THE EASIEST WAY TO VISIT SOMEONE AT ATTICA IS TO BLOW A HOLE IN THE WALL WITH A TRUCK BOMB
STATE OFFICIALS TURN PRISON'S 'VISITORS CENTER' INTO MINI-PRISON
“Behind Enemy Lines,” prison art by Ojore Lutalo. Photo credit: courtesy of the artist.
MALONE, NEW YORK OPINION
Dec. 9, 2025
There are two ways to visit someone at Attica: use a truck bomb to blow a hole in the wall surrounding the notorious maximum-security New York state prison, or try to walk in on the weekend when visitors are supposed to be allowed inside for a few hours.
The truck bomb is easiest.
That's what I found out after being essentially jailed for four hours just trying to visit someone there—only to be denied at the last minute.
Attica's "Visitors Center" isn't a welcoming place of respite for people coming to the prison to visit family and friends. Many, like me, travel 100s of miles. Instead, in reality, Attica's Visitors Center is a large cell where hopeful visitors are imprisoned for hours—while guards leisurely screen them at the slothful pace of about a dozen an hour and often less.
The process seems designed to frustrate visits rather than facilitate them.
Because I served almost 13 years in New York's prisons for manslaughter from 1990 until 2003, I know how visits are supposed to run—and what Attica is doing to visitors is plain wrong. It's so far outside a wide range of acceptable it's even cruel and unusual.
A lot of people don't understand why I would want to go back to prison after doing all that time. The answer is simple: it's my job. I'm a journalist.
On assignment for the New York Daily News as a news photographer in 2015, I visited Shabaka Shakur in the state's maximum-security Shawangunk Correctional Facility when a judge ordered him freed after he served 27 years for a crime he didn't commit. I went back three days later when he was released.
On assignment for New York City-based news website Gothamist, I visited Rikers Island twice. The first time was to report on a new cell block for youthful offenders; the second to investigate the administrative “kangaroo court” system New York uses to revoke parole. That second time, prison officials actually threw me out—just because I did my job and asked a few questions.
My blockbuster report based in part on that visit, NYC's Plan To Close Rikers Undermined By 'Lock Everybody Up' Parole Enforcement, Sources Say, helped inspire state lawmakers in Albany to reform that system to prevent it from being used to send people back to prison for minor, technical rule violations with the Less is More Act.
My visit to Attica started Friday afternoon when I drove 300 miles in five hours to the prison from my North Country home. Within minutes of checking into a local hotel called "The Attican" Friday night a marked Village of Attica police car parked on the road at the end of the hotel's driveway and stayed there for at least an hour. Judging from the lack of other cars in the hotel’s parking lot, I was the only guest there.
Seeing the cop car there like that made me think of the 1988 true crime movie Mississippi Burning.
In the morning, I had breakfast at the local diner, Twilight Meadows (opened 1988), before driving the 2 1/2-or-so miles out of town to the prison. I tried walking straight into its front entrance but was told by a guard behind the prison's front desk I had to go back to my car and wait to be picked up by a van.
Some bureaucratic Nazi genius at Attica wrote a memo requiring prospective visitors to wait in their cars until a van picks them up and drives them from the Visitors Parking Lot to the Visitors Center. For some reason, the Visitors Center is not next to the Visitors Parking Lot—like it is in most places. They're about 200 yards apart, on opposite sides of a 90-degree corner in the prison's 40-foot tall wall.
Visitors can't just pile into the van whenever the van finally comes around either. Only about six or seven people (depending on how big they are) are allowed to be in the van for this part of the process. I found this out the hard way.
I tried to get into the van when it stopped near my car and was told to get out. Not by a guard, but by a woman in civilian clothes sitting in the front passenger seat. Another woman in civil clothes, this one far younger, was behind the wheel. They looked like they might be a mother and daughter duo. Prison is a family business in Attica, New York the town (pop. 1,846, not counting prisoners) so it wouldn't surprise me.
"Mom" seemed to relish controlling visitors like I imagine the wife of a slave plantation owner in the South before the Civil War would. She hated me from the start because when I tried to get in "her" slave van another visitor yelled across the parking lot and asked me if there was space. I looked inside, saw there was and said so.
Mom barked "You shouldn't have told her she could get in the van now you have to wait. Get out."
Mom made me, the woman who asked me if there was space—who had a young 5-year-old girl with her—and everyone else wait about another half-hour before she picked us up.
When we finally got to the Visitors Centers, I was shocked by what I saw. The one large room in the one-story building was packed with about 50 people—maybe slightly more, not counting the two additional people who worked there. One was a church-looking blur-hair lady; the other was younger and wore a t-shirt that said “Buffalo Mafia” on it. About 10 of the 50-or-so people waiting were kids.
I sat down in a row of chairs between a dark-skinned young woman and a middle-aged Spanish woman. The dark-skinned girl was visiting her brother. Her husky, bourbon-flavored voice and the almost regal way she carried herself was soothing. The Spanish woman had driven all the way from Newark, New Jersey—with her elderly, handicapped parents. The prison didn't make them get in the van for the ride to the Visitors Center. Instead, it forced them to wait in the car they drove up in the parking lot.
Without a bathroom for them to use. For the same four hours I waited.
About every 30 minutes, four people were given the necessary paperwork and told they could go outside and get in the van for the ride to the entrance of the prison. The same entrance we could have just walked to from the visitors parking lot. Except from 11:00am to 12:15pm. During that 1-1/4 hours Attica does a prison-wide count of prisoners during which nobody can move until the numbers come out correct and the count "cleared."
Visitors are not allowed to bring phones to the Visitors Center. Without a phone, I studied the walls—adding to the sense of punishment.
A sheet metal sign with red letters warned people not to bring contraband into the prison or "anything that might explode." Someone had glued a red plastic label with raised white letters over the word "inmate." Inmate was no longer sufficiently Politically Correct for politicians and bureaucrats in Albany. They decided on yet another new-and-improved designation for prisoners. Instead of "inmates," this time it's "Incarcerated Individuals"—the raised white letters on the sticker said.
As if that was real progress.
Another line on the sign referred to the prison "Superintendent or his designee." This time, the offending word was excised by a simple piece of white tape stuck over "his." (That actually was a nice edit, even if its execution left a lot to be desired.)
You want to know why "woke" sucks, dumb stuff like that sign is my answer.
Resources and effort wasted on making bad things appear better, not actually making it better. In fact, covering up the truth that prison conditions in New York are actually getting worse.
Once you make it back into the van for a second time (when only four people are allowed inside), Mom and Daughter drive you to the prison's entrance, where you are searched and processed into the visiting room inside the prison to finally meet the person you came to see.
By itself, sometimes that process alone takes up to an hour or more—depending on how long it takes guards inside the prison to bring the prisoner to the visiting room.
Here's the thing. That's supposed to be the only part of the process. You're not supposed to wait at the Visitors Center for hours. Attica added that.
Waiting for hours in the Visitors Center, I realized I left my cash in the car. I asked if it was OK if I walked back to my car to get my cash to buy the person I was visiting a soda and snacks (which is allowed) from the vending machines in the prison visiting room (there precisely for that reason). Although we were still on the outside of the prison and not behind a wall or even a fence, the church-looking lady told me it was not.
However, she said, I could walk back to my car to get it once the van dropped me off in front of the prison.
Finally, they handed me paperwork and told me and three other people to get into the van. It was about 12:45pm.
Instead of heading straight to the prison's entrance, Mom stopped the van at the visitor's parking lot to see if there was anybody waiting for them to pick up. Nevermind they could have done that on the way back to the Visitors Center after they dropped us off. No, stopping and wasting more of our time was more important. Not to actually pick anyone up, just to see if there was anyone to pick up after they dropped us off.
Mom got out and walked around, looking into cars.
They happened to stop in front of my car. I hopped out of the van after Mom got out and got my cash.
When Mom saw I’d hopped out of the van too, she stopped looking into cars, ran back into the van and sped off. They left me in the parking lot. I walked to the entrance of the prison—like you're supposed to do in the first place. Mom ran in behind me. She started babbling to the guard behind the front desk I'd hopped out of the van and shouldn't be allowed to visit anybody. The guard behind the desk called for a sergeant.
In the meantime, I was welcome to sit in another waiting room, this time next to the metal-detector and body-scanner in the prison's lobby. About 10 people who had been held in the Visitors Center with me were waiting—again—to be searched and scanned.
The Spanish lady I'd been sitting next to was one of them. She had finally made it in with her parents. They looked close to 90. Her mom was in a wheelchair. Her father had a walker. When the time came for all three to be scanned in the stand-up body-scanner, her mother had to stand up, get out of her wheelchair and step up into the scanner.
Daughter struggled to help mother and the old woman cried out, "I'm afraid of falling."
No one closer—not a guard or any of the waiting visitors—moved to help. I stepped up and held the old woman's arm while she climbed up the step into the body-scanner.
When it was her husband's turn, the man in civilian clothes operating the scanner grew visibly frustrated that the older Spanish-speaking man did not understand his barked English orders how to position his body inside the machine.
A sergeant blew into the lobby from inside the prison. His pale skin was flushed red. The veins in his forehead pulsed. He was pissed and I was about to make him even angrier. I put my back to the wall opposite him in the hallway where he called me to talk, so no one could sneak up behind me.
"You're not getting to visit him," Sgt. Donald L. Baker II said.
I asked for written documentation of a reason for denial of the visit. Sgt. Baker refused to provide it.
"I'm ordering you to leave," Sgt. Baker finally said. "If you don't leave, I'll call the State Police and have you arrested for trespassing."
"Go for it," I shot back. "I waited four hours. I want my visit."
He reached for the phone and made a call. I stood there.
A lieutenant came. The sergeant handed him the Nazi memo that required prospective visitors to sit in their cars, leave their phones behind, wait for vans and be held captive for hours in the Visitors Center. I asked the lieutenant to hand me the previously secret memo. I read it and handed it back.
Sgt. Baker said the memo meant I couldn't go to my car at any time, even though the memo didn't specifically say that. I replied whatever the memo says, the church-looking lady in the Visitors Center told me I could go to my car once the van dropped us off at the prison's entrance. I just sped up the process a little.
The pettiness and absurdity of the whole thing was infuriating. Everything had happened outside the prison, where I was a free person. I wasn't a prisoner, or a slave, but that's how they treated me—and everybody else too.
On top of that, we were arguing over a memo. It wasn't a law I'd allegedly broken, or even a written rule. It wasn't even among the half-dozen or so official memos stapled to the bulletin board in the Visitors Center. It was a secret memo I saw for the first time when the lieutenant handed it to me.
Finally, I looked at the clock on the wall behind the lieutenant's head and saw it was 1:00pm. I could stand there and waste more time arguing or I could escape and head to the next stop on my itinerary. There was someone I wanted to visit about 45 minutes away at the Albion Correctional Facility. I could make it, but I had to leave immediately.
I ran for it. I burned rubber out of the Attica parking lot and made it to Albion with 15 minutes to spare. How they treated visitors at Albion was night and day from Attica. From the time I pulled into the parking lot to the time I sat down in the visiting room all of 15 minutes passed.
One of the guards I talked briefly with at Albion said the 40-year-old woman I was visiting was doing her first bid when he first started working there as a CO 17 years ago. He stayed and she'd been back several times. The tone in his voice was striking. It was almost nostalgic, even tender. Like he was talking about an old comrade.
"Womens' prisons have about a 70% percent recidivism rate," he wistfully noted.
Since the person I wanted to visit had just got out of the Box, they made me visit her in a sectioned off part of the visiting room. Three National Guard soldiers stood around the table next to us. Three more COs sat at another table across from the soliders.
I joked with them when I saw the set up: "Is this the VIP area?"
I waited about five minutes for the person I'd come to see to arrive. She brought her best self, and we warmly chopped it up like the old pros we were. She asked me to buy her chips and a soda. This time I had the cash, but the soda machine was broken.
Since we were so close to the soldiers and COs, they could hear every word we spoke.
"Do they even know what's going on?," my friend asked, gesturing to them. "Do they even know you're a journalist?"
The COs and soldiers stopped talking.
"Not until you just told them."
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