From Attica to Abu Ghraib--and a prison near you.

A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, "who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfully fighting for legal damages." Working as a paralegal after his release, Smith was a pivotal force behind a twenty-six-year civil action lawsuit that won a $12 million settlement.

Smith's life changed forever on September 13, 1971--the day New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered 500 state troopers to storm the Attica Correctional Facility, resulting in the deaths of thirty-two inmates and eleven prison employees. The raid wounded at least eighty-six other people.

The media coverage was atrocious. Outright lies were front-page news, "informing" the public that prisoners had slit the throats of hostages when the troopers' assault began. Corrective facts came later, with much smaller headlines, after autopsies revealed that no throats had been cut. Only when their claims were exposed as deceptions did top state officials admit the truth.

Smith, known as "Big Black," figures prominently in a full-length documentary that debuted on national television four years ago. The Ghosts of Attica includes grim footage and grisly photos that had been kept under wraps by the state government for decades. The movie also features interviews with people on all sides of the tragic conflict.

After previewing the ninety-minute film, I wrote that it "packs a powerful wallop because of its deep respect for historical accuracy. Horrendous prison conditions prompted the Attica uprising, which began as an undisciplined riot and grew into a well-focused articulation of rage from men who chose to take a fateful step, fighting for human dignity."

The timing of the national premiere for The Ghosts of Attica on Court TV was unlucky--it aired just two days before 9/11--and media follow-up was sparse.

Lighting up the film, Smith's clarity and humanism seem especially notable because of what he went through. As the documentary explains, guards "tortured him for hours with cigarettes, hot shell casings, threats of castration and death, a glass-strewn gauntlet and Russian roulette."

While the uprising was multiracial, most of the 1,281 prisoners involved were black, reflecting the prison population as a whole. In the film Smith said: "Attica was about wants and needs. Attica was a lot about class and a lot about race."

Although U.S. media outlets have rarely dropped a hint along this line, the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib was also about class and race. From a global perspective, U.S. troops--sent to Iraq by the richest nation in the world--serve elite interests in the United States. And anti-Arab racism made it easier for Americans to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, a third of a century after the Attica uprising, just about every jail and prison continues to be "a lot about class and a lot about race." With more than two million people now behind bars--63 percent black or Latino--the incarcerated population is vastly skewed toward low income and dark skin.

Journalists shouldn't automatically view events from the perspective of prison management. Yet they routinely do.

Four years ago the Attica documentary caused me to write: "Reflexively assuming that the powerful white guys in positions of authority would be truthful, reporters on the story got it backwards." When covering Attica, this media bias meant badly misinforming the American public. But that was hardly an isolated incident.

Every day, brutality is a common reality for prisoners in every region of this country. But what goes on behind closed cell doors and thick walls rarely gets exposed to media sunlight. As Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist who has often testified about human rights abuses in U.S. prisons, points out:

   I do not view the sexual abuse, torture and humiliation of Iraqi
   prisoners by American soldiers as an isolated event. The plight of
   prisoners in the USA is strikingly similar to the plight of the
   Iraqis who were abused by American GIs. Prisoners are maced, raped,
   beaten, starved, left naked in freezing cold cells and otherwise
   abused in too many American prisons, as substantiated by findings
   in many courts that prisoners' constitutional rights to remain
   free of cruel and unusual punishment are being violated. ... In
   order for the abuses to continue, one group has total control
   over another; the victims feel they have no recourse and the
   perpetrators are confident they can get away with it; and the
   entire ordeal has to remain secret.

That's where the news media should come in and dispel such secrecy.

When the public finally learned about abuses at Abu Ghraib, there was outrage. But what's going on today behind bars in U.S. prisons still doesn't stand the light of media day.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com.