“Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access.” 

Thompson describes one of the difficulties involved with researching Blood in the Water—namely, that the state still blocks or hinders access to certain relevant documents. In this way the state is continuing the cover-up of events at Attica begun in 1971.

“It was past time, they believed, to get tough on anyone who bucked authority, and even tougher on anyone who had broken a law.” 

This is a summary of the view held by Mancusi, and many on the political right, in the early 1970s. They believed 1960s permissiveness had encouraged a lack of respect for traditional authority both within and outside prisons. The solution was to restrict freedoms and increase the severity of punishments for lawbreakers.

“Rockefeller, a Cold Warrior to his core, viewed any prisoner agitation as part of a larger leftist plot, just ‘one more step toward the ultimate destruction of the country.’”

Thompson refers here to Rockefeller’s theory about the true cause of unrest in New York prisons. Influenced by Cold War paranoia, he believed that such agitation was really the product of a broader socialist or communist conspiracy. The purpose of such a conspiracy was to eradicate the American way of life.