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  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 derives 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 “keep-locks.” 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.

  CHAPTER 2

  SCHOOL FOR JAILERS

  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-hydroxycortico-steroid 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.
r />   “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 billion. 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 roommat
es 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, bunk-mates—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.