August Rebellion: New York’s Forgotten Female Prison Riot 14

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August Rebellion: New York’s Forgotten Female Prison Riot:

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In contrast, the August Rebellion, as the 1974 Bedford Hills uprising has been called, has received little attention beyond sparse reports that appeared in local newspapers shortly after the incident, and in underground feminist literature. Yet the women’s revolt eventually led to prison reforms that still protect female prisoners from arbitrary and excessive segregation in solitary confinement.

The story of the August Rebellion begins and ends with Crooks, who was born October 12, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father died when she was seven or eight. According to court records, Crooks “was forced to fend for herself and a younger sister,” named Shirley.

In a 1974 interview with the Patent Trader, a local newspaper in Westchester County, Crooks detailed a Dickensian childhood. At age 11, she was playing cards and shooting dice with men and stealing food to help support her mother and sister. “When I started getting in trouble,” Crooks then said, “was when people started bothering my sister.”

In 1972 Crooks was running a heroin distribution ring in Downtown Brooklyn when, she claims, a former associate tried to blackmail her. Police found the man shot to death.

Crooks was arrested for the killing, pled guilty to first degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for 0 to 15 years.

On Sunday morning, February 3, 1974, Crooks woke up, walked past a guard, and walked down a flight of stairs to the mess hall for a glass of milk. The guard ordered her to stop, but she ignored her. According to the female corrections officers who later testified against her, Crooks returned to her cell, took off her glasses, and attacked four guards, knocking two of them out with her fists, and striking two others with a flower pot and two table legs.

Sergeant Elizabeth Roggy tried to get to the scene to help, but was blocked by other prisoners. She said that when she finally made it through, Crooks was calmly strolling to her cell.

“I came forward, and I said to Crooks, ‘What on earth is the matter? What are you doing?’ Carol looked at me, and she said to me, ‘This woman isn’t going to fuck with me,’” Roggy testified, referring to CO Helen LaPay – who had first ordered Crooks to stop and was now bleeding from her face.

When the Voice asked Crooks about the brawl she replied, “I never attacked them. Only defend myself when they came to me. They training wasn’t all that sufficient.”

Male COs were, at the time, generally not permitted in the prison, but administrators were empowered with the discretion to allow it in extraordinary circumstances. Officials at Bedford Hills determined Crooks was an extraordinary circumstance.

A half-hour or so after the fight, Crooks said, she was sitting in her cell when several male COs came for her. They used a mattress as a shield, pushed their way into her cell, wrapped a white sheet around her neck, tackled her to the floor and used a leather harness to restrain her arms behind her back.

Then the guards dragged her across the snow-covered grounds to the solitary confinement cell-block, where they stripped her, and put her in a dank cell, with only a toilet, and a broken window. “It was very cold. I didn’t have a blanket. I didn’t have a mattress,” Crooks said.

For what happened that day, Crooks was convicted of three counts of felony assault, sentenced to an additional 2 to 4 years in prison, and condemned to solitary confinement until the expiration of her now 19-year prison sentence. In solitary, Crooks said, the male COs showed the female COs at Bedford Hills how to manage her.

“Mens was telling the women how to control me they way they would do their men in their box,” Crooks said, adding that they would gradually give her necessities like food, or blankets based on her behavior. Crooks’ comrades helped her survive.

One of them was Sid Reed, who arrived at Bedford Hills 2 years before, in 1972, when she was 16, with a 5-year sentence for robbery. Reed and Crooks became lovers.

In solitary confinement, Crooks’ cell was on the ground floor, in a building where, she said, “everyone had to walk past. And they would sneak up to the window to talk. And sneak up and stick cigarettes through a hole.” Women on the outside helped too.

Crooks was friends with Efeni Shakur, who was a Black Panther. Shakur used her connections to make Crooks’s case a Leftist cause célèbre and covered in the first issue of DYKE, which summarized Crooks’s struggle as part of a fight “against this mindfucking white male bullshit.”

Crooks and her attorney, Stephen Latimer, filed a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit that established the right of all women at Bedford Hills to due process of law before they are sent to solitary confinement, which Crooks had been denied.

Man.

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