On August 21, a drama of irrationality was acted out in the Adjustment Center of San Quintin prison. The actual scenes and movements of that drama are at present known only to a small group of people. If, in fact, they are all known by anyone still living. However the body count, as always, has been widely circulated. Dead are George Jackson, central figure of the drama, three white guards--Frank DeLeon, Paul Krasnes and Jere Graham-- and two white inmates--John Lynn and Ronald Kane.

Less than a month after those six men died in San Quentin, a second drama of irrationality was performed in a prison a continent away. Unlike the California incident, much of what happened at Attica occurred in full view of reporters and television cameras. Nonetheless, there seems to be as much confusion about what happened at Attica and how it happened as there is about how the six men came to die on an afternoon in San Quentin.

In both cases, much of the confusion resulted from the fact that, consciously or accidentally, the officials involved misinformed the public. In California, San Quentin was quarantined while prison officials emerged periodically to present a string of stories and updates about how the six deaths had occurred. Similarly, New York officials changed stories with the impunity with which a snake sheds its skin. Alleging at first that the hostages who did not come out alive had been killed by inmates, the New York officials finally announced that all 40 of the deaths that day at Attica had resulted from gunfire by the invading forces of the state.

The damage, of course, had already been done by a combination of error and omission. A nation mesmerized by the pictures from Attica of a mass of exotically clad inmates, mainly black, holding hostages, All of whom were white, had generally accepted the initial report that the hostages who died had all had their throats slit. Some of the early reports also stated that several of the white dead had had their genitals severed and had suffered other forms of extreme physical abuse.

In some part of the public mind the visions conjured by these first false reports remain as if surgically implanted, and they will always be the first images summoned by editorials marking the anniversaries of the Attica massacre.

In the long run what is probably more important than the erroneous information the officials fed the public is the fact that they failed to deal in any meaningful way with why the two incidents occurred. The authorities at San Quentin claimed that George Jackson had been killed in an aborted escape attempt. Yet at no time did they or their supporters attempt to explain why Jackson would try to escape. Their entire treatment of the incident took Jackson's motivation as a given--as not susceptible to change nor of any particular consequence.

The New York officials seemed to have been caught slightly more off-guard by the riot at Attica and were too engrossed in their efforts to restore order in the prison to give much speculation to the emotional motivation of the prisoners. To be sure, Commissioner Oswald and the negotiating committee of outsiders attempted to discover the prisoners' physical grievances, yet the ultimate violent response of the state, and Governor Rockefeller's posture towards the revolt, the appearance of Bobby Seale, and even the entreaties of the negotiating committee revealed not so much a concern for the safety of the hostages--or even a respect for law and the imperative of maintaining some semblance of order--as a disrespect for the humanity of the inmates so irrational as to border on the conspicuously neurotic.

To the extent that any official in California or New York did deal with the question of motivation, it was only to dismiss it as a significant factor by depicting the prisoners as sub-humans incited by sinister terrorists. Governor Regan: "Many of these incidents (prison uprisings) appear to result from the unlawful designs of, self-proclaimed revolutionary forces operating within and without prison walls."

Faceless revolutionaries, men beyond the call of any sense of moral decency or reason is the image of the prisoners at Attica and of George Jackson which the authorities in California and New York have attempted to persuade the public to accept. To a large degree, the authorities were successful. Abetted by the Establishment media, they mustered all the representations of the prisoner as a dark and irrational man justly separated from the world of civilized men that have appeared in B-grade films and novels and armed these stereotypes with the most explosive rhetoric of insurrection and hate. In so doing, they have succeeded in turning public attention from the question of why these incidents occurred in San Quentin and Attica to how they occurred.

As a result of the emphasis placed on the physical mechanics of the killings and the public's acceptance of the authorities' explanation of the motivation of the prisoners, a debate has ensued between those who refuse to reject the officials' versions of the killings and those who refuse to accept them. The debate has been legalistic in tone, revolving around things like coroners' reports and ballistics that are basically peripheral to the human experience. Imprisoned in the heat of the debate--which, at best, can end in an impotent draw--people on both sides have lost sight of the principle issues involved in what happened at San Quentin and Attica. Regardless of whether or not they have accepted the stories the officials in California and New York have given of how the prisoners in the two institutions acted, people involved in the debate have, either openly or by default, accepted the officials' versions of why the prisoners may have acted in the manner in which the authorities claim.

Yet it is precisely this question of motivation that is the central one in both cases. It is the pivotal issue, not only because it is the key to the specific truth of what happened at San Quentin and Attica, but also because it is the portal to reaching an understanding of what significance the two incidents hold for those of us surviving, both inside and outside prison walls. It is only through an analysis of the human element of motivation that one can accurately answer the most enduring questions raised by the tragedies at San Quentin and Attica.

II

No come to terms with the motivation of the men involved in the two incidents one must begin by looking outside of the prisons, for neither George Jackson nor any of the inmates at Attica was born in prison, nor, in probability, were many if any of the guards held hostage.

Attica is a prison town, which (with the exception of some cities and large communities like Trenton that are the sites of state or federal penal institutions) is a place analogous to the company town. The majority of people in the community are directly connected in some form to the operation of the prison. Fathers, sons, and grandsons work as prison guards. Wives and daughters hold jobs as secretaries or other noncombative positions on the staff. Often in facilities large enough to provide employees housing inside the walls or in cases in which the town is too small to have a private or municipal hospital, children are born inside the prison. Clinton T. Duffy, a former warden at San Quentin, was born there--his father was a guard--grew up there--playing "prisoners-and-guards" instead of cowboys-and-Indians--and married there to the daughter of the Captain of the Yard.

However, the prisoners usually have to come from someplace else.