Prisons New York State

New York state agreed Tuesday to pay $8 million to inmates caught up in the 1971 Attica riot, settling a 25-year-old lawsuit over the nation's deadliest prison uprising. The money will go to 1,280 inmates--or their survivors--who claimed they were tortured, beaten and denied medical treatment in the aftermath of the revolt and authorities' bloody efforts to put it down. The original class-action suit, filed in 1974, sought $100 million.

Ted Conover got clocked in the head, screamed at daily, humiliated by society's rejects for seven months straight and given the silent treatment by his wife--all in the name of experiential journalism. The author has just finished a book about what it's like to be a guard at one of the most notorious prisons in the country.

Kenneth Kimes, who along with his mother was convicted earlier this year in the murder of a missing Manhattan socialite, took a reporter captive for several hours Tuesday at the prison where he is serving a sentence of more than 120 years to life. Kimes grabbed the reporter for Court TV at 2:20 p.m., held a pen to her throat and was threatening to stab her at Dannemora Prison in Clinton, N.Y., according to a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Corrections in Albany, N.Y.

Oklahoma must return a Death Row inmate to New York to serve a prison term before it can execute him, a judge ruled Monday, hours before the convict was to be put to death. Gov. David Walters had said Oklahoma would execute Thomas Grasso early today unless New York prevailed. Grasso was convicted of killing one elderly person in each state.

Tammy Taylor is worried. It's the day before her release from the maximum-security prison here, and the thought of freedom weighs on her mind. She's been here before. But as Taylor smoothes her green prison-issue skirt and ticks off a list of things to do--reapply for welfare, visit her probation officer--a new item crops up: arrange day care. "I'm nervous," she says. "I've been here before, but it's different going home with a baby. There's all this responsibility."

A union representing state prison guards said Friday that it has purchased "captivity coverage" from Lloyd's of London that will pay benefits if a corrections officer is taken hostage during an uprising. The insurance, believed to be the first of its kind, was spurred by a rebellion at the Coxsackie Correctional Facility last summer in which five guards were held hostage. Lloyd's is underwriting the coverage for Council 82 of the Security and Law Enforcement Employees union.

A New York court awarded almost $1.3 million Wednesday to inmates and the survivors of inmates who were shot during the bloody state police assault that ended the 1971 uprising at Attica state prison. The awards ordered by the state Court of Claims range from $35,000 to $475,000 and include the first damages given to survivors of inmates involved in the Attica uprising.

As Jean Harris gets up and starts to walk away, her foot catches a leg of the chair and she stumbles backward, gracefully almost, as if in slow motion, grazing her head against a window sill as she falls to the floor. She sits there, her face a cross between dazed and annoyed, and it's a minute before people begin converging--her publicist, a reporter, a corrections officer, another inmate--to help.

The estate of former Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller is not financially responsible for deaths that occurred during the uprising at the Attica Correctional Facility in 1971, a federal judge ruled Friday. The decision was a blow to the families of Attica inmates, who filed a $2-billion lawsuit against state officials. The suit has prevented Rockefeller's heirs from inheriting an estate worth more than $66 million. Although he gave state police the go-ahead to forcefully retake the prison on Sept.

A make-believe prison emergency, intended as a training game for corrections officers, sent flak-jacketed state troopers off on a wild-goose chase Thursday with sirens screeching and a helicopter fluttering above. At least 24 State Police squad cars zoomed down the state thruway at mid-afternoon, responding to a distress call issued by the special tactical squad used to quell prison riots, police and Corrections Department officials said.