This is the Cato deadly podcast for Monday, December 26, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Attica Prison Riot is not clearly remembered.

In fact, the events of that riot have been covered up and fundamentally

misrepresented for decades. Heather Ann Thompson is author of the new book, Blood in the Water,

the Attica Prison Uprising 1971, and its legacy.

We spoke earlier this month.

You expect that prisons are places of unrest generally because the vast majority of people there are in prison.

And you've written a book detailing the Attica Prison Riot and some of the things that we've learned

more recently about it.

Give us a broad overview.

Well, Attica is a historical moment that people think that they know a lot about.

They know that there was a big riot there in 1971.

And there was something bad that happened there

because Attica has come to connote the worst of the worst men in prison and one of the most dangerous

facilities.

But it turns out that Attica was in fact one of the really most extraordinary human rights events of the 20th century and it was indeed

something that we we got wrong at our peril we didn't know the history and as a result we came to really

misunderstand what prisons are meant to do and what the men inside of them and

indeed the women inside of them are really like.

I guess what fomented the specific event?

Well, Attica is a prison, a maximum security prison in upstate New York it still exists. It was built during the Great Depression and indeed even today looks exactly as it did back then and like today it was a prison that was severely overcrowded, way disproportionately filled

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