressing the inmates, he would make a final appeal for the release of hostages. If they refused, the jail would be retaken by force. ¹¹²

Lindsay looked to quell the four remaining rebellions by beginning with the two most recent, while preparing a larger force for the Tombs and Branch Queens. Shortly after midnight on 4 October, city officials offered inmates at the Brooklyn House of Detention an hour to surrender and then sent in roughly fifty correction officers to take back the 4th and 5th floors of the jail. Poorly trained, most of the guards had fastened their gas masks incorrectly. On their first rush of the building, they choked on their own tear gas and retreated. But many inmates had fled back into their cells from an anticipated onrush. After securing their equipment, correction officers charged the jail again, freeing the guards and locking inmates in their cells with 200 inmates and a dozen guards injured in hand-to-hand combat. ¹¹³ Commissioner McGrath noted that ‘ringleaders’ were singled out to be dealt with ‘in a proper manner’. ¹¹⁴ Within twelve hours, correction officers had quelled the rebellion at the Brooklyn House of Detention.

Backed by the Tactical Police Force, a Correction Department convoy arrived at Kew Gardens at 3am. Cutting their way into the building from the roof with acetylene torches, correction and police officers battled inmates to retake the facility floor-by-floor. By 6am, the last man was back in his cell, but five prisoners had to be hospitalised. ‘One had the feeling’, wrote Gottehrer, ‘that in the space of an hour or two the guards must have let out violence they had suppressed for years.’ ¹¹⁵ Hundreds of inmates were injured in the fighting.

As the Lindsay administration turned its attention to the two remaining jails, concerned citizens rallied in support of the inmates. On Sunday afternoon, 4 October, there were several protests outside the Tombs and Branch Queens. And members of the BPP and the Young Lords Party organised impromptu rallies across the city. ¹¹⁶ Into the evening, groups demonstrated outside the Tombs, chanting, ‘Free the Political Prisoners’. ¹¹⁷

While supporters on the outside rallied in solidarity with the inmate rebellion, those behind the wall tried to hold together a sense of unity. Balagoon contends that in Branch Queens, the negotiation team had misrepresented their consensus by promising to release all the hostages after the bail review. Slowly, the fear of a possible assault on the jail began to sink in and the fear of that possibility cut into the will to resist collectively. In the Tombs, the same phenomenon played out. According to de Leon, the tension created further division:

Ethnic animosity between blacks and Puerto Ricans was smoldering, fanned by ignorance and fear of the oppressor. All our efforts to cool out this type of madness were useless because of the petty individualistic behavior of a few. No sooner had we dealt with one aspect of the insanity than something else would pop off. Between dealing with the pigs and trying to maintain a united front, all our efforts were being dissipated on the ineffectual activity because of the disunity. ¹¹⁸

These emerging divisions were the fault lines along which city officials effectively convinced inmates to give up their remaining hostages. Just as the radio had carried news of rebellions to inmates in NYC’s jails, city officials used the radio to quell the last remaining revolts. From last-minute negotiations on the afternoon of 4 October, it became evident that inmates and city officials were at an impasse. Tombs inmates wanted to meet with Lindsay before giving up their last hostages, while ‘the administration responded by saying that they would not tolerate “violence” that we had to give up the hostages’. De Leon mused: ‘they sounded like Nixon’s mouthpiece at the Paris peace talks. Unconditional surrender.’ ¹¹⁹ To convey their demands and demonstrate their good faith to city officials and the media, inmates released guard Alfred Earl Warren to make known their demands of a general amnesty, the appointment of more Spanish-speaking guards and the introduction of educational programmes. ¹²⁰ In the midst of these negotiations, a handful of prisoners on the 5th floor of the Tombs revolted, only to be stopped by a team of correction officers. ¹²¹

In response to this deadlock and the threat of further revolt, Lindsay aides broadcast an ultimatum over WINS and WNYC ‘to reach all prisoners simultaneously and to carry the maximum dramatic effect’. ¹²² At 10pm, the ultimatum was broadcast through the Tombs’ public address system as well. Calling upon ‘the men on the Tombs 11th floor’, Lindsay promised to meet with their representatives once the hostages had been released. ¹²³ Outside the prison, busloads of correction and Tactical Police Force officers were massing. According to de Leon, Lindsay’s ultimatum pushed all the waverers into agreeing to surrender. Two factions emerged: ‘those of us who did not want to give up without a commitment on our demands were out maneuvered by the compromisers on the committee, who took over the public address system and steamrollered the surrender’. ¹²⁴ Yet it was not until 11.40pm that inmates agreed to release the remaining seventeen hostages with the concession that there would be no reprisals. Just before midnight, Lindsay arrived at the Tombs to meet de Leon and ten other inmates in the 2nd floor cafeteria, ¹²⁵ where they, along with eleven hostages, who chose to stay at the jail once released, impressed upon Lindsay and McGrath the direness of the situation. ¹²⁶ After a two-hour meeting, the 11th floor was peacefully evacuated as inmates returned to their cells.

At Branch Queens, the men tried to halt the growth of divisions, translating committee discussions into Spanish. When rumours began to spread that the Panthers had taken over the rebellion to advance their own interests, Balagoon and his comrades voluntarily withdrew to their tier, agreeing to abide by any decision reached during a general meeting. But when debate shifted to whether or not to follow through on their threat to kill the hostages, splits grew deeper: ‘we were getting close to going to war between ourselves, different groups began planning moves to take the prisoners or to protect them’. ¹²⁷ In the end, inmates tabled the debate for later as it was clear that the Mayor would be addressing them over the radio. For Balagoon and others had been monitoring the radio and the recent news from the other jails added to the tension:

They reported that one by one the other rebellions were smashed, and that after a long delay the brothers in the Tombs had given up, letting their hostages go. Then they began reporting the situation at Branch Queens in the manner of a football game. One station began saying that the police were massed outside the building and their forces were mobilized so heavy as to have been unseen since World War Two. This was psychological warfare. ¹²⁸

At 5.30am on Monday, 5 October, Mayor Lindsay presented his ultimatum over WINS and WNYC, explaining that he had met with Tombs inmates and promised to meet with their leaders once all the hostages were released. In response, inmates gathered on their tier and decided as a group on whether to fight or comply with the Mayor’s decision. In a final vote, ¹²⁹ the tiers voted four to three to release the remaining hostages. Though they vigorously disagreed with the final decision, believing that they still faced reprisals from the army of guards and police outside the jail, Balagoon and other militant inmates agreed to abide by the will of the majority. Within minutes, those opposed to fighting had released the last three guards unharmed. ¹³⁰

As inmates surrendered and evacuated the jail, they were forced to pass through a gauntlet of police and correction officers who kicked and beat them with baseball bats, nightsticks, and axe handles. Those who could be identified as leaders were forced down a double row of guards. ‘The yard echoed with screams and shouting and the thud of clubs.’ ¹³¹ Both Drake and Cender were beaten unconscious and, with six others, ended up in hospital. The guards forced the rest of the inmates to sit in the yard as they waited for buses to relocate them to Rikers Island, hitting them with nightsticks whenever they turned round. Though police had barred the news media from within a block of the jail, two photographers captured the brutality from a nearby warehouse. For New York Daily News photographer Mike McCardell, ‘the whole situation was so disgusting, I resisted from vomiting only by holding my will back’. ¹³² CBS and NBC evening news broadcast those photographs along with the witness accounts of the beatings.

However, not all inmates had surrendered. The nine Black Panthers along with several dozen other defendants had barricaded themselves in the Branch Queens annex. From the 6th floor window, they used a bullhorn to announce that they had witnessed the brutal treatment of fellow inmates and needed assistance to ensure that they would not suffer the same treatment. (The Lindsay administration had long since relinquished control over to the police and guards who now controlled Branch Queens.) The remaining inmates only surrendered after protests continued outside and negotiations between city officials and the lawyer for the Panther defendants allowed them to leave the jail in a Fire Department cherry-picker. Early on the morning of 6 October, the last man cleared the jail’s courtyard and boarded the waiting bus, ending the last of the rebellions.

Conclusion

On 9 October, four days after the end of the rebellion, the Weather Underground Organisation (WUO), a covert revolutionary group that had earlier split with other elements of the student-led Anti-war Movement, bombed a Queens’ traffic courtroom, rendering it temporarily unusable. Though its bombing was carried out in solidarity with rebelling inmates, WUO’s communiqué addressed students and other potential supporters of the radical prison movement:

Soledad, the Tombs, Long Binh and Con Thienh, the final solution of the Amerikan state-machines for breaking men and women and filth, rats, isolation, brutality and torture. They are instruments of genocide against the entire black and Latin community. When the inmates cut loose they showed the vulnerability of the empire. With thousands of pigs mobilized to guard the jails those of us on the outside should have moved to aid the prisoners. Put out wanted posters for Murtagh and McGrath. Wherever they go, treat them with the respect due enemies of the people. Keep them scared. The people will free the Soledad Brothers and the Panther 21. ¹⁴³

More a symbolic response to state violence than a tactical counterattack, the bombing was intended to engage popular sentiment in revolutionary action. By linking rebellions in Long Binh, an army stockade in Vietnam, with jails and prisons in New York and California, WUO sought to demonstrate the centrality of incarceration to the system of imperialism as well as how broadly resistance was growing. With help from the outside, the prison gates could be prised open.

Though the jail rebellions did not lead to the sort of action advocated by the WUO, inmates did receive some support from outside groups like the Youth Against War and Fascism and the Committee to Defend the Queens House of Detention 8, which solicited contributions to a bail fund for those indicted and organised rallies outside court houses on trial dates. Following a reduction in his bail and a $2,500 bail collection organised by the Young Lords, Victor Martinez was released from Rikers Island and continued to organise the Inmates Liberation Front to assist inmates with securing legal assistance and putting together defence committees. With a small staff of six men and women, it also wrote to inmates, contacted families, and collected money for those who could not afford clothing or commissary. ¹⁴⁴

Unsurprisingly, the small organisation was not able to sustain itself – first as the Inmates Liberation Front, and then, the Inmates Liberation Party – following Martinez’s indictment on charges of kidnapping and attempted murder. Fearing guard brutality if he returned to jail, Martinez went underground in early 1971. ¹⁴⁵

In spite of this, the question of the inmates’ civil and human rights remained an important one. Though the Inmate Liberation Party did not last long, the NYCBC had been pushed to make inmates’ rights the centrepiece of its mission over the next decade. The rebellions had sent a signal to the criminal justice system. ‘After the jail riots in the Tombs and other city jails in 1970, judges were more lenient in their sentencing, fearing that overloaded prisons would spark further riots.’ ¹⁴⁶ Among the general public, the largest inmate uprising in the city’s history left a lasting impression. As the NYCBC later reported:

To many New Yorkers, rich or poor, black, brown, or white, and from those with lengthy criminal records to those who have never stepped into a courtroom for any purpose, the Tombs has come to represent the system’s inhumanity to our fellow citizens, particularly those who are too poor to meet bails set by the courts, too impecunious to hire outstanding private lawyers, and too disenfranchised to demand – and receive – what many now see as the minimum required by fundamental fairness, if not by the United States Constitution. ¹⁴⁷

The 1970 rebellions placed the issue of the criminal justice system’s racial and class bias squarely on the table. In the midst of Nixon’s law and order politics, they also challenged the assumption that the innocent could be treated like criminals. These issues remained on the table as the NYCBC and other city agencies reported on the continued problems of overcrowding in jails, insanitary conditions, poor health services, suicide prevention, and the court’s cramped holding pens – some of which were issues first presented in the Tombs’ list of grievances.

Slowly, changes began to occur in New York City Houses of Detention. In the year that followed the reconstitution of the NYCBC in October 1970, city officials implemented a host of reforms including a ninety-day limit on pretrial detention; requirement for the visit of city’s jails by judges; installation of phones on the housing floors of the Tombs and Branch Queens; improvement in the privacy accorded inmate mail; regular visits to the Tombs and Branch Queens by pest exterminators; the provision of toiletries to newly arrived men as well as the weekly provision of clean linen at the Tombs; the recruitment of volunteer physicians and psychiatrists at the five city jails; the opening of a Methadone Detoxification programme and a recreation area at the Tombs; the recruitment of fifty correction officers’ aides from Puerto Rico; storage of spare clothing for indigent defendants; the availability of abortion on request and weekly visits by a gynaecologist to the Women’s House of Detention; better training of new correction officers; and establishment of an Investigation Unit to look into allegations of excessive use of force and other violations of Departmental rules. ¹⁴⁸ In spite of these reforms, a federal court judge found that the Tombs as originally constructed and currently operated, violated inmates’ constitutional rights, and ordered its closure in 1974.

With the closure of the Tombs, the sprawling jail complex on Rikers Island quickly came to serve as the city’s main jail. Located on the East River, between the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx, this island would come to hold the majority of the city’s jail facilities. Over time, many of the same problems of inmate overcrowding, poor conditions and guard brutality surfaced, as Rikers came to play a central role in the state’s turn towards mass incarceration and the emergence in New York state of what Angela Davis and other radical scholars have termed the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (PIC). Indeed, while a good deal of critical analysis has focused on the place of policing and prisons in the PIC, substantially less attention has been paid to big city jails like Rikers, where the logics of preventive detention have been baked into its daily operations. Unable to afford their bail, its inmates, often Black or Latino young men, routinely plead guilty and accept a reduced sentence, so as to avoid not only the prospect of losing in court, but also the protracted jail term facing them as they wait months and even years to go to trial.

In 2016, a coalition of 125 community organisations pushed forward a campaign to close Rikers jails, which had, in recent years, become a flashpoint of controversy. While basic living conditions had been improved, Rikers had become notorious for rampant guard corruption, humiliating strip searches, long-term solitary confinement and unchecked inmate-on-inmate violence. Echoing efforts to subject other big city jails in the US to public oversight, the #CLOSErikers campaign has counterposed the harm and suffering at Rikers with the need to rebuild those poor and working-class communities that have been directly impacted by its operations. The ground that this campaign has gained points to a likely future where, in spite of the clumsy ‘law and order’ efforts of the Trump administration, states may seek to scale back, however incrementally, their prison populations, with jails increasingly becoming key sites of social control and political struggle. The 1970 jail rebellions point to the way in which those of us challenging the PIC need to not only shut down jails like Rikers, but also defeat the ways in which the logic of preventive detention has structured their operations. Equally, these rebellions point to the way in which, at key moments, those organising and fighting on what Rodney termed, ‘this most disadvantaged of terrains’ might expose the fallacy of this logic as part of a broader ‘war for dignity and freedom’.