An investigative report in the New York Times on Sunday about the Attica Correctional Facility has raised new questions about whether the troubled Wyoming County prison, home to the 1971 uprising, should be shut down.
The Times report offers extraordinary details about the prison, and the unprecedented case today in Warsaw of three corrections officers charged in the beating of an inmate in 2011.
The three officers this morning pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of official misconduct, a class A misdemeanor, the Buffalo News reported.
Brian Fischer, the state's former corrections commissioner, told the Times he has come to the conclusion that Attica, opened in 1931, should be closed.
"Of all the maximum security prisons, I would probably argue, given the history of it, we'd probably be better off if we did," he told the paper.
The push to close Attica, which employs about 600 workers, the largest employer in the small, rural county between Rochester and Buffalo, is something that prison-reform advocates have been pushing for.
The Correctional Association of New York has a page on its website dedicated to closing Attica, which last fall commemorated the 43rd anniversary of the riots.
"The abuses taking place behind Attica's walls are an affront to humanity and nothing short of closing the prison will end them," the group says on its website. "At the same time that Attica must be closed, staff violence and abuse must end across all New York state prisons."
