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The Current Transcript for September 30, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The members opposite either think we're not going fast enough or we're going too fast. Canadians know we need to grow the economy and protect the environment.

LAURA LYNCH: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau argues his government is striking the right balance but his proof--conditional approval for a natural gas pipeline project in BC--is striking others as a startling reversal of his party's campaign promises. This morning we hear reaction, everything from heartbreak to those who say this is politics as usual. And then…

SOUNDCLIP

They ban the pit bulls. The bites don’t go down so they go to the Rottweilers, the German Shepherds, the Mastiffs, the Dobermans. It doesn’t work. You’re targeting the wrong end of the leash. You gotta go after the people, not the dog.

LL: To some they are much loved pets but to others they are violent snarling menaces. And Montreal has come down on the side of those who believe pit bulls must be banned for the sake of public safety. The debate over dogs coming up in half an hour. After that…

SOUNDCLIP

When they started shooting, it was like all hell broke. You could hear people crying, people dying. It was just like they indiscriminately shot everyone.

LL: Just say the name “Attica” and it conjures memories of the violent uprising and retaking of the prison in upstate New York in 1971. A new book reveals disturbing new details of what happened at Attica before, during and after the riot inside prison walls. I'll speak with author Heather Ann Thompson who argues 45 years later, Attica’s legacy lives on in America's crowded jails. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

LNG decision broke Canada's promise to be climate change world leader, says environmentalist

Guests: Karen Mahon, John Ivison

SOUNDCLIP

If Canada actually shows that it's serious, that it's back, that we understand that the science behind climate change is real, that we need to be taking action, that we need to be you know looking at what measures we can take to reduce emissions, I think that will set an extraordinarily strong signal.

LL: Canada's Environment Minister Catherine McKenna had been on the job less than a week last November when she jetted off to a crucial climate conference in Paris with a strong message for the world: Canada is ready to take a leadership role on fighting global warming. This week minister McKenna followed up those strong words with action.

SOUNDCLIP

You've certainly heard me say that the environment and the economy must go hand-in-hand. We worked extremely hard to deliver on this promise today.

LL: That was the environment minister giving the green light Tuesday to a controversial liquefied natural gas project in British Columbia. It's being touted as Canada's largest ever private sector development. Karen Mahon was at that Paris conference last year. She's the executive director of Stand, an environmental advocacy group. And we have reached her in Bellingham, Washington. Hello.

KAREN MAHON: Hi. Good morning.

LL: What was your reaction to Minister McKenna's announcement this week?

KAREN MAHON: Well, I was quite surprised and really fairly troubled by it. As you said I was in Paris as part of the Canadian environmental delegation and I watched our prime minister and our minister really be champions for this agreement. They really did a great job of working to get a strong international climate agreement and to try and really get all the countries on board and I was quite proud to be a Canadian. At that moment it really felt like Canada was back. So given that this was their first major energy decision, to see that they would approve something like this—which is going to become the largest source of carbon pollution in the country—was very disappointing.

LL: But why is it so problematic for you?

KAREN MAHON: Well, this is a massive, massive plan. This is not a small—this is not a small facility. This is the equivalent of putting almost two million new cars on the road. That's the carbon impact and that is a huge signal in the wrong direction. It's a huge signal to the provinces that they can just blow through their own carbon plans. In British Columbia, this makes it impossible for British Columbia to meet their own climate goals. It uses up basically all of the carbon emissions that we’ve planned until 2050. So it sends a signal to British Columbia, to the rest of the provinces that you don't have to take your own climate commitments seriously. And it sends a signal internationally that you can sign a treaty, you can call yourself a climate leader but at home you can conduct business as usual and continue to build new plants that going to pump out carbon pollution for decades to come.

LL: But wait a second. Minister McKenna stressed there are 190 restrictions on this project. Why isn't that enough?

KAREN MAHON: I've read all 190 restrictions and they say things like they will monitor and they will measure and that's all fine and good. But the fact remains that this is one of the largest—this will be one of the largest emitters in Canada and it will make it very, very difficult for Canada to meet its own commitment. We promised—

LL: But they have put a hard cap on those emissions that's 20 per cent less than was being proposed.

KAREN MAHON: It’s 20—that’s true and so 20 per cent less than massive amounts of pollution is 20 percent less. But it doesn't even—it’s not even state-of-the-art science. This facility is still 31 per cent more polluting than other similar LNG proposals. This is far, far from state of the art.

LL: Did you expect this government to turn down the project?

KAREN MAHON: Look, we don't expect him to say no to every project. They can't. But as an early decision, this was a really bad signal. And again, this isn't just any plant. This is a massive, massive new source of carbon pollution that we're bringing on line that will be a burden for decades.

LL: You talked about when you were at the climate conference in Paris last year. Did you meet with the minister then? Did she give you personal impressions of how she was going to approach her job?

KAREN MAHON: Yes. I was very impressed with the minister. I continue to be impressed with the minister and her staff. I believe that they understand the climate crisis and they want to do the right thing but clearly they have yet to find a way to reconcile their climate ambitions with their economic ambitions.

LL: You've also said that this sends the wrong kind of message to the rest of the world. Tell me what you mean by that.

KAREN MAHON: Well, that's actually the most disturbing part for me because here we are in Canada. We are a relatively rich country with a stable democracy and a progressive government. And if this is the very best that we can do, what does that mean for countries like India or other developing countries that are just trying to get their people electricity and keep them warm? You know we have alternatives here in Canada. We are not in desperate economic straits compared to other countries in the world that have to make the same decisions. So—and they're watching us, right? This is a very fragile time in terms of the global climate politics. We all went to Paris and finally we had a treaty that we could be optimistic about. And now all the countries are watching to each other to see what does this really mean? Are people really going to act differently? And we've just said to the world, no, we're not actually going to act differently. We're going to call ourselves a climate leader. We're going to say we support this treaty but at home, it's business as usual.

LL: Do you have any sense of how this is being viewed in other parts of the world? This decision?

KAREN MAHON: I know it's certainly gotten the attention of other parts of the world. It's gotten coverage in other parts of the world. I mean the question is now whether it will be built. And in fact it may not be built because this is not a strong economic play either. The cost—liquid natural gas is now the same price in Asia as we can produce it. They can produce it locally and the price is in fact lower than the cost of production at this moment. So there's nobody out there saying that this is you know this is a fabulous economic development project. It may not go ahead because the economics are so poor.

LL: Well, then that's the end to your worries, isn't it?

KAREN MAHON: [laughs] Well, if that—yes. If it didn't go ahead, I would be very happy. But the point is the government can't just let the market decide our future here. They've made commitments and they need to honour those commitments. And you know we have a number of big decisions coming up. We have a national climate plan that’s due out this fall and we have a decision on the Kinder Morgan pipeline which is due in December. So we need to see how those decisions come down. And frankly, the government has a carbon budget to spend. We can only put so much carbon into the atmosphere and actually meet any of our international commitments. And so surely we can't build a new gas plant, approve a new pipeline and continue completely down the road as usual. What we need to see is a really strong climate plan that's going to actually take out significant portions of emissions from other sectors of the economy.

LL: There's also the argument though, that the federal government needed to get BC on board to be able to carry out its own commitments. And this was one way to do it. If they said yes to this, they'd be able to have BC on board with their national plan. What do you think of that?

KAREN MAHON: I think that that's entirely likely that that is some of the politics of the moment. But we need to be able to find other ways to trade. We can't be sort of horse trading away our future. We can't say you know we need you on this and therefore we're going to do this other thing which is completely untenable. It might have been good politics actually in that way. But no matter what you—however you slice it, it's bad. It's bad for the planet and it's bad for humanity.

LL: How do you think it is going to be received at the next climate conference?

KAREN MAHON: Well, with some skepticism. I mean we will—I'm very hopeful about the national climate plan that's coming up and I'm very hopeful that this government will deny the Kinder Morgan pipeline. Those are kind of the two hurdles between now and Marrakesh, the next climate summit. And you know I'm hopeful the government will make the right decision there. If they don't, they're going to have a lot of problems both internationally and domestically because people are concerned and people know that we have to really see action on climate.

LL: Ms. Mahon, thank you.

KAREN MAHON: Thanks so much.

LL: Karen Mohan is the executive director of Stand, an environmental advocacy group and she was in Bellingham, Washington. We did request an interview with the Environment Minister Catherine McKenna but we didn't hear back. Now of course the Trudeau government's decision on Pacific Northwest LNG was a hotly anticipated one, not only for environmental groups but for the opposition parties in Ottawa as well. And NDP Leader Tom Mulcair was quick to voice his disapproval.

SOUNDCLIP

I find it galling that the prime minister was there barely 48 hours ago with members of the royal family emoting about the Great Bear Rainforest and saying into the microphones that the Great Bear Rainforest is no place for a crude oil pipeline. He tweeted that the Great Bear Rainforest is no place for a pipeline which would mean whether its crude oil or natural gas. I mean sometimes there is a time lag that makes people forget—when it was 48 hours ago that you were showing great emotion with members of the royal family in that same place—I mean it's beyond comprehension.

LL: NDP Leader Tom Mulcair. John Ivison is the Ottawa bureau chief for Postmedia. He joins me now. Hello.

JOHN IVISON: Hi there.

LL: Now we just heard some Mulcair calling this decision “galling” and “incomprehensible.” What do you make of how the decision is being viewed by the NDP here?

JOHN IVISON: With great glee, I would suggest. There’s nothing much to cheer about if you’re a New Democrat in recent months. But this decision gives them a reason for being here. They've really been—they were outflanked during the election by the Liberals on the left and the right, really squeezed on—the Liberals were offering deeper tax cuts but at the same time they were offering a commitment to spending money on things like infrastructure and making broader commitments for the environment. And so the Liberal—the New Democrats really had nowhere to go. They've got—they've had no real cause celebre, their supporters have been drifting towards the Liberals. One in five have supported the Liberals since the last election, the opinion poll shows. So this actually gives them something to look forward to.

LL: So they leapt upon this and we heard Tom Mulcair there. Do you think it will help the NDP?

JOHN IVISON: I think both the New Democrats and the Greens are going to look at this and as he put it, it's a natural gas pipeline. And the Great Bear Rainforest becomes a flashpoint for people who are concerned about Aboriginal rights or about the future of the planet, they become symbolic in the way that the Keystone Pipeline did, then they stand to benefit politically. I mean you heard the previous speaker was saying I mean I can believe she was surprised that the Liberals made this decision. I suspect she was not really surprised because I think they flagged their strategy long, long ago that they were going to make these kinds of tough decisions.

LL: Tell me about that. Tell me when they flagged that strategy.

JOHN IVISON: Well, I think—going back to 2012, the Liberals were very clear that they were going to be slower than the Conservatives in approving resource projects but they were going to be much quicker than New Democrats. And you heard Trudeau say that in the clip you played. You know they positioned themselves in the middle of these two parties. They would put environmental conditions on but there had to be a balance between the economy and environment. And you know I think we're going to see a lot more of that. The genius, from their point of view, was that they've managed to sit on the fence this long.

LL: Okay.

JOHN IVISON: But eventually they knew they were going to have to come off the fence. And they knew it would upset people.

LL: And they’ve made a choice. What went into making this choice? They must—they knew they were going to alienate someone.

JOHN IVISON: Well, I think the biggest thing this got into is that economically this country is not in a good spot right now. I mean they need to generate economic growth to pay for all the things that they've committed to. And there was a Bloomberg story I think yesterday saying, without 50 billion—[inaudible]—revenue problem.

LL: You were breaking up a bit there, John. Just keep going.

JOHN IVISON: They have a revenue problem and I think they need to create a grievance through resource projects to start generating economic growth. And I think that they've realized that and the calculus now is—I think it’s typical of Liberal governments in this country over the years—you campaign on the left and then you govern from the centre.

LL: I guess I'm wondering though perhaps about the strategy of this particular decision that we know that this government is facing a number of decisions coming up about different pipeline projects both in British Columbia and in Quebec. So do you think there was a strategy built into saying yes to this that that has an impact on the other project decisions that need to be made going forward?

JOHN IVISON: Well, I think the particular strategy in this one—they need to get BC on site for their carbon pricing plan. And my experience with this government is that there a lot of linkages. You know they link one subject to another subject. So for example, if they want the Energy East pipeline to go through Quebec, that may well be linked to the Quebec government wants money for Bombardier. And I think in this case, the British Columbia government, it was a big deal, very big deal for the Christy Clark government, which goes—they go to the polls next May. They need a result on liquefied natural gas. And by giving them a result, it gave the federal government leverage when it comes to BC signing on to a carbon pricing plan. BC have been pretty resistant to the idea that they would increase their carbon tax. They've set it at $30. They’ve been out ahead of the rest of the country. It's higher than anywhere else in the country. Their point was well, why are we going to commit to increasing it when we're already higher than anybody else? And they've frozen that carbon price at $30 for the last four years effectively, in real terms of cut. So I think by getting them, Christy Clark then turned around and said after the federal government gave its approval of this project, we will increase in lockstep with the rest of the provinces once a national carbon price comes in. So I think there was a definite linkage strategy here.

LL: Now we’ve talked about the strategy. We’ve talked about the NDP. What about the Conservatives? What does this decision mean for the Conservatives?

JOHN IVISON: Well, they're delighted about anything that helps the NDP frankly. They cannot ever form a government with the NDP at 13 per cent in the poll. It’s as simple as that. So they—I mean you know you've heard Rona Ambrose come out and say you know we want it actually to happen now. You’ve created a situation where there are 190 conditions and not kill the project. I'm not so sure about that. I think if a project is killed, it'll be more to do with the glut on world markets than the conditions set by the federal government. But secretly, speaking of the Conservatives, they are happy that the NDP [unintelligible] gap on the left wing of the political spectrum because they need to see the NDP coming up north of 15 per cent hopefully not—from their point of view—hopefully north of 20 per cent. So yeah, an NDP recovery, it starts to bring down those double digit gaps between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The latest opinion poll, you've got the Liberals somewhere around 48 per cent, the Conservatives somewhere at 28 per cent and the NDP somewhere at 13 per cent. You know these are rough numbers. But if you start to see momentum of the NDP going up, it's all coming from the Liberal column.

LL: But we are still so far away from an election right now. What do those kinds of poll numbers mean anyway?

JOHN IVISON: It's true. They don't mean anything but the trends are important. You know we are still three years from an election. If you’re a political party, you can't wait until a year out before you start getting your act together.

LL: Do you think there was also any kind of a thought given to whether it was better for them to lose support in BC than Quebec? I mean voter support.

JOHN IVISON: No, not necessarily. I mean I think the projects have come up in that order. I mean you know you've got the LNG project in BC first and then you've got Trans Mountain coming up in December. It’s also BC. Energy East will be sometime in the future. I think what we will probably see, the Northern Gateway project, a government decision needs to be made on that before too long. As to whether they’re going to appeal a court decision, I suspect they’re more or less inclined to get involved in that one. You know Justin Trudeau was out with the royals last weekend in the Great Bear Rainforest saying it’s no place for a crude oil pipeline. And that—the current plan, the Northern Gateway still goes through the Great Bear Rainforest. So I think there will be wins and losses for the proponents of these schemes. There will be wins and losses for the environmental groups and the First Nations. I don't think that was a calculus made regionally per se.

LL: Is this then flip flopping on the part of the Liberals or is this just politics as usual?

JOHN IVISON: It’s politics as usual. This is not floppy. They signaled long in advance that they would make tough decisions on pipelines and Justin Trudeau has been very consistent saying one of his chief responsibilities is to get Canada’s natural resources to market.

LL: John Ivison, we'll leave it there. Thank you very much.

JOHN IVISON: Thank you.

LL: Bye-bye. John Ivison is the Ottawa bureau chief for Postmedia. Now we want to hear from you. What do you make of the Liberal government's LNG pipeline approval? Tweet us @thecurrentCBC, post a comment on this story on our Facebook page or e-mail us by clicking on the contact link at www.cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Sting]

LL: The news is next. Then Montreal's had to grapple with a debate that's already raged in many different jurisdictions: the banning of pitfalls in the wake of a deadly attack. We're asking whether banning specific breeds really works in our next half hour. I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

Stop targeting pit bulls! Evidence shows bans don't work, say critics

Guests: Berry Vrbanovic, Bronwen Dickey

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch and you're listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Still to come.

SOUNDCLIP

[Yelling] Attica. Attica. Attica. Attica. Attica. Attica. Attica.

LL: That's Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. It's been 45 years this month since Attica became a byword for excessive use of police force. I'll speak with the author of an acclaimed new history of the New York state prison revolt at Attica and the massacre that followed. Blood in the Water in half an hour. But before that, putting public safety first or barking up the wrong tree?

SOUNDCLIP

My duty as mayor of Montreal is to make sure that first of all I'm working for all Montrealers and I'm there to make sure that they feel safe and they are safe. This is a prevention too. And one is too many.

When Montreal mayor Denis Coderre said that one is too many earlier this week, he was referring to the death last June of a Montreal woman named Christiane Vadnais. She died in her backyard after being mauled by a dog that was thought to be a pit bull. Though police haven't confirmed the dog's breed, Christiane Vadnais’ family called for a ban on pit bulls in the wake of her death. And this week Montreal passed just such a bylaw.

SOUNDCLIP

Look at all the numbers. We had to act and I'm sorry. I mean there are some people who asked us to react when there's a death. Well, we've done it too. But there's also a lot of statistic that shows that a lot of dog bites are coming from them and if you talk to surgeons, they will tell you that the damage that can provoke those bites by the type of dog are pit bulls. So we, I think we took our responsibility.

LL: The Montreal bylaw bans the new ownership of pit bulls. Current owners of the dogs will have to get special permits and will face new restrictions. The ban has been celebrated by some but others have decried it including the SPCA and the singer-songwriter Cyndi Lauper who posted a message of opposition on her Facebook page. And now members of Christiane Vadnais’ family say they're getting blowback from angry dog owners. Her sister Lise Vadnais spoke with Radio-Canada’s Alain Gravel.

SOUNDCLIP

[Through translator] Listen. About 50 per cent of the messages I get are nice messages, encouraging, congratulating. And the other 50 per cent are mean messages, denigrating. Yesterday, one was from a teacher who invited me to their class to explain to their students why I was a pit bull killer. I also got a message from someone who called themselves JoJo—because you know they don't use their real names—who said that in any case, my sister probably didn't defend herself very well because she herself would have been capable of fighting off the pit bull. It's appalling business what these people are writing to someone who's lost her sister. It's like they have no empathy. The only thing that matters in their life is their dog. That's not normal. That's not what we want as a society. We want to love our animals but not more than humans. It means those people prefer their dogs to their little neighbours who might get bitten or even their own children because we know that often the pit bulls attack their own families.

LL: That’s Lise Vadnais speaking with Radio-Canada’s Alain Gravel. But pit bull owners in the city are reeling. Amanda McKernan owns a pit bull named Kristal. Under the new bylaw, Kristal will have to be muzzled at all times, even on the balcony.

SOUNDCLIP

Yeah. Crystal. [claps] Up and at ‘em. Come here! [blows kisses] Here, I’m going to get her some treats. I can get her to do—[chuckles] I’m concerned that a pit bull’s deemed a dangerous animal. Why? Why is my dog dangerous? I feel for that family and if I was a part of it I would be completely distraught. But at the same time, when the husky killed the baby, the owner was charged. There was no bylaw outlying huskies. I don't understand why when it’s a husky, the owner’s responsible but when it's a pit bull, the dog is responsible and we must outlaw them all. Kris has lived in the Sud-Ouest area her whole life. She had absolutely nothing to do in the training of that dog.

LL: And there you hear some reaction to the new pit bull ban in Montreal. Several other jurisdictions in Canada also ban pit bulls. In Kitchener, Ontario, pit bulls have been banned since the late 1990s when a spate of attacks prompted the city to react. Berry Vrbanovic is the mayor of Kitchener. He joins me this morning from Toronto. Hello.

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Good morning. How are you?

LL: Fine, thank you. What do you think of Montreal’s new ban of pit bulls?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Well, you know certainly this is the kind of issue that every community needs to determine for themselves based on their experiences and so on. In our case, back in the mid to late nineties and since then, in the entire province of Ontario we determined that for a public safety point of view it was necessary to ban pit bulls. We were having numerous experiences. Probably the most significant one culminated with a pit bull mauling a dog being walked in the area of a veterinary clinic and then basically going on a bit of a rampage through numerous areas of our city causing several schools to be put into lockdown. And finally the dog being shot across four lanes of traffic by ERU officers from our police department—with a few bullets actually bouncing off the pit bull’s skull at the time. So it was a very scary experience at the time in our community. We had again numerous incidents of either people or dog attacks. And the community was expecting the council of the day to act. We had the full support of our humane society. In fact, Dr. Hess, who was the veterinarian in charge of the humane society at the time, was a strong advocate of the ban. And back in those days, we actually needed to go to the province to get special legislation for Kitchener and Waterloo in order to put the ban in place.

LL: Mayor, I’m just wondering, what has happened to the incidents of dog or cat attacks since you imposed the ban?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Certainly in terms of pit bull attacks, they've gone down significantly. Obviously we grandfathered the existing ones at the time and because of the time that's passed since then, there really aren’t any grandfathered ones in the community anymore. We work—if any do move into the community now because of a provincial ban, we actually work to send them, to get out of province dog centre.

LL: Okay. You said the number of pit bull attacks are down. What about other dog attacks?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: You know what I couldn't give you specific numbers right now in terms of other dog attacks. Listen. There’s without question that there are you know many breeds that bite and I know that pit bull owners will say well really this is an issue about owners. Absolutely it is. But unfortunately it's very difficult to regulate owners. And based on the issues we were experiencing in our community and the type of owners—generally, not in all cases—that we were seeing with pit bulls who were often bred as fighting dogs, who had various physical characteristics that made them a greater threat to public safety. And the community, we deemed it necessary to take the action that we did.

LL: But mayor, I'm surprised that you—maybe you are but you may not know—you're not keeping track of other dog attacks. If this is—

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Absolutely we do at the humane society. Any that are reported obviously.

LL: Well then if there are continuing to be dog bites—the critics of the ban say it doesn't reduce the number of dog bites—shouldn't you be doing something about that as well, instead of being breed specific?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: So we do actually have a dangerous dog bylaw in place as well. So we do have procedures in place to deal with other dogs that bite on a regular basis. We have a committee that reviews and puts conditions on those dogs. But again with the pit bull, in our community, much like Montreal, much like Winnipeg and Edmonton before us, we saw specific incidents and public safety concerns that forced us to ast specifically with respect to this breed. And you have to remember, it was a breed, it's a cross-breed that was actually created as fighting dogs. And you know in Kitchener, I don’t know what Montreal did, but we modeled our bylaw after Winnipeg and Edmonton at the time and did not ban purebred American Staffordshire terriers because we weren’t seeing that that kind of problem.

LL: Now Ontario, as we said, has had a ban on pit bulls since 2005 but a provincial member of parliament Cheri DiNovo has been against the law since it was introduced. She is planning once again within the next couple of weeks to introduce a bill to strike down the present law. And we asked her what she'd like to see in its place. Have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

I think we need you know really severe sanctions against irresponsible owners. Those who either train dogs and try to use them as weapons no matter what the breed, those who are irresponsible owners who let their dogs run wild without control, off leash, et cetera, don't license their animals. There should be a range of reactions to bad ownership. And in fact, this is the case in Calgary which has really the gold standard in Canada for animal legislation. It on one side educates people about dog behaviour in dogs independent of breed and on the other hand, holds owners responsible because it's really the owner that we need to be looking at, not the breed or the dog.

LL: Mayor, what do you think of that proposal?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Well, you know certainly any time that additional tools can be made available to municipalities through the Municipal Act to deal with various issues but that's always welcome by municipalities. At the same time, I think it should also be upon municipality who deal with these kinds of issues at a grassroots level, to have the ability to have the kind of ban that we had in place initially through special legislation that ultimately got well put in place because the province deemed it a significant public safety issue across the province. And certainly I would you know more than welcome the opportunity to speak with the MPP about her thoughts and why I think you know the direction she is going can be beneficial. But to suggest that the ban should somehow be lifted, I think would be dangerous for the province.

LL: So you're saying that just going after the owners themselves wouldn't be enough.

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Based on the experiences we've had in our community, and again we you know we saw these dogs being—in many cases, again, not in all—but in many cases you know not being well taken care of, being used by the criminal element and creating quite frankly safety concerns in our community. And based on that, we deemed it necessary to act, as many other communities have before us and since then.

LL: Now I know that you said the humane society supported your move in Kitchener to do this. But the SPCA in Montreal does not support what Montreal is doing. The RSPCA in the UK has been in opposition to the ban there for many, many years and you’ve been dealing with this debate for a long time. What do you say to those who say banning pit bulls is cruel and leads to the needless death of many innocent animals?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: You know what I would say to you is that our responsibility as municipalities is to deal with issues of public safety and I understand that this is an issue—you know I have been involved with it for over 20 years as a local elected leader—that generates you know great passion particularly among pit bull owners. And there’s no question in my mind that there are some very responsible and good pit bull owners and some great stories that we've all heard. But we've also heard some very disturbing dog attacks—particularly pit bull attacks—that have led to death. And quite frankly, it's you know our responsibility as elected leaders at the local level to make sure our communities are safe. And the kinds of experiences we were seeing, particularly the one I described earlier, is not reasonable in a large urban environment today.

LL: And what do you say to those owners of innocent dogs, of dogs who aren’t misbehaved, of pit bulls, who are put down. What would you say to them?

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Well, again in the province of Ontario, people should know that they can't have a pit bull. Unless they’re moving into the province, they should be aware of that. And so there's all sorts of options that are available. As I said, we work with our humane society to ship the dogs to an out of province dog centre. And you know they get home—housed there for the balance of their lives.

LL: Mayor Vrbanovic, thank you.

BERRY VRBANOVIC: Thank you.

LL: Berry Vrbanovic is the mayor of Kitchener, Ontario and we reached him in Toronto. I am Laura Lynch and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current. Well, writer Bronwen Dickey has been watching the controversy over pit bulls closely. She is the author of a new book titled Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon and we have reached Bronwen Dickey today in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hello.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Hi. Thanks for having me.

LL: You listened to the mayor. What do you think of what he had to say about banning pit bulls?

BRONWEN DICKEY: Well, part of what he said was frankly stunning in that you know the comment about pit bulls—bullets bouncing off pit bulls’ heads—I mean that frankly frames the dogs as being somehow supernatural or monstrous. That's a completely [unintelligible] statement so I was really stunned to hear him say something like that. Also, I certainly noticed him doing kind of the typical shell game with regards to bite numbers in terms of yes, you know pit bull bites go down but other bites we don't know. I mean that's kind of a typical thing you see with people who have passed bans. Yes it is true. You can't be bitten by a dog that doesn't exist. But if it's overall, bites have gone up, then your community is not any safer than it was before. And that's what we've seen over and over again with these bans. I've studied this for seven years. And the science is incredibly clear on this. Studies in the UK and Belgium and the Netherlands and Italy and Germany and Spain have all concluded that this type of legislation does not work and does not make communities safer.

LL: Your argument being it doesn't make it communities any safer because other dogs are still biting people.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Exactly. Well, what we know from the literature and from over you know 25 years of studies and animal behaviour is that the biggest factor in dog bites and especially serious dog bite injuries and even fatalities, have to do with how the dogs are cared for and controlled by their humans. So if you take the dog out of the equation, the problematic relationship between the dog and the human is just going to be there with another dog. So basically humans have not learned any of the lessons that would contribute to a reduction in bites. You see that for instance in places like Calgary, where they've instituted a responsible ownership bylaw that really zeroes in on problematic owners. They saw a huge reduction in dog bites. So when the mayor said you really can't regulate problem owners, that's just not true. There have been many places that have done that and seen tremendous success.

LL: Alright. But given all of that then, Montreal is certainly not the first but it has now joined a number of cities, jurisdictions who are banning pit bulls. What were your first thoughts when you heard about what Montreal was doing?

BRONWEN DICKEY: Disappointment because you don't have to love these dogs or like these dogs to look at the science and just see that this approach isn't going to work and that's why so many places have repealed these bans rather than passing them. In the US, I think over 164 cities and towns have repealed their breed base laws. We have over 20 states that now have statewide pre-emptions against these laws because all the people in the animal sciences and all the people who work with animals for a living have told us that this is not effective. So yes, there was a ban passed in Ontario in 2005. But as we've seen and you know look at Toronto—bites are up in Toronto. They have—

LL: Where did you get that information from?

BRONWEN DICKEY: That information comes from 2015. It's an editorial in one of the major Toronto papers. So yeah it's just—it's really unfortunate. So you know I understand that a horrible tragedy happens and people get very upset and they want something to be done but that's the time to really consult the experts and think about a holistic approach that will really solve the problem instead of dividing the community and stoking fear.

LL: You heard the mayor of Kitchener say that his main preoccupation is with the public safety of his citizens.t That's what he's there to protect.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Absolutely.

LL: And he believes that this is maybe—maybe it won't even solve the whole problem but it solves a problem.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Right. And I would just say that we have so much evidence that that just isnèt true. And I would agree with him that his obligation is to public safety and that's why consulting the experts is so important because you know he can't be expected to be you know an animal behaviour expert or a public health epidemiologist or any of those things. But his duty to the public is to consult those people so that you know he can help pass legislation that truly will keep people safe instead of just kind of putting a gloss on things and maybe making people feel better for a little bit but nothing has really changed in terms of safety.

LL: Now we heard of an Ontario politician proposing an alternative. What do you think? Is there a better—what is the best way? Is it going after the owners? And how do you do that? How do you make that effective?

BRONWEN DICKEY: Absolutely. Well, there was a 2013 survey of 36 major Canadian municipalities that showed that increased enforcement of existing breed neutral laws lead to the most significant reduction in bites So increased enforcement of leash laws, containment laws, checking in with people who have been cited for other kind of more minor animal-related nuisance stuff—that actually had a much, much larger reduction in bites. So those things are easy to do. Multnomah Country, Oregon did that. They have a program wherein you know if a dog menaces someone or seems to be a problem, animal control officers will then check in with that dog and the owner and place restrictions on the owner and kind of over time you know kind of keep the dog on their radar so that these things don't escalate into a tragedy. The dog that killed Mrs. Vadnais, you know this dog had been already bitten two other people. It should have been on animal control's radar. There should have been some kind of intervention before this escalated into a tragedy. And the fact that that wasn't done was a horrendous mistake.

LL: Who is at greatest risk of getting bit by a dog?

BRONWEN DICKEY: The greatest risk by far, what we know from epidemiological research, children ages five to nine are at by far the greatest risk because they are mobile, they are curious, they're very interested in animals. They're very active. They're not quite old enough to understand when a dog might be giving them signals to kind of back away. So they are by far at greatest risk and there needs to be very comprehensive public education about never leaving children unsupervised with dogs and kind of educating kids about how to safely interact with dogs.

LL: But if they’re that young, they probably don't get it.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Yeah. I mean that supervision piece is so critical. Boys, for whatever reason, boys are at greater risk than girls. Maybe because of you know sports or various activities that young boys might be involved in. But I think the education piece is critical.

LL: Even if you do take all the measures that you suggest in terms of education, in terms of going after the owners, will there ever be a day when you can absolutely guarantee that there won't be a dog attack?

BRONWEN DICKEY: No. No. And that is part of the concession that we have to make in order to live with dogs who, let’s remember, enrich our lives in so many ways. These tragedies are horrific and terrifying when they happen but they are vanishingly rare. You look at—you know the Canadian numbers, since the 1960s only about 45 people have been killed by dogs in all of Canada. That's not even one a year. At most it's one year. And so these are incredibly, incredibly rare events. And it should be noted that of those dogs, over half were husky types or sled dogs. And there has never been an outcry about them. Only one was confirmed to have been from a pit bull breed.

LL: Okay. Just briefly then, because we've been talking about the pit bull in terms of preventing vicious attacks, you call it iconic. What makes a pit bull iconic?

BRONWEN DICKEY: I mean that's kind of whatever your interpretation is. It's iconic because so many people have invested so much in kind of the dog as a symbol. Whether they love the dog, whether they hate the dog, many people, most people, have some kind of feeling or opinion about pit bulls. So that's definitely why I call that an American icon. And because in the early 20th century there was this kind of illustrious history of the pit bull in Hollywood and in advertising. They were kind of seen as the quintessential American dog.

LL: Well, I'm sure the debate will rage on. Thank you very much.

BRONWEN DICKEY: Thanks so much.

LL: Bronwyn Dickey is the author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon. She was in Charlottesville, Virginia. Do you support a ban on pit bulls? Tell us where you stand on this. Tweet us @thecurrentCBC or me @lauralynchCBC. Find us on Facebook, e-mail us from our website www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour, tensions and temperatures were running high in Attica Prison 45 years ago. A prisoner uprising and the bloody crackdown were products of their time but they still have resonance today. I'm Laura Lynch. And you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

45 years after Attica massacre tensions in U.S. prisons still high

Guests: Heather Ann Thompson

LL: Hello, I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to the Friday edition of The Current on CBC Radio One.

SOUNDCLIP

Your instructions are that your weapon is not to be taken. [Unintelligible] to be taken. You’re to meet force with force. There have been some of the prison personnel severely injured here this morning. And we certainly don’t want to see any of our people hurt.

LL: A grim day in the history of the American penal system. It was 45 years ago this month, September the 13^th, 1971, that hundreds of New York state troopers under clouds of gas ended a four-day prisoner uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility. And it was a bloody ending. More than 33 prisoners and nine hostages were killed that day. And what happened in Attica—the massacre itself and the uprising that led to it—still has very real reverberations in the US prison system today. Heather Ann Thompson is a professor of history at the University of Michigan. She's revisited Attica for a new and widely acclaimed book titled Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Heather Ann Thompson joins me from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hello.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Hi. Great to be here.

LL: Let's start here. Tell me what the conditions were like in the prison, in the time leading up to the riot.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, they were very grim. And indeed much like today, prisoners are not just being contained in prisons, they are also being deprived of basic human rights and that was the same. 1971, you had prisoners who were relegated to one square of toilet paper a day, very little food, 63 cents a day was feeding them. They had very poor medical care. Prisoners were losing all their teeth because they had no dental care and basic human rights—such as the ability to practice your own religion—were just not there. And so they would—they tried very desperately to get their needs met, again, first through the system, to no avail.

LL: How tense was the prison in the hours before the riot broke out there?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: So the night before, there was a relatively calm scene out in one of the rec yards. Everyone is enjoying their very, very limited time out in the yard and there was a group of young men who were horsing around sort of playing football, kind of horsing around and management got concerned about it and called one of them over. One of those COs called one of these guys over and this young man had just been locked in a cell, what they called keep lock, basically on a shut down solitary kind of existence for a few days. And he was being told he had to go back into keep lock and he erupted. He did something that usually never happened in a prison which is that he struck the officer. And very quickly it was clear that there was something new going on. The prisoners were fed up. They were reaching their breaking point. But that was really the end of it. What escalated it was the management decision to retaliate against not just that young man but his entire company where he bunked. And so there's you know 80 or so prisoners in this tunnel. They think they're going to go out through a door into the rec yard, as is common practice at that time after breakfast. And instead the doors are locked and the corrections officers in charge of them don't know why, the prisoners don't know why. And all of a sudden, everyone feels a bit like a sitting duck. They panic and start moving away from each other and start trying to grab anything they can to protect themselves and all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose. The corrections officers are assaulted, people start to grab onto anything they can find to start smashing windows and trying to get essentially out of that hallway meant trying to get into the central area of the prison that controlled the whole prison which they succeeded in doing. So within a very short period of time, the entire prison is you know a scene of chaos. People grabbing hostages, people grabbing weapons, meaning you know baseball bats or very you know crude weapons and trying to protect themselves. But that quickly morphs into one of the most important human rights protests in American history and a story that itself is very remarkable.

LL: And we will get there but let's get a few more details. So you say the prisoners were taking hostages. How many did they take?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, it's actually—it's interesting, it's not altogether clear how many were initially taken because it is so chaotic. We do know that there are more than 40. Forty some, but many of these guys end up being released. The prisoners release them if they have been injured and so that they can get medical care. But ultimately, there's about 39 perhaps 40 hostages in the yard who are kept very carefully because the prisoners know that if they're going to want to negotiate with the state, they need to have something to negotiate with. And that is these men.

LL: Tell me what you mean when you say “were kept carefully.”

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: So although the first minutes of the uprising are complete chaos and what one would describe as a riot, within a few minutes, a few—really not even an hour, you have folks moving towards one central area which is D yard and taking their hostages into that area and then a decision is made that those guys need to be protected. So two rings of prisoners, the Muslim, black Muslim prisoners in the yard, surround them to protect them, to make sure that no harm comes to them, gives them blankets and mattresses and makes sure that they are fed and so forth. Meanwhile, mobilizing themselves to elect representatives who will then speak on their behalf to the state.

LL: It's quite interesting. Quite quickly they become quite—I suppose a society unto themselves and they begin operating like one.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Yes indeed. Despite that initial chaos, it is remarkable how quickly the yard becomes a very organized tent city. There is a medical station set up to tend to people's wounds. There's a food station. Each cellblock elects two representatives to go up to this negotiating table so that there is you know equal representation from all parts of the prison and everything is being translated up at that negotiating table into Spanish so that all of the prisoners, including Spanish speaking prisoners, could know what was happening. And in this very organized what is now a rebellion, it's very clear that the state and really the world is going to see for the first time what conditions are like inside a prison.

LL: And that is because there is a group of observers that is brought together to act as a bridge between prisoners and officials. So tell me about them.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Yeah. So the prisoners are very well aware that they need someone to act as observers, as someone who will make sure that the state negotiates in good faith. So they request several high profile Americans, who by high profile I mean men such as William Kunstler, who was a very famous Marxist lawyer who defended a lot of social movement activists, reporters like Tom Wicker from the New York Times who had written columns sympathetic to prisoners. They invite these guys to help them negotiate. The state in turn adds its own men to that group. But at the end of the day, that group of you know more than 30 men will become instrumental in trying to help these guys negotiate a peaceful settlement with the state and supporting their desire—the men and the yard's desire—to have the media come in and to really shine a light on what goes on behind prison walls.

LL: Okay. So what were the key demands of the prisoners?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, ultimately, those are hashed out over a few days because they need to be agreed upon by all of the men in the yard. There is sort of a consensus decision making process. And they change over time, but ultimately there's about 32 key demands that are again, quite basic, such as making sure that if you're forced to labour in a prison that you're remunerated. Because again, people needed money to get enough food, people needed money for every basic necessity. You know improvements to the parole rules. At Attica, you could get parole but you were then handed an outdated phone book and told to write employers and you couldn't leave until one of them hired you which of course meant that people couldn't get out on parole. Improvements to the medical care, the hiring of guards who spoke Spanish, very, very basic kind of demands that would have improved life immeasurably but would not have cost the state very much.

LL: And watching all of this from a distance is President Richard Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller and they both said that Attica was part of a black revolutionary movement in America, not just a prison riot. Were they right?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: From Nixon's point of view, this was a very important affront to the order, to the status quo. And so he did see it as a conspiracy. Indeed, Nelson Rockefeller, the government of you know of New York, the governor of New York sees this as a conspiracy. But in fact, this was a group of men, some more politically active than others, who were responding to the conditions under which they lived.

LL: What was the mood like in the prison yard then, in the hours that led up to the assault?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, a great deal of fear of course because at any moment the men inside understood that the prison could be retaken by force. But also you know almost a tragic degree of naiveté. They really believe that the state values its own employees, the men that they have held hostage who are both guards and civilian employees. And they believe that at the end of the day, the state will do the right thing because it values its own people. And that proves to be a serious miscalculation on their part because the state is determined to take this prison with force even though all of its own people, even the observers it has placed in the prisoners saying don't do that because if you do, it'll be a massacre.

LL: And even some of the hostages were saying that.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Indeed because of course after four days in the yard, four days of intense negotiations, you know the hostages grew more fearful as well. They understood that these were basic demands that the state could meet. And at the end, they're telling the media look, you know Governor Rockefeller you need to do what these folks need and indeed you need to come to Attica. You need to endorse that they can surrender without reprisals. You need to—you know you need to show that you'll stand by your word. And of course their cries go unheeded as well.

LL: And so while all of this negotiating is going on inside the yard, outside the yard troops—state troopers, others are massing to mount an assault. Did the prisoners know an assault was imminent?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: For many, many decades, the state has maintained that the prisoners had every opportunity to surrender on the morning of the 13th and that they essentially chose not to and that's why the retaking was inevitable. For starters, the only reason the retaking hadn't happened sooner was because of the presence of observers inside. So the intent to go in was always there from the beginning. But more importantly, on that morning, I found documentation that the governor's office deliberately did not give these men an ultimatum. They led them to believe that negotiations were still in play. And so the guys in the yard while being fearful and worried that negotiations may be souring, they had no idea that the prison was going to be taken in the next few minutes. And most importantly, they had no idea that it was going to be taken with firepower because that had never happened before.

LL: So tell me about the assault on the prison.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Outside of the prison for those four days, troopers from every single battalion around upstate New York are converging on Attica. For four days—also corrections officers from all the other prisons—for four days they are not sleeping. They are arming themselves with every weapon. Personal weapons, weapons being handed out of the backs of trucks, supply trucks, without any regard to serial numbers or record keeping. And they're angry. They are being fueled on a toxic cocktail of rumours coming from organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and they are ready to go in and they are itching for revenge and these are the guys who are going to be sent in by the governor. Before they go in though, first there is a toxic, toxic amount of gas dumped on the yard. This is actually a powder. It clings to everyone's nasal passages. And as prisoners and hostages alike are being mowed down by this gas, retching, throwing up, blinded, that's when the troopers go in and corrections officers go in with guns blazing. And before they go in, they take off their identifying badges so that whatever's going to happen next you know is going to be grim.

LL: And at this point some of the prisoners have taken hostages and are standing with them as the forces come in guns—as you say—guns blazing.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, and indeed this goes to the heart of this idea of optimism. The prisoners were naïve to think that if they went up on the catwalk, if they went up and surrounded a select group of hostages with so-called executioners at their side, prisoners with these handmade weapons around these guards, that they would somehow be sending a message to the state of New York that if you come in you're going to kill your own. In other words, it was the sort of last ditch effort to keep the state police out, to keep an attack from happening once of course they realize it's imminent—finally realize it’s imminent. But it was a serious miscalculation because no sooner do they do this then the assault begins. And that is one of the reasons why so many hostages ultimately die in this assault.

LL: And how many people would die during the retaking of the prison?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, there's 29 prisoners who die of their injuries, gunshot injuries during this retaking. Eventually 10 hostages will die, nine initially and then one more later. And as significantly, a total of 128 people are shot very severely. Some of them six, seven bullet wounds. And I must say, as if that is not horrific enough, that's really just a prelude to what will become really as people at the time termed it, an orgy of brutality, that will then go on for days and weeks and months thereafter in retaliation for the prisoners having taken the prison.

LL: And we will get to that. But first I want to play you a secret recording that took place between New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and President Nixon after the massacre. Have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

RICHARD NIXON: Tell me this, is this—are these primarily blacks that you’re dealing with?

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: Oh yes. The whole thing was led by the blacks.

RICHARD NIXON: I’ll be darned. Are all the prisoners that were killed blacks? Or are there any whites?

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: I haven’t got that report, but I have to—I would say, just offhand, yes.

RICHARD NIXON: Yeah.

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: We did it, though, only when they were in the process of murdering the guards, or when they were attacking our people as they came in to get the guards.

RICHARD NIXON: You had to do it.

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: And otherwise we recaptured all the cell blocks and so forth without shooting a shot. And no troopers were wounded. One of them—well, one of them was in the leg. But—

RICHARD NIXON: Only one trooper was wounded?

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: That’s right.

RICHARD NIXON: Good, good, good.

NELSON ROCKEFELLER: It really was a beautiful operation.

LL: And you heard that. That was New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller calling this massacre “a beautiful operation.” Why was President Nixon so interested to know if the uprising was led by “the blacks,” as he called the prisoners?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, we now know having listened to quite a few of Nixon's tapes that he was obsessed with this idea that he needed to contain African-Americans and specifically any black demands on equality and their freedom struggle that had been going on for now a very long time in the United States. This was his particular obsession. He was determined that that would be stopped in its tracks and if the cost was that there would be blacks killed, that appears to have been fine with him. The obsession though was not just Nixon's. And it really was interesting to see how Rockefeller himself was absolutely willing to say this was a beautiful operation despite the fact so many people had been shot and so many people had been you know shot severely because of his own disregard for who these people were.

LL:

What was the official reason given for the assault?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, the official reason was that he prisoners inside did not surrender and give up the hostages. But of course that's where the research into this book became really interesting to me because again, they had already determined that they were going to retake the prison that morning really regardless of what the prisoners might do and deliberately did not give them an ultimatum. So they did not know that negotiations had terminated, that this was the end of the line. And so one can only imagine that this was Rockefeller's decision to really draw a line in the sand. He was going to take control of this prison no matter what, even if that meant killing his own and frankly we now have evidence that he was told that the hostages would also be killed and he did it anyway.

LL: Now some of the things that you describe in the immediate aftermath are gruesome—and I would warn listeners about that –but tell us what happened to the wounded prisoners after the assault was over.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: You're talking about a level of disregard for human life and a level of torture that was very difficult, for me anyway, to find the vocabulary to describe. So what I do to the best of my ability is I let the people, some of the people who survived it or witnessed it tell you themselves what happened. There was not only the shootings that had preceded the torture but during the torture, it meant everything from forcing these men to run a gauntlet while being beaten when they have multiple bullet wounds to refusing them medical care to actually preventing medical care—medics from treating them. Dumping them over onto the ground, kicking them, hitting them, urinating in wounds, playing Russian roulette with them and this goes on and on and on. And indeed on the outside, everyone suspects that this might be going on, but prisons are such closed institutions. It's almost impossible to get in to try to protect these guys.

LL: I have to say that one of the things I found most disturbing was the behaviour of prison doctors, the people who you think are supposed to be helping the wounded.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Exactly. And you begin to understand why the rebellion happens in the first place. The two prison doctors at Attica who had caused so much harm prior to the uprising play a particularly diabolical role in this what we call the rehousing of the prisoners, in these moments after the retaking. Just brutal and very unsympathetic but you know the thing about this story is that there's also many heroes and heroines. There are doctors who try to come in, they try to help. They are trying to perform surgeries in the most spartan of conditions and they are traumatized by what they see and so traumatized by the torture that they see that they will try to tell their story publicly again and again, even though no one is listening, and ultimately will come and testify on behalf of the prisoners years later.

LL: So we know that at this point the eyes of the nation are on Attica, as they had been for several days, so they knew that the retaking was happening. How did Americans initially respond to the loss of life at Attica?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, of course this is another moment where you just sort of sit back in a bit of awe that why was it that we did not come away with Attica with this idea that the prisoners were trying to do the right thing and law enforcement was the one who had created so much harm, so much violence? Indeed, instead we come away from this feeling more hostile to prisoners than we ever had in American history. We start moving towards giving law enforcement more power not less and we build the largest prison nation on the globe. How can that be? Well, the answer is that the state of New York, even though it has just killed so many people and wounded and maimed so many others, it steps out in front of the prison and tells all of those reporters that something entirely different happened. It says that the prisoners are the ones that killed the hostages and not only that, that one of them, this very large black man, in fact his nickname was Big Black, had actually castrated one of the guards and stuffed his testicles in his mouth. Well, of course none of this had happened. But that story went out on the front page of the New York Times, the LA Times, every AP paper in between. And it did an enormous damage, disservice to what had really happened, but it definitely turned the nation sour on this idea that prisoners deserved protection or sympathy. But ultimately the record is set straight. The world is told that indeed law enforcement has killed all of these people on the 13^th, not the prisoners. But the damage was done. Number one, to this day folks will tell you that the prisoners are the ones who killed the hostages at Attica. And even when it was corrected, the state spun yet another narrative that well, if that was true, if anyone died it was unintentional and it was as the result of crossfire for the hostages and self-defence when it came to killing the prisoners.

LL: Were then—were any corrections officers, national guardsmen, state troopers—were any of them ever charged, ever arrested for what happened in the massacre or the aftermath with torturing of prisoners?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: No and indeed that's why the book—the first third of the book is really about the uprising and a retelling of that from multiple perspectives. But the majority of the book is about the aftermath, precisely because what happens after Attica is this investigation as to who committed the harm there. And all attention gets focused on the prisoners. No state trooper or corrections officer will ever stand trial even though they killed so many people and wounded so many. And we now know that that was not coincidental, that in fact, the state police went to great lengths to cover up the crimes committed at Attica and the governor's office was complicit in that cover up.

LL: Attica still stands. There is a memorial out in front of it. But what is it like inside Attica Prison today. Did reforms happen?

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Well, in the immediate aftermath of Attica, there are important reforms and they should not be minimized. In some respects, the New York prison system has more humane conditions than several others for that reason. But those improvements are rolled back or rendered meaningless by this incredibly punitive turn that this nation takes in the wake of Attica. As I say, you know Attica becomes this kind of emotional fuel for this punitive, punitive spirit that's going to lead us to mandatory minimums and ultimately to mass incarceration. So today, Attica still stands. It looks exactly as it did not just in 1971 but back in 1932 when it was first open. It is an archaic site of trauma. It is more brutal in there than it was even in 1971. The justice department is constantly being asked to investigate guard brutality there. And now, there's a real push to shut Attica on behalf of former prisoners and legal advocates.

LL: Heather Ann Thompson, thank you for such a compelling retelling of the history of Attica—not only a retelling but telling us things that we didn't even know about what happened.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Thank you so much for letting me share the book with you.

LL: Goodbye.

HEATHER ANN THOMPSON: Goodbye.

LL: Heather Ann Thompson is the author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy and she was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. That is our program for today. Tune into The Current Monday. Anna Maria will talk with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright. His new book is called The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State. And also hear her conversation with the man known as the toy smuggler. Rami Adham smuggles toys into Syria to bring some joy to the children of Aleppo. I'm Laura Lynch and thank you for listening to the Friday edition of The Current.

[Music: Ending theme]

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