Newjack Read online

  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 was raised in Colorado and lives in New York City. Two of his previous books, White-out 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, and many other publications. Further information about Ted Conover is available on his web site at www.tedconover.com.

  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

  TO MARGOT

  sweet muse, sharp-eyed critic,

  my girl on the train

  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.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  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 L’Esperance Astacio

  Antonelli Michaels Van Essen

  Foster Rufino Gaines

  Arno Hawkins Perch

  Dobbins Wickersham Pacheco

  Bella Chilmark Scarff

  McCorkle Duncan Saline

  Popish St. George Pitkin

  Dieter Birch Lopez

  Di Carlo Massey De Los Santos

  DiPaola Phelan Garces

  Speros Perlstein Riordan

  Turner Billings Delacruz

  Malaver Mendez Perez

  Fay Larson Addison

  Melman Sims Blaine

  CHAPTER 1

  INSIDE PASSAGE

  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 cell-block. 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.

&
nbsp; 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 mediu
m-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.