Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
4-2025
ISSN
1939-8557
Publisher
University of Michigan Law School
Language
en-US
Abstract
Every so often, a prison strike will make national news, as it did in 2014, 2016, and 2018. 1 The media will focus on the atrocious conditions of confinement; the unchecked violence; the wages numerated in pennies; and the state’s indifference to the strikers’ modest demands for food, medical care, and human contact.
Orisanmi Burton’s2 book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, urges us to process such reporting with a healthy dose of skepticism. What if prison rebellions were telling us something else, something even more important? What if they were revealing to us the portal to our collective liberation (p. 18)? Burton immerses his reader into the universe of prisoners in revolt not only to document the horrors of incarceration, but more significantly to highlight their most basic, common demand: freedom. Burton’s innovative and challenging account reveals the abolitionist political analysis that emerged from the prison revolts that rocked New York State from 1970 to 1971. Focusing on rebellions by prisoners rather than texts by legal academics, Burton challenges legal scholarship’s mainstay methods of investigation and approaches to reform.
In particular, Burton reorients our understanding of the most implausible of prison revolts: Attica. From September 9 through September 13, 1971, people incarcerated at Attica prison in upstate New York wrested control from the Department of Corrections (pp. 8–9). The inmates first gained control at the intersection of Attica’s Cellblocks A and C after a security slip (pp. 84–86). Over two thousand of the men held captive poured into the central yard, known as Times Square (p. 86). In the revolt’s first few days, these men made demands and negotiated with the state, using the guards they took hostage for leverage (p. 28). For a moment, they existed in a parallel world in which prisoners possessed a semblance of self-determination.
Before the dramatic takeover of Attica, rebellions erupted in New York City jails and the Finger Lakes’ Auburn prison. Burton begins to chart this neglected prehistory in the borough of Queens, at the Long Island City branch of the Queens House of Detention (p. 23). He continues the narrative at the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as the “Tombs” (p. 24). Each of these rebellions lasted only a few days or a few hours; but in that short time, the people inside controlled the sites of their incarceration, and city and state officials at least pretended to listen to their demands (pp. 40–42). The world watched as the rebels turned the dominant social order on its head.
In Burton’s view, attributing the motivations for Attica to the ritual degradations of prison life misses the mark. While those revolting demanded “human treatment,” Burton describes how they also yearned for more: “[They] burned for a form of freedom that the captors had no ability to grant . . . one that had to be invented” (p. 53). Although Burton does not explicate their full set of political aspirations, the uprising at Attica, like New York’s wave of prison revolts, was a movement whereby even the most maligned citizens—those who perpetrated harm—could recapture some of their humanity.
Burton asks us to consider the rebels’ militancy in strategic terms (p. 83). Through revolt, Burton contends, the rebels proposed a vision for political community that did not rely on confinement to guarantee security—a key tenet of abolitionist political philosophy (p. 14). Burton supports his claim with interviews of the revolts’ participants. His book reflects hundreds of hours of conversations with former rebels that reveal their motivations and their distinct trajectories as political leaders. From this painstaking work, Burton has produced a layered account of radical prison organizing. His account draws on conversations with rebels since released; their correspondence; interviews with their supporters outside; and fifty-year-old social movement ephemera, like pamphlets and communiqués from underground organizations.
Recommended Citation
Zohra Ahmed,
Taking Revolution Seriously
,
123
Michigan Law Review
1209
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4126
Included in
Jurisprudence Commons, Law and Philosophy Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons
