The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Dostoevsky said that, and he spent four years in a Russian prison camp in Siberia with his hands and feet bound the whole time.

So we knew what he was talking about.

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Now, welcome to the award-winning BestOfALeft podcast with Cups today, including an excerpt from the documentary

William Cunsellor, Disturbing the Universe, and clips from Democracy Now, The Young Turks, The Real News, Counter-Spin, and the Tom Hartman program.

The National mood of political unrest and protest filtered into the United States prison system.

And on September 9, 1971, prisoners at Attica Correctional Facility seized control of the prison.

The prisoners took hostages and demanded better living conditions.

The conditions at Attica were awful. There were no education programs. There were no people of color as gods. The medical care was horrendous.

There were all sorts of grievances, and there was a group of people who wrote these grievances down and attempted the state to get to the state to look at them.

And the state refused to look at them, and the entire prison was taken over.

And 1289 inmates took over D.Y.R., which is one of the four exercise yards in Attica.

They called for negotiators, and negotiators were allowed to come in, and your father was immediately called.

Your father was in the middle of every bit of this, and it was both his a bad moment for him and a great moment for him.

As he walked into D.Y.R., my father was painfully conscious of his white middle-class prejudice.

He told me he worried that he and the other observers might be murdered by the prisoners.

He went in as a negotiator, just like everybody else, but being Bill, and being more courageous than most people, and also being an actor, you know, a person wanted to act, not contemplate.

In short, in order, he was the person in charge. He was going to be the lawyer for the inmates.

Dad came to see that the prisoners were taking a courageous and organized stand for their rights.

And he wanted to stand beside them.

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