The guards' strike, because it was illegal, provided Boone with a good opportunity to discharge the most un-cooperative guards. The Public Employees Union of the AFL-CIO stymied his move by threatening surgent that all state employees would walk out on strike if the prison guards were fired.
The guards' union refused to negotiate together with the NPRA, thereby forcing the Department of Corrections to conduct bilateral negotiations. Boone drew up a plan, to be executed May 22, which would bring guards back into the prison and grant concessions to the guards' union and to the NPRA. This included a shakedown, a retraining of officers, and a system of assignments placing the most notorious officers in positions with the least contact with the prisoners.
There was some evidence at this point that officers within the Correction Department set Boone up for the May 19 riot (one of the officers is now superintendent of Walpole). The officers sent a memo to the NPRA which announced the shakedown and introduction of guards but gave no mention of the observers or any of the concessions granted in three months of negotiations. There are many conflicting accounts of the following events. The civilian observers who were in the prison agree that the riot was administration-instigated.
The NPRA that had performed the operations of counting and locking-in every night refused to execute them after receiving the officers' memo. Early in the morning, the guards in the bullet-proof booth which controls the cell blocks of the prison locked the steel doors separating minimum from maximum security and announced that the state police were coming. Prisoners are afraid of state police because the "staties" have a reputation for making them run gauntlets and performing other brutalities after they quell a riot. The ensuing riot was the result of the prisoners' efforts to get back to their cells before the state police arrived. They panicked and broke down the walls separating units of the prison.
After the May 19 riot, Boone had lost all power and the governor would not appoint the superintendents Boone recommended. On June 21, Sargent fired Boone and sent the State Police to take control of Walpole. The civilian observers quit Walpole one week later, after the police had denied them the rights to talk or listen to the prisoners or to gain access to the cell blocks. The observers felt that they had become a factor that legitimized the State Police repression.
Walpole is in the same condition now as it was before Boone's administration, except that the authorities have spent $1 million to put one-half-inch steel plate on the walls. The NPRA was re-established in August 1973, after 94 per cent of the prisoners ratified it in an election. However, it has lost much of its previous rights to call meetings and communicate with its ex-prisoner board members. Observers maintain that there had been no major blow-up in Walpole since May because of the presence of the NPRA, though the union did organize a boycott of a Christmas dinner in support of Attica.
Massachusetts taxpayers spend $34 million each year on the 2900-employee prison system. As of January 1973, these resources go to a prison population of only 2892 people. The budget at Concord prison last year was enough to give each of the inmates a college education.
The Department of Corrections is based on a patronage system. The women's prison at Framingham is a classic example of featherbedding. Framingham has a permanent staff of 143 employees with a combined salary of $1.4 million a year. The prison population last year was as low as to to 60 women. As a solution to the population crisis, the Department of Corrections made the prison coed (creating more scandals to be reported on by the Herald). In December, after all of the changes, there were still less than 100 prisoners.
Teachers and social workers in the prisons receive a starting salary $1200 less than the guards. The psychiatrists at Bridgewater, the state prison for the criminally insane, receive a starting salary of $9000 also less than the guards. The attempts at rehabilitating the prisoners are only a farce. The real priority of the Department of Corrections is security.
The prison system, as it stands now, is a social failure. It benefits more than anyone else the people who run it--not the victims of crime, not the taxpayer, and certainly not the prisoner. Those people who fight to keep the prisons at a status quo are thinking of nothing but their own self interest. As Attica leader Roger Champen said in a speech at Harvard in December, "Prison is an industry, and industry must have its slaves."