Various authors have shown that for a particular type of atomic light amplifier, which can be identified as an unsqueezed amplifier, squeezing in the output is destroyed for gains greater than 2, and if the input is classical light then there are no non-classical effects (squeezing or sub-Poisson photon statistics) in the output for any value of the gain; however, these results are not necessarily true for a squeezed amplifier. Here we investigate single-stage and multi-stage squeezed atomic light amplifiers and show that the above non-classical effects can occur even with a coherent-state input. We find that the output of a multistage squeezed amplifier can be squeezed in principle for any desired gain, and that when this amplifier is used as an attenuator, output light can in principle be produced with any desired amount of squeezing for any input.