Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Acclaim for Ted Conover’s
Also by Ted Conover
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Author’s Note
Chapter 1: Inside Passage
Chapter 2: School for Jailers
Chapter 3: Up The River
Chapter 4: Newjack
Chapter 5: Scrap Heap
Chapter 6: Life in Mama’s House
Chapter 7: My Heart Inside Out
Epilogue
Afterword
Afterword, 2011
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Copyright
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
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Published in 2011 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
A Random House Group company
First published in the USA by Vintage Books,
a division of Random House Group Inc.
Copyright © Ted Conover
Ted Conover has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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TO MARGOT
sweet muse, sharp-eyed critic,
my girl on the train
Acclaim for Ted Conover’s
NEWJACK
“Nobody goes to greater lengths to get a story than Ted Conover. Immersing himself in his subject to a degree matched by few journalists working today, he has given us a compelling, compassionate look at a terribly important, poorly understood aspect of American society. My hat is off to him.”
—Jon Krakauer
“Newjack tells the straight skinny on a guard’s life inside prison without being overly judgmental or cloyingly sentimental. It’s experiential journalism at its best.”
—The Denver Post
“Ted Conover is a first-rate reporter and more daring and imaginative than the rest of us combined. This book is one of his finest.”
—Sebastian Junger
“Profoundly eye-opening.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“A devastating chronicle of the toll prison takes on the prisoners and the keepers of the keys.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
“This book takes a reader inside one of the many locked doors of America’s penal system. It is clear-eyed and sympathetic, intelligent and engrossing. It reminded me of some of George Orwell’s admirable journalism.”
—Tracy Kidder
“A fascinating and sobering read.”
—USA Today
“It is hard to know if there has ever been an institution that cost more and achieved less than a prison. And after reading Newjack, that statement seems truer than ever.”
—Chicago Tribune
“An incisive and indelible look at the life of a corrections officer and the dark life of the penal system.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Endlessly fascinating, often suspenseful.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Pretty damned amazing. … entirely gripping and powerful.”
—Sherman Alexie
“A fascinating story. … Prison books crowd the shelves, but few tell the story from the point of view of the officers who spend eight hours a day doing time, hoping and praying that they make it home that night, hoping and praying that the job allows them to remain human.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Newjack is a valuable contribution to the urgent debate about crime and punishment in our time.”
—The Boston Globe
“A fascinating window into the complex machinations of America’s prison systems.”
—The Austin Chronicle
“A timely, troubling, important book.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“George Orwell, you have a godson. Upton Sinclair, you’ve been one-upped. In this mind-blowing example of journalism at its most authentic, Conover discovers that prison can bring out the animal in any man, and even the zookeeper has to protect his soul.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Ted Conover
NEWJACK
Ted Conover is a writer best known for his participatory investigations: riding the rails with tramps, travelling with Mexican undocumented workers, and working at Sing Sing prison. Two of his previous books, Whiteout and Coyotes, were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and many other publications. He teaches at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. Further information can be found at www.tedconover.com.
Denied access to report on Sing Sing, acclaimed journalist Ted Conover went undercover, spending a year as a rookie officer, or ‘newjack’.
Unarmed and outnumbered, prison officers at one of America’s toughest maximum security jails supervise 1,800 inmates, most of whom have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape.
When a fight breaks out in the galleries or yard an officer’s day can go from mundane to terrifying in a heartbeat. Newjack is a fascinating insight into how the gruelling world of the prison system brutalises all who enter it – prison guards and prisoners alike.
ALSO BY TED CONOVER
Whiteout: Lost in Aspen
Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens
Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes
Thanks to Kathy R., agent nonpareil; to Dan M., early believer; to Nicky D., Bob R., and Estelle G., good readers, advisers, and secret keepers all; to Robert S., Esq., for advice; to Jerry C., Jody and Jenni K., David S., Katie C., and especially, as ever, thanks, Jay.
This is a work of nonfiction, describing events that I witnessed and participated in. No scenes are imaginary or made up, though some dialogue was, of necessity, re-created. Like all officers, I kept a small spiral notebook in my breast pocket for note-taking; unlike most of them, I took many notes. Most of the individuals in the book are identified by their real names. But to protect the privacy of certain officers and inmates, I have made up the following names for real people:
Aragon
Antonelli
Foster
Arno
Dobbins
Bella
McCorkle
Popish
Dieter
Di Carlo
DiPaola
Speros
Turner
Malaver
Fay
Melman
L’Esperance
Michaels
Rufino
Hawkins
Wickersham
Chilmark
Duncan
St. George
Birch
Massey
Phelan
Perlstein
Billings
Mendez
Larson
Sims
Astacio
Van Essen
Gaines
Perch
Pacheco
Scarff
Saline
Pitkin
Lopez
De Los Santos
Garces
Riordan
Delacruz
Perez
Addison
Blaine
SIX-TWENTY A.M. AND the sun rises over a dark place. Across the Hudson River from Sing Sing prison, on the opposite bank, the hills turn pink; I spot the treeless gap in the ridgeline where, another officer has told me, inmates quarried marble for the first cellblock. Nobody could believe it back in 1826: a work crew of convicts, camping on the riverbank, actually induced to build their own prison. They had been sent down from Auburn, New York State’s famous second prison, to construct Sing Sing, its third. How would that feel, building your own prison?
The shell of that 1826 cellblock still stands, on the other side of the high wall I park against; the prison has continued to grow all around it. In 1984, the roof burned down. At the time, the prison was using the building as a shop to manufacture plastic garbage bags, but as late as 1943, it still housed inmates. Sometimes now when inmates complain about their six-by-nine cells, I tell them how it used to be: two men sharing a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot cell, one of them probably with TB, no central heating or plumbing, open sewer channels inside, little light. They look unimpressed.
I park next to my friend Aragon, of the Bronx, who always puts The Club on his steering wheel; I see it through his tinted glass. This interests me, because, with a heavily armed wall tower just a few yards away, this has got to be one of the safest places to leave your car in Westchester County. Nobody’s going to steal it here. But Aragon is a little lock-crazy: He has screwed a tiny hasp onto his plastic lunch box and hangs a combination lock there, because of the sodas he’s lost to pilfering officers, he says. Between the Bronx and prison, a person could grow a bit lock-obsessed.
There’s no one else around. Most people park in the lots up the hill, nearer the big locker room in the Administration Building. But it’s almost impossible for a new officer to get a locker in there, so I park down here by the river and the lower locker room. The light is dim. Gravel crunches under my boots as I head into the abandoned heating plant.
This six-story brick structure is one of those piles of slag that give Sing Sing its particular feel. Massive, tan, and almost windowless, it looks like a hangar for a short, fat rocket. The whole thing is sealed off, except for a repair garage around the corner and a part of the first floor containing men’s and women’s locker rooms and rest rooms.
The men’s locker room—I’ve never seen the women’s—is itself nearly abandoned; though it’s stuffed with a hodgepodge of some two hundred lockers of inmate manufacture, fewer than twenty are actively used. The rest have locks on them, some very ancient indeed, belonging to officers who quit or transferred or died or who knows what. Nobody keeps track. An old wall phone hangs upside down by its wires on the left as you enter, the receiver dangling by its curly cord, a symbol of Sing Sing’s chronically broken phone system.
Cobwebs, in here, find a way onto your boots. For a few weeks following my arrival, on Aragon’s advice I checked the room for lockers that might have opened up. None ever did. All those unused lockers needlessly tied up. This might not be a problem for the officers who drive to work from the north, but down south in the Bronx (I live there, too) you don’t want to advertise that you’re a correction officer: Too many people around you have been in prison. Officers tend not to stick the big badge decals they pass out at the Academy on their car windows (because they like their windows), and most, like me, don’t want to walk the street wearing a uniform. It’s just awkward. A locker lets you leave your uniform at work.
My second month, I found one old lock that was so flimsy I could almost twist it off with my hands, but not quite. I brought in a small tire iron and it came off easily. Inside were plastic cups, magazine pictures of women in bikinis, and newspapers from 1983. I’ve since heard of a locker coming available in the Administration Building, but I’m not pursuing it. I’ve come to prefer it down here. The feel of neglect is somehow truer to the spirit of Sing Sing.
It’s barely fifteen minutes till lineup. I throw on my gray polyester uniform, making sure I’ve got all the things I need on my belt: radio holder, latex-glove packet, two key-ring clips, baton ring. I put pen and pad, inmate rulebook, and blue union diary in my breast pockets, slide my baton through the ring, lock the padlock, and slam the locker door. I walk past a pile of old office desks and, by necessity, into the men’s room. It smells like an outhouse. I sit down, for the second time this morning. Every morning is like this, and it is for the other new guys, too: Your stomach lets you know, just before the shift starts, what it thinks of this job.
A decrepit footbridge takes me over the tracks of the Metro North railroad—Sing Sing may be the only prison anywhere with a commuter railroad running through it—and other officers start to appear. My climb continues, up a wooden staircase that’s been built atop a crumbling concrete one.
Here is the Administration Building parking lot, and the main entrance to the prison. Parked in the middle is the “roach coach,” purveyor of coffee and rolls. To the right is the entrance to the Visit Room, not yet open. To the left, officers are lined up, waiting to deposit their handguns at the outside window of the Arsenal. For reasons lost to time, New York State correction officers are allowed to own and carry concealed weapons, and most seem to enjoy doing so. However, they can’t bring the guns inside with them (nobody is allowed to carry inside)—and few of us have any doubt that prison is the safer for it. I take the last steps to the main gate and flash the badge and I.D. card I carry in a special wallet that I picked up at the Academy. The officer takes a cursory peek inside my lunch bag—the contraband check. I punch my time card and proceed to the morning’s worst moment, getting my assignment.
The desk of Sergeant Ed Holmes is the focal point of the lineup room. It’s on a raised platform, in front of a window. From up there, Holmes can see everybody in the room and most of those ascending the front steps. His eyes are constantly scanning, never settling on any person or object for more than an instant, moving from an officer to the printout in front of him and back again. The printout tells him what jobs he’ll need to fill—who’s on his day off, who’s got vacation, who’s out sick, who’s on suspension. He checks off old-timers as he sees them—they’ve chosen their jobs and know where they’re going. It’s the new guys, like me, who are at his mercy.
Holmes is one of the tough black officers who have been here forever, a big man who seems to enjoy his distance from the rank and file. Several of his fellow white-shirts spoke to us during orientation, mostly about how the institution runs. Holmes was different. He came only to warn: Don’t fuck with me, he said, glancing at the back wall of the room. I’m gonna give you your job assignment, and if you complain, I’ll give you a worse one tomorrow. I have no patience. I’m not nice. Don’t fuck with me. A few days later, a longtime officer advised me never to show Holmes I was scared—of him or anything else. “Holmes feeds on weakness,” she said.
And now the line has moved and I’m next, a small, new officer before the mighty sergeant. I place my time card in front of him—he initials all the cards, to prevent us from punching in for friends—and then he is uncharacteristically silent: Holmes hasn’t decided what to do with me. Or maybe he’s not thinking of me at all; maybe his mind has wandered to his car or his electric bill or the movie he watched on TV last night. He riffles through his printout. Usually I’m sent to A-block or B-block. These are massive human warehouses, two of the largest prison housing units in the world, containing over a thousand inmates between them. I live for the exceptions: an easy day in the wall tower, the barbershop, or the hospital. That’s the root of my dread—the hope for something else.
“Two fifty-four B-block,” says Holmes finally, glancing to my left. Holmes could tell us the job instead of just the number, but if it’s in the blocks, he won’t. He wants to leave us guessing, as if we’re still at the Academy. I turn and walk back among the eighty-odd officers milling around the crowded room, looking for someone who might know what job 254 is. I ask Miller; he shrugs. I ask Eaves; he thinks it’s an escort job. That would be good. Escort officers spend a while in the mess hall and then get to leave the block for chunks of the day, taking groups of inmates to other buildings in the prison. Eaves has written down all the jobs in his union diary but hasn’t yet found the number when a different sergeant shouts: “On the lineup!” As we assemble in rows, I pray it’s true that it’s an escort job and not a gallery job. Gallery officers run the galleries, the floors on which inmates live. Galleries are understaffed, and the officers on them, surrounded by inmates all day, are put at risk and run ragged. It’s an awful job. I often get it.
We form into six or seven files, facing the white-shirts, most of whom are sergeants. As we’re called to attention, it’s interesting to watch the heavy ones try to squeeze between our narrow rows as they make a cursory check for violations of uniform—missing collar brass, whiskers, an earring inadvertently left in. Then a lieutenant, often the watch commander, speaks, telling us what has gone on in the prison since we left the day before. Today it’s Lieutenant Goewey.
“Okay, it’s been pretty quiet. They had one guy cut in the leg, in the tunnel from A-block yard. No weapon, no perp, the usual. Then we found three shanks buried in the dirt there in B-block yard, two of ’em metal, that we found with metal detectors. You think they’re just sitting around out there, but these crooks are always conniving.” In other words: one inmate stabbed, assailant unknown, knife not found; three homemade knives found; no officers hurt. A fairly typical day. Then a new sergeant steps forward: “Remember, there’s no double clothing allowed during rec, for the obvious reasons. Inmates with two shirts on or two sets of pants should be sent back to their cells and not allowed in the yard or gym.” Double clothing is understood to be both a defense against getting “stuck” and a way of quickly changing your appearance if you stick someone else.
Often we’ll hear a moral message at lineup, too: a warning that we’re not stepping up to the inmates enough or a caution that we need to watch one another’s backs better and know the names of the people we’re working with or a reminder that our job is “to get out of here in one piece at three P.M.”—as if that needed saying. No such message today. There’s the schedule of driver’s-ed courses, for anyone interested, and a reminder of next week’s blood drive, and the announcements are over.
“Officers, a-ten-shun!” yells a sergeant. Everyone is quiet. “Posts!” And we’re off, not exactly at a run, through the long, rough corridors and up the hill to begin the day.
Sing Sing sprawls over fifty-five acres, most of it rocky hillside. It’s flat down where I parked, near the river—the old cellblock and the railroad tracks. The former Death House, site of the electric chair that killed 614 inmates between 1891 and 1963, is down there too. (It’s now a vocational-training building.) And so is Tappan, the medium-security unit of Sing Sing, with some 550 inmates housed in three 1970s-vintage shoe box–shaped buildings.
But most of Sing Sing is on the hill, and from the lineup room, we climb there. Getting to B-block is the longest walk; it’s the remotest part of the “max” jail. There are a couple of ways to go; both involve a lot of stairs. Officers sip from coffee cups and grip lunch bags as we make the slow march up to work. We are black and white and Latino, male and female. Members of the skeleton night crew pass us in the hall and wave wanly; most have that gray night-shift look. They trade normal diurnal rhythms for the perk of having very little inmate contact—at night, all the inmates are locked in their cells. If I didn’t have a family, I might put in for night duty.
The corridors and stairways are old, often in disrepair. When it rains, we skirt puddles from leaking roofs. When it’s cold, we have reason to remember that these passages are unheated. The tunnels snake around Sing Sing, joining the various buildings, and at the beginning and end of each—sometimes even in the middle—there is a locked gate. Most of the officers posted to these gates have big, thick keys, but at one gate the guard pushes buttons instead, as they do in modern prisons. By the time I pass through the heavy front door of B-block, there are ten locked gates between me and freedom.
A-block and B-block are the most impressive buildings in Sing Sing, and in a totally negative sense. A large cathedral will inspire awe; a large cellblock, in my experience, will mainly horrify.
The size of the buildings catches the first-time visitor by surprise, and that’s largely because there’s no preamble. Instead of approaching them from a wide staircase or through an arched gate, you pass from an enclosed corridor through a pair of solid-metal doors, neither one much bigger than your front door at home. And enter into a stupefying vastness. A-block, probably the largest freestanding cellblock in the world, is 588 feet long, twelve feet shy of the length of two football fields. It houses some 684 inmates, more than the entire population of many prisons. You can hear them—an encompassing, overwhelming cacophony of radios, of heavy gates slamming, of shouts and whistles and running footsteps—but, oddly, at first you can’t see a single incarcerated soul. All you see are the bars that form the narrow fronts of their cells, extending four stories up and so far into the distance on the left and right that they melt into an illusion of solidity. And when you start walking down the gallery, eighty-eight cells long, and begin to make eye contact with inmates, one after another after another, some glaring, some dozing, some sitting bored on the toilet, a sense grows of the human dimensions of this colony. Ahead of you may be a half-dozen small mirrors held through the bars by dark arms; these retract as you draw even, and you and the inmate get a brief but direct look at each other.
A-block and B-block are aligned with each other, end to end, and span the top of Sing Sing; between them sits the mess-hall building. Both were completed in 1929, and they’re very similar in structure, except B-block is twenty cells shorter (sixty-eight), and one story taller (five). Though few civilians have seen anything like them, there is nothing architecturally innovative about the design. It plainly derives1 from the 1826 cellblock, based on Auburn’s “new” north wing, which was the prototype for most American cell-house construction: tiny cells back to back on five tiers, with a stairway at either end and one at the center of the very long range.
From the ground floor, which in both buildings is known as the flats, you can look up and see how each structure is made up of two almost separate components. One is the all-metal interior, containing the inmates; it’s painted gray and looks as though it could have been welded in a shipyard. The other is comprised of the exterior walls and roof, a brick-and-concrete shell that fits over the cells like a dish over a stick of butter. One does not touch the other: Should an inmate somehow escape from his cell, he’s still trapped inside the building. A series of tall, barred windows runs down either side of the shell. They would let in twice as much light if they were washed. As it is, they let pass a diffuse, smog-colored glow, which crosses about fifteen feet of open space on each side before it reaches the metal, which it does not warm. There is a flat, leaky roof, which does not touch the top of the metal cellblock but leaves a gap of maybe ten feet. If the whole structure were radically shrunk, the uninitiated might perceive a vaguely agricultural purpose; the cages might be thought to contain chickens, or mink.
The blocks are loud because they are hard. There is nothing inside them to absorb sound except the inmates’ thin mattresses and their bodies. Every other surface is of metal or concrete or brick.
A crowd of officers is milling around a cell near the front gate of B-block when I get there; this cell is the office of the officer in charge, or OIC. Rooms for staff were not included in B-block’s plan, so a few cells near the front gate have been converted for that purpose. Next to the OIC’s office, an identical, tiny cell houses the sergeants; two of them are squeezed in there. Next to that is the coat room, which contains a barely functioning microwave oven and a refrigerator that won’t stay closed. There’s an office for paperwork and filling out forms, and one for a toilet—the only staff toilet on these five floors.
For many years, the day-shift OIC has been Hattie “Mama” Cradle, a fifty-something woman five feet tall and just about as big around. She’s got a clipboard in her hand and horn-rimmed reading specs on a chain around her neck. Officers give her their names and job numbers; she tells them where they’re posted. I hang back a little, but then there’s no more stalling: “Conover, two fifty-four,” I say. She gets the spelling off the tag on my shirt, then, already poised to jot down the next name, says, “R-and-W.”
My heart sinks. It’s as bad as it could be. I am the first officer on the second-floor galleries, known by the letters R and W. I’ve worked there a few times before, including my very first—horrifying—day of on-the-job training, when I accompanied a novice officer, or “newjack,” who barely knew what he was doing. Today I’m that newjack, going it alone.
I crowd into Cradle’s office and look for my keys—four separate rings of the big, heavy “bit” keys, which work cell doors, with center-gate, end-gate, and fire-alarm keys thrown on for good measure. I attach these to my belt, and feel the weight. My heart is pounding, but there’s nothing for it. I find a fresh battery for the floor’s portable communications radio and grab a sheaf of forms that I have to fill out during my shift. Last is the list of “keeplocks.” I copy mine from Cradle’s bulletin board, noting that there are two new ones in the past twenty-four hours. Keeplocks are inmates on disciplinary restriction. In the old days there were few such inmates, and often they would be sent to solitary confinement, known as the Special Housing Unit or the Box. But now their numbers overwhelm the Box, so they stay put, mixed in with the general population—except they can’t come out of their cells. One of our main responsibilities as gallery officers is to keep the keeplocks locked up. Because we’re always in a hurry and often don’t know the inmates, this is harder than it sounds. It’s easy to unlock the wrong door.
I pass through two more gates on my way upstairs and relieve the night officer on R-and-W. Since the galleries are all locked down at night, mainly her job is to check, every hour or so, that every inmate is still breathing. It’s not a bad job, and if an inmate does die, it’s no problem—unless he’s found with rigor mortis. In that case, she will lose her job, because of the cold, hard proof that she wasn’t really checking. The night officer hands me the radio and some other keys. Does she know what the new keeplocks are in for? I ask.
“I don’t know, I don’t care, they’re not my friends, and I don’t like them,” she says with a suddenness and finality that I find kind of funny. She hands me the radio, which I attach to my belt. She’s left some wrappers and tissues around the desktop, but I don’t mention it; she looks tired. I envy her as she puts on her coat: She’s going home and doesn’t have to deal with the inmates any longer. “The cells are all deadlocked,” she adds before leaving, which means that not only is the huge bar, or “brake,” in place which locks them all at once but the cells are locked individually. Inmates are not at large at night, swarming around you on their way to chow, arguing with you when it’s time to “lock in,” calling you names, stressing you out. Pandora’s box is closed. My first job of the day, with breakfast less than an hour away, will be to open it.
When the recruit arrives he is plunged into an alien environment, and is enveloped in the situation 24 hours a day without relief. He is stunned, dazed and frightened. The severity of shock is reflected in 17-hydroxycorticosteroid levels comparable to those in schizophrenic patients in incipient psychosis, which exceed levels in other stressful situations. The recruit receives little, or erroneous, information about what to expect, which tends to maintain his anxiety.
—Peter G. Bourne, “Some Observations on the
Psychosocial Phenomena Seen in Basic Training,”
Psychiatry, Vol. 30, No. 2 (1967), 187–196
WHEN THE APPOINTMENT letter from the Department of Correctional Services arrived, Arno had been managing a Burger King in Syracuse. Chavez was working the floor buffer machine in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building. Davis was pounding fenders at his upstate body shop. Allen and Dimmie were supervising teenage boys in youth detention centers in Westchester. Brown was a plumber in Keeseville, near the Canadian border. Charlebois worked distribution for Wal-Mart in midstate. Others hadn’t had jobs for a while. I had been working for several months on a story for The New York Times Magazine. The letter gave each of us two weeks or less to drop these jobs and report to the Albany Training Academy, where we would enter state service as correction-officer recruits.
I tried to quickly wrap up my work and prepare for the seven weeks away from home—and possibly much more, if I decided to stick with the job and work in a prison. Then, on a rainy Sunday evening in March 1997, I drove from New York City to the Academy. I’d been there twice before, for psychological testing. The three-story brick structure had a white statue in the bell tower and looked like a suburban Catholic high school. Later I would learn that it had once been a seminary. From seminary to corrections academy: a sign of the times. In the foyer, two uniformed officers sitting at a table asked for identification, took my letter, and nodded toward a mountain of luggage nearby.
“Dump your bags there and get in line.”
The line of male recruits in suits (and a handful of women in dresses) stretched way down a long hallway and around the corner, out of sight. All stood at rigid attention. As I made my way to the end, carefully skirting an officer chewing out a guy with a badly knotted tie, it dawned on me that I had reported to boot camp.
“You call that wearing a tie?” the officer demanded of the young man. “Button the collar. No. I’ve changed my mind. Take it off and start over.” The man got started but, without a mirror, apparently didn’t make much progress. A second officer, assigned to dog the recruits, walked up and laughed at him.
The officers were like sharks, sniffing for blood. This first lesson of the Academy was immediately clear: Don’t stand out. I had a sense of foreboding about the recruit who stood three people ahead of me. Blond hair spilled over his shirt collar, and he had an earring. Of course, others stood out, too, like the guy who had chosen to wear army boots along with his coat and tie. But long hair made a different kind of statement.
The first officer stopped and gaped at the man in a stagy way. “What did you think you were coming to, a club?” he demanded. The guy with the hair mumbled something. “What?” said the officer, stepping right up into his face. “Did you think you were going out to a nightclub? Were you dressing up for a nightclub? He was dressing up for a club!” he told the other officer, who laughed some more.
My hair was only slightly shorter, but I passed the first inspection. The line advanced slowly. I tried to take in my surroundings with my peripheral vision. On the walls were a succession of old black-and-white photos of New York State prisons and two big display cases. The first case I passed contained objects with hidden compartments in which inmates had stashed things—a false-bottomed Coke can, a hollow-heeled shoe, and a hollow-handled hairbrush. The next one displayed inmate weapons: a sharpened piece of Plexiglas, a filed-down serving spoon, a metal spike. They were riveting; it was hard to keep my eyes forward.
“What do you think this is, a museum?” barked an officer from the hallway behind me. At first I thought I’d been caught, but as the officer yammered on, I realized it was someone behind me who’d been spotted looking at the shank display. “Eyes directly ahead! That’s the meaning of attention!”
The officer walked by and stopped again in front of the recruit with the tie. The officer gestured at it angrily. “Are you intentionally disrespecting me?” he demanded. A few minutes later, perhaps thinking he was over the worst of it, the same man was caught leaning slightly against the wall: a born target. “Excuse me! Does the wall need holding up? Do you think I’m an idiot? Give me twenty push-ups.”
“Umm … right here?” the recruit stammered.
“Of course right here! You think we’re going to the gym?”
The man bent down and awkwardly got started.
“Five! Six! Seven! Eight!” counted the officer impatiently.
I closed my eyes for a moment. That night I’d been scheduled to give a slide-show lecture about Alaska at a club in my neighborhood. My dad and I had been in the north country recently, retracing a 1915 wilderness journey taken by my grandfather. The organizers had graciously rescheduled when I told them something had come up, but I pictured myself there now, finishing my after-dinner talk and glass of wine, waiting for coffee to be served, hands on the white tablecloth. It was a sudden but long-awaited assignment, I’d explained—a trip that couldn’t be postponed. That was the first of the thousand dodges and sorry-I-can’t-talk-about-its I’d have to make over the next thirty or so months as my life split into two parts, neither of which could know about the other.
The slow shuffle forward continued for nearly an hour. Finally, I was in the foyer again, receiving a bunk-room assignment and some bedding, both of which, it occurred to me, could have been quickly given out upon our arrival. But then no one would have had a chance to yell at us. I retrieved my bags and headed upstairs.
There was no time to unpack or meet my three roommates; we were due back downstairs immediately. The “auditorium” was a former chapel, with marble floors and tall stained-glass windows, dark now at 9:30 P.M. In the back, behind where a priest would have stood to lead vespers, was strung a banner. TOTAL QUALITY, it said, A D.O.C.S. COMMITMENT. A passable slogan for a factory but an odd concept, it seemed to me, for junior prison guards. In any event, I never heard it again. I was just taking a seat in a row of stackable chairs among my 127 classmates when a loud “Ten-hut!” brought us all to our feet.
A short, fit, florid-faced man strode in, looking unhappy. This was Sergeant Rusty Bloom, who ran the Academy. He surveyed us silently for a moment through thick glasses. From this night onward we were correction-officer trainees of the state of New York, he began, making $23,824 a year. “And notice I said ‘correction officers,’ not prison guards. It doesn’t take much to become a prison guard. There is no academy for prison guards. You are here to become professionals.” We would be joining more than 26,000 other state COs, he said, working for a department with an annual budget of $1.6 billion1. More than 18,000 people had taken the civil service exam we took two years before; we were among the first classes to be drawn from the list of those who had passed, because our scores were high. Even so, he said, we didn’t look like much. Over the next seven weeks, he and his staff would try to change that.
Like every new class, we were restricted to the grounds for the first week, Bloom explained, though we could return home on the weekends, dressed in our coats and ties, when he excused us Friday afternoon. If we didn’t think we could follow the rules that guided life at the Academy, we should leave right now. Personal housekeeping, for example. The guidelines governing display of uniforms and toiletries were very clear; if one guy’s stuff was out of compliance, the whole room would be written up for it. That applied on a larger scale, too. Our class of 128 would be divided into four “sessions.” If anyone in a session messed up—was late or sloppy or disobeyed any order—the rest of the session would pay. Generally this meant being restricted to the grounds, as we were now, like any new class in its first week. And lest we forget what the job was about, Sergeant Bloom told us, “The easiest way to mess up is to leave a lock open.” We had brought padlocks, as instructed, for the lockers in our rooms. “And I’ll tell you right now, if I find anyone’s lock open—and I promise you I will—that session’s going to be held accountable.”
Bloom told us to look on either side of us—one of the two people we saw would no longer be in the Department in twelve months’ time. It was not an easy job; it was not for everybody. That sounded kind of ominous. But the next thing Bloom said broke his own scary spell. “And if you decide to quit during the Academy—I can guarantee you some will—please, please, let me know you’re leaving. Don’t just walk out.”
Hearing the sergeant implore us was sort of funny, and a relief. Bloom wasn’t just a terrorizing demon; he was also a bureaucrat at the mercy of paperwork. I suspected that recruits left the Academy without saying good-bye fairly often, and the thought of it cheered me considerably.
The job, he said in conclusion, was about care, custody, and control. “The gray uniforms are the good guys, and the green uniforms are the bad guys. That’s what it’s all about.” And in twenty-five years, we’d have a pension.
We were given notebooks, a training manual, and a tall stack of forms to fill out. One officer got angry when recruits started asking him for pens—few people had brought them, because we hadn’t been told to. “Well, what did you think you were going to be doing here tonight?” he demanded inanely. Everything was delayed while he went to look for pens. When he returned, he discovered he hadn’t brought enough. He tossed the last handfuls of them angrily into the air above our heads. I would later find that of the several assholes on the Academy’s training staff, this officer actually wasn’t one of them; it was just his act for opening night.
Next stop was the quartermaster’s room, where we were issued an armload of uniforms and insignia, and then, at 11 P.M., it was up to our room on the second floor to hem trousers and sew on American flags. “Did anybody bring scissors?” “Can I borrow your Magic Hem?” “Where’d that iron go?”
I had a feeling of dread—born of fatigue and aversion to military discipline—that I tried to disguise. But at least one of my three roommates seemed completely charged up by the experience. He was Russell Dieter, an ex–Marine aircraft mechanic who had been working as a production welder and, since his divorce, living on the family farm, midstate. I would grow to dislike Dieter, and he would grow to hate me, but we were, for the duration, bunkmates—I, unfortunately, in the bed above him. Since this was the first night, a sort of cordiality reigned. Dieter had been through several boot camps and was no stranger to abuse. His hair was already shaved to the skull. His small brown mustache was closely trimmed. And he was prepared in other ways: Though nobody had told us to, he had brought along an iron and ironing board, even spray starch. I watched as he bent over his new gray shirts, pushing his glasses up on his nose while applying a precise military crease to the middle of each breast pocket.
Also in the room were Chris Charlebois, the former Wal-Mart employee, and Gary Davis, an Air Force vet in his fifties, who had barely been making ends meet at his body shop in Ticonderoga, New York. Like me, they had taken a civil service test nearly two years before and then not heard a word until January 1997, when we’d all been summoned to Albany for physical and psychological testing. Charlebois had been given only three days’ notice to report to the Academy. He’d even taken a cut in pay, he said, but he felt it was worth it in the long term for the pension, the health and dental insurance, and the paid leave—basically, a month per year.
It wasn’t until 1 A.M. that we had our uniforms prepared, toiletries displayed on our tiny closet shelves, and extra stuff stashed away in lockers. Housed above us, on the third floor, were members of the class in front of ours, and sometime around midnight one of those more seasoned recruits ventured by and offered a tip: “Short-sheet your beds. That way, you don’t have to make them again every morning,” he explained. Huh? The logic was that short-sheeting gave you an extra sheet. This you could keep in your locker during the day and throw onto your apparently perfectly made bed every evening. With an extra blanket that you brought from home, you could then sleep comfortably on top of your bed and not waste time making it in the morning. It was idiocy, I thought, the military bed-making fetish, but the wisdom of the advice was immediately clear. Making the precise corners and folds required for bed display took a long time. Dieter, in fact, was already planning for it: he announced that he had set his big alarm clock, which had bells on top, for 5 A.M. We didn’t need to report to the classroom until 6:30 A.M., so I groaned. Nobody else said anything, though, so I kept quiet and went to sleep.
I was here, basically, because the Department had told me I couldn’t be. The Academy, they said, was off-limits to journalists—no exceptions, end of conversation. Now, why should that be? I wondered. With prisons so much in the news, costing so much money, and confining such unprecedented numbers of people, it seemed to me that their operations should be completely transparent.
I have been fascinated by prisons for a long time. There is little, I think, that engages my imagination like a wall. A small town in Minnesota that I’ve passed through countless times en route to family reunions has a prison with a massive brick wall and turret-like guard towers, which I have spent hours thinking about. Every old prison I’ve seen since, from the Tower of London to Philadelphia’s massive and abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary, has inspired a similar fascination.
Tightly knit cultures or subcultures, such as that of the police, represent a different kind of locked door. By combining journalism with anthropology, I’ve tried in previous writings not simply to observe but to participate in the lives of railroad tramps, illegal Mexican immigrants, Kenyan truckers, and even the elite of Aspen, Colorado. Sometimes these worlds lie behind an open door through which no writer has thought to pass for a while. Other times, the door is locked, and getting in takes some extra effort.
That challenge is something I relish. Getting in can take patience and resourcefulness. Often it involves overcoming my fears—as it did in this case. Punishment is frightening, and confinement, the modern punishment of choice, frightens in a particular way. When I was a kid at camp, older boys once shut me in a locker until a friend let me out; those brief moments filled me with a terror I’ll never forget. Maybe as a result, I’m made uneasy by the sight of birds in cages, fish in tanks, large dogs in small apartments. I treasure tales of escape, be they from Alcatraz or Nazi concentration camps or the dungeon in which Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo was unjustly imprisoned for fifteen years. I’ve always felt that a special ring of hell should be reserved for kidnappers who place their victims in the trunks of cars.
But how to learn about prison? Short of becoming an inmate, I thought, how could you ever learn what that world was like? Most of the accounts in contemporary nonfiction are by prisoners—inmates from the radical (Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, Mumia Abu-Jamal) to the establishment (former New York chief judge Sol Wachtler, Boston politician Joseph Timilty) to the hard-core (Jack Henry Abbott and Sanyika Shakur). Documentary films, as well (such as the excellent The Farm), tend to focus on inmate life.
But prison, it occurred to me, is actually a world of two sides—two colors of uniforms—the “us” and the “them.” And I wanted to hear the voices one truly never hears, the voices of guards—those on the front lines of our prison policies, society’s proxies.
What most civilians believe about guards is what they learn from the movies. Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The Shawshank Redemption, and many others paint melodramatic pictures of prison life that have some common denominators. Among their lessons: while a few inmates are very bad, many are actually reasonable people, wrongfully imprisoned; middle-class white men face a high likelihood of rape; wardens are often corrupt; and guards are uniformly brutal.
This stereotyping of guards was particularly interesting to me. Was it true? And if so, was that because the job tends to attract tough guys predisposed to violence? Or were guards normal men who became violent once enmeshed in the system? If the stereotype was false, why did it persist?
All of this seemed urgent because of what can be called America’s incarceration crisis. While crime rates fall and the economy prospers, far more people than ever before are getting locked up, mainly due to mandatory sentencing for drug crimes. Huge resources are diverted as a result: California, where prisons are already at double capacity2, must build a new prison every year to keep up with the flood of new inmates. But while other priorities—health care, education—suffer, there is little evidence that this mass jailing provides either a cure for crime or a deterrent to it. Since the dismantling of apartheid3 in South Africa, the former number-one jailer, the United States has run neck and neck with Russia in the race to become the world leader in rates of imprisonment. We lock up six times as many citizens per capita as England, for example, and seventeen times as many as Japan. By early 2000, United States prisons4 and jails held nearly 2 million people, meaning that one out of every 140 residents was behind bars. The number of inmates has tripled in the last twenty-five years, and rates of incarceration keep climbing. In the 1990s5, while Wall Street was booming, one out of three black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine was either behind bars or on probation or parole. Young black men in California are now five times as likely to go to prison as to a state university. Through knowledge, political will, and perhaps some luck, we seem to have tamed inflation and the budget deficit. But our response to crime remains a blunt and expensive instrument that more often seems to scar the criminal than reform him.
Incarceration, the best punishment we have been able to think up, has itself become a social problem. One of its unintended results is the growth of so-called prison culture. The baggy low-slung pants popular among inner-city (and white suburban) teenagers are a fashion thought to have originated in prison, where inmates are issued ill-fitting clothes and, sometimes, no belts. Same with the sneakers-without-shoelaces look, a psych-ward regulation. So common is confinement among the older brothers of young minority-group men I have met in New York City that a prison term seems practically inevitable to many, almost a rite of passage. That prisoners should have such an influence on civilians is just one of the indicators that prison has unwittingly given rise to its own empowering culture, theorists suggest, one that keeps inmates resentful and resistant to the “reformative” goals that prison authorities once pursued and still pay lip service to.
At first, I didn’t consciously think about becoming a guard myself. In 1992—having been rebuffed by the state in an effort to discuss guards and prison in general terms—I got in touch with the New York State guards’ union, Council 82 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. Its executive director, Joe Puma, was initially wary, but we ended up having two long conversations. Puma was a guard himself, and a former Teamster, from Brooklyn. He told me that prison guards had the highest rates of divorce6, heart disease, and drug and alcohol addiction—and the shortest life spans—of any state civil servants, due to the stress in their lives. They feared not only injury by inmates but the possibility of contracting AIDS and tuberculosis on the job. (One officer had recently infected his family with prison-contracted TB; another had died of a resistant strain.)
months,