This is a recent history of the Attica Prison uprising, some of its root causes, and decades-worth of aftermath. I wasn’t alive for Attica, and so it was mostly a cultural meme in my lifetime, but specifically its use in the Sydney Lumet movie “Dog Day Afternoon” with Al Pacino calling out “Attica! Attica!” as a (fake) rallying cry. That’s the way I’ve generally understood it. The uprising itself stemmed out a handful of predictable causes. Inmates had been agitating for a while from several […]