The Attica uprising of September 9–13, 1971 — 1,281 prisoners holding the yard under an elected multiracial leadership, demanding minimum wage, religious freedom, and amnesty, three weeks after George Jackson's killing — ended when Governor Rockefeller ordered the assault in which state gunfire killed twenty-nine prisoners and ten hostages. Troopers' torture of survivors ran for days; the state then indicted only prisoners: sixty-two Attica Brothers on 1,289 counts, with defendants like Dacajeweiah (John Hill) convicted while every trooper walked.

The Attica Brothers' defense — a movement in itself — cracked the prosecution open when a state investigator, Malcolm Bell, exposed the cover-up of official crimes; Governor Carey closed the books with a 1976 amnesty, and decades of civil litigation ended with $12 million to the tortured survivors in 2000. Attica remains the word for both the prison movement's possibility and the state's answer.