ATTICA IN ROCHESTER
Extending the sphere of the prison town
Interview with Chris Snyder
November 6, 2018
11:15am, Wilson Commons
University of Rochester
Sadyn, Winston and Skylar interviewing.
We started off the conversation by re introducing ourselves and filling Chris in on our research trips to Attica. Part of the conversation is repeated word for word, other parts are just phrases (or paraphrases). I tried to capture what felt meaningful, startling and important.
Skylar: Are you from the town of Attica itself? Did you attend Attica schools?
( I went on to explain what we had found out about Attica high school's senior class field trip into the correctional facility).
Chris: “No, I’m from Alexander, right next to Attica. It’s an Attica thing (the field trips). Alexander and Attica are rival high schools. It was like an antagonistic, dialectic exchange between the two schools. Attica was the more rowdy, more country like school, more rough around the edges school. But it’s all relative. Why the difference between the two schools? Alexander draws from a more suburban feeling area. Very few of the people actually came from farms, while Attica is the opposite.”
“....What was most wild is how little you hear about the prison. I didn't know what it was. ”
“I thought of Attica as 'the castle on exchange street' when I was little.”
"Michel Foucault’s answer to why we don't hear about the prison is there has been a shift in our carceral sense...the whole system is designed so you don't actually see the act of imprisonment. They love to show the act of catching the criminal, there are tv shows about catching the bad guys, but not what happens after.”
"The nature of the system, as it is now, is conducive to being out of the public eye. But sometime there is something that forces the issues into the public eye-- an event that changes everything (like the Attica prison uprising)."
"Imagine what it looks like"
“In a town of 1,000-2,000 people, there's not enough eyes to see it”
"The way that it is humanized is by upholding the nobility of the correctional officers themselves. They are held in such high esteem, up there with firefighters and police officers. They have become part of the family."
"There remains a great mythology of the deaths of the correctional officers during the uprising."
"It was so surreal being there at the demonstration (late summer 2018, early September) as an adult and as an activist. I had the had the mic briefly, read a poem about mourning.”
"The town identifies first as a strong farming community, it does not identify with the prison. You see that as normal growing up, just like how I grew up on a farm thinking all the eccentric animals that was normal (like peacocks.)"
“We don’t think about the prison”
Prison chanting on the inside with the demonstration “Inside, Outside, we’re all on the same side.” We demonstrated across the street from the prison, we moved over a few feet when asked to get off of the museums property. “
"I’ve never been inside the prison, you can talk to my Uncle Andy about what it looks like on the inside...it’s amazing what you become jaded too. My uncle told me this story of this guy who feel out of bed and broke his leg, and then hide his broken leg because you aren't allowed visitation in the hospital."
"You (in reference to our Attica group) have a heightened sense of otherness. Well...you know that you don't belong.”
You need to “decouple” the town from the prison, town that happens to have a prison in it
The deep truth of our time is that we miss each other, technology has wrecked it for a lot of people, we were not collectively ready for it (our society). This plays out double in rural areas, where it is more work to get out and see each other. It’s isolating, farm kids are mostly alone.
I would describe Attica and Alexander as “poor adjacent”... no visible signs of poverty but it’s there. More of the family farms are gone in the area.
Winston: "Is that a good or bad thing?"
The people who live in the town are just as curious as you are. They each have a slight piece of a much larger puzzle.
In Viktor Frankl's man search for meaning " A man can get used to anything, but don’t ask him now”
Prisoners, correctional officers administrations, ourselves… They just get used to it”
You don't think about it.
