Third world newsreel: Third cinema practice in the United States

On September 9, 1971, 1,300 inmates, almost half the prison population, captured more than three dozen guards and employees at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The mostly Black and Latino inmates did so to protest the intolerable living conditions and vicious brutality of the prison guards. Inside Attica, they were subjected to severe overcrowding, up to 16 hours per day in solitary confinement, severely restricted medical aid, and rectal searches before and after they received visitors despite the fact that they were separated from their visitors by a wire mesh barrier. In addition, the authorities arbitrarily withheld inmates’ correspondence, denied them access to newspapers and magazines, curtailed the religious freedom of Muslim inmates, and separated politicized inmates from the rest of the prison population (Bell 1985).².