Abstract
Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt by Dr. Orisanmi Burton is an important unpacking of prison rebellions over thirteen months in 1970 and 1971 across New York state (what he calls the Long Attica Revolt). These rebellions preceded the Attica uprising on September 9, 1971 that the state violently repressed on September 13, 1971. Dr. Burton counters the oft-told, mainstream historical tellings of Attica as a one-off rebellion of incarcerated men over awful prison conditions that deradicalize the events and “pander(s) to white audiences that devalue, criminalize, and assail complex and protracted Black insurgency while craving explosive spectacles of Black suffering and death” (p. 80). Dr. Burton's ambitious project is one of the most important interdisciplinary academic works of this generation (see Ball, 2023; Shanahan, 2024; Besteman, 2024, among others for insightful reviews) and one that criminology and criminal justice (CCJ) scholars must study to understand our role in what he calls a protracted war.
Tip of the Spear is a product of what Dr. Burton calls “archival war” (p. 16). He does not solely rely on the “archives of white supremacy and repression,” i.e., documents from “the state that seeks to criminalize and incarcerate Black radical knowledge while stabilizing its own legitimacy” (p. 15). In understanding that, he analyzes these sources ‘through a rebellious and disloyal interpretive paradigm.’ These documents, on their own, are not to be trusted as “objective.” Instead, Burton relies on what he calls “Black radical ways of knowing” as “the primary sources of this study” (p. 8). This required relying on “the recollections, letters, treatises, manuals, journalism, testimony, and even the rumors, legends, and ‘conspiracy theories’” of “people who understood themselves, and were understood by the state, to be revolutionaries” (p. 8). Sources like these have long been dismissed as biased in orthodox criminology, while contradictorily, the ‘archives of white supremacy and repression’ are viewed as objective.
Tip of the Spear, directly and indirectly questions many of the fundamental beliefs of orthodox CCJ. Dr. Burton comes to understand the prison as a protracted site of an ongoing war against Black radicalism and revolutionaries, and vice versa, a counter-war for said revolutionaries. He is rejecting the oft-taken for granted belief by many criminologists as to why prisons exist. Prisons, to Dr. Burton and rebels such as George Jackson, are not sites to house those who commit, so-called “crime,” but instead are a continuation of an ongoing war against a captive population, “historical Prisoners of War” (p. 13)-enslaved Africans and their descendants that were continuing to rebel in cities across the US. He later describes the role of prisons “as a site of incubation for technologies that are central to the reproduction of empire” (p. 202).
Dr. Burton's choice of title reflects this understanding of prisons as sites of war. ‘Tip of the spear’ is a military phrase, referring “to combat forces deployed to penetrate an enemy's first line of defense” (p. 9). For Burton and carceral rebels, Tip of the Spear is an analysis of both, the incarcerated rebellions of the 1970s as the “people ‘behind enemy lines,’ such that their effective organization could catalyze movements beyond the walls” (p. 9). Or, from the perspective of the state, “incarcerated people and especially Black revolutionaries, the tip of a counterinsurgency spear that has pierced through the front line of its opposition on its way toward striking a more essential target, ‘us’” (p. 10).
In Chapter 3, Dr. Burton outlines the Attica rebellion's ‘significance as an epochal act of abolitionist worldmaking.’ This chapter is by far, the most uplifting, outlining how the Attica rebels obtained and then struggled with their newfound freedom to build “The Black Commune.” After the initial fog of the rebellion wore off, Burton describes how the rebels “exerted kinetic energy and intellectual labor to remap their world, literally ‘changing places’ without ever leaving the walls” (p. 91).
That said, Burton does not shy away from the messiness of this abolitionist worldmaking, referring to Attica as “an incomplete abolition” (p. 95). There were punishments, including the creation of a “People's Prison” after two prisoners were convicted of treason by a tribunal. Another white prisoner, Michael Privitera, who Dr. Burton states was struggling with severe mental health, was also imprisoned. Eventually, the state found these three to have been executed. This, alone, does not delegitimize Attica as an abolitionist project, however. The material conditions of the rebellion “necessitated other forms of captivity” (p. 95). For CCJ students and scholars, Chapter 3 is a vitally important lesson of the nuances of abolitionist worldmaking.
Dr. Burton views the existence of the criminal legal system as part of this protracted war, a tactic of counterinsurgency to quell Black radicalism and rebellion. He quotes the US Army's definition of counterinsurgency, which “is a style of warfare that involves ‘military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by a government to defeat insurgency’” (p. 4). His book outlines the various ways the state responded to the Long Attica Revolt in real time and after the violent retaking of Attica on September 13, 1971. In Chapter 4, Dr. Burton describes this violent retaking as “a collective act of sexual revenge that aimed to punish the rebels and defend the racial breach within normative masculinity” (p. 120). However, this use of state violence did not quell rebellions in New York or across the country, as Dr. Burton notes that 1972 had the most prison rebellions on record.
Thus, the state had to supplement its violence “with a constellation of ‘modernized,’ ‘progressive,’ and ‘gentle’ techniques, which sought to produce ‘compliant’ and ‘rehabilitated’ subjects in ways that were not immediately recognized as coercive” (p. 151). Dr. Burton outlines four strategies of reformist counterinsurgency that the state deployed to pacify the incarcerated and their allies: (1) expansion, (2) humanization, (3) diversification, and (4) programmification. Moreover, Chapter 6 outlines the war on Black Revolutionary minds, through “behavior modification, coercive persuasion, brainwashing, thought reform, mind control, human programming, and so on” (p. 184).
Dr. Burton demonstrates how some incarcerated and formerly incarcerated rebels recognized and resisted these reformist state tactics. Joseph Little, a survivor of the Attica rebellion, “denounced ‘rehabilitation’ as propaganda, a disguised attempt to ‘pacify the inmates,’ ‘make them docile citizens,’ train them to be like robots,’ and mold them according to white, ruling-class values” (p. 155). In Chapter 6, Dr. Burton tells the resistance story of Masia A. Mugmuk to the RX Program, which was designed, according to Mugmuk, “to eliminate freedom fighters, to control us physically and mentally, and to transform us into nonviolent, passive, meek, humble, obedient, modern-day slaves” (p. 189). It was these and other programs, some that Dr. Burton and others noted sounded familiar to the infamous MK-Ultra program (see also Burton, 2023).
Tip of the Spear should cause criminologists to reflect on the role they play in this protracted war. CCJ students and scholars must recognize the complexities of these carceral systems and the ways these institutions “grant access to…while foreclosing access to others, as a way to manage perception” (p. 173). Its narratives and documentations must be treated with skepticism, as the very ‘archives of white supremacy and repression’ that they are. We must adopt Attica survivor Joseph Little's inherent critique of criminology, “which trace criminality to biological, psychological, or cultural defects believed to be internal to those who transgress the law” (p. 156). Instead, we must reject that the criminal legal system is attempting to eliminate crime and violence, but that instead, is a protracted site of war against captive populations. CCJ scholars and students must unpack and amplify the very structures of “a society that” Little notes, “requires crime and prisons” (p. 156).
There is no way to write a review that does this book justice. Its impact is far-reaching, as recognized by the state of New York which banned the book from its facilities (Burton, 2024). CCJ can take many lessons from Dr. Burton's work in order to understand our role in this protracted war.