Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
| Date | 01 January 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474517724175 |
| Published date | 01 January 2019 |
| Author | Ashley T Rubin |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
institutions Soyer describes in A Dream Denied? Finally, how do Latinas and
LGBTQ youth experience these same systems? These are just some of the many
questions facing critical scholars of juvenile justice in the United States; for them,
and for anyone interested in the criminalization of minority youth in the US,
A Dream Denied is going to be necessary reading.
Jerry Flores
University of Toronto, Department of Sociology, Canada
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its
Legacy. Pantheon Books: New York, 2016; 724 pp. (including index): ISBN:
9780375423222, $35.00 (hbk)
Heather Ann Thompson’s new book, Blood in the Water, which tells story of the
1971 Attica prison riot and its aftermath, has already accumulated many accolades
both in and outside the academy. It is on multiple best book lists and has won
numerous prizes, including the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst
Prize (for socio-legal history), the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in
History, and it is soon to be a major motion picture. Indeed, Blood in the Water
has joined the ranks of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in its ability to
reach and inspire a general audience.
Blood in the Water is also an extremely lengthy book that is difficult to sum-
marize while doing justice to the meticulous and horrific detail it offers. Instead,
this review begins with Thompson’s main focus on official misconduct and then
steps back to examine Attica in the broader context. In the process, this review
considers what Blood in the Water has to offer to an interdisciplinary punishment
and society audience interested in questions of prisons, power, riots, and penal
change.
Good guys, bad guys, and power
One of the most striking features of Blood in the Water is that the Attica prison
riot actually takes up very little space in the book. Thompson’s work is divided
into 10 sections of four to seven chapters each (58 chapters total, plus an intro-
duction and epilogue). The days of the uprising (9–13 September 1971) are cov-
ered in Parts II and III only, while Part I describes the context in Attica and other
New York correctional facilities before the Attica rebellion and Part IV describes
the retaking of the prison. In truth, the riot itself is preamble: the book’s main
focus (Parts V–X) is what happened after the riot and the prison’s retaking—the
roughly four decades of cover-ups, multiple investigations, and epic legal fights
Book reviews 131
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