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  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 turretlike 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 capacity, 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 apartheid 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 prisons 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 1990s, 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 priso
n guards had the highest rates of divorce, 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.)

  Puma reinforced my sense that the work was awful, that prison guards were the dentists of the law enforcement world. “I’d take a cut in pay for some more respect” was how he put it, still chafing that New York governor George Pataki had recently referred to his rank and file not as “correction officers” but as “prison guards”—as did most newspapers. “It has always killed me how fast the criminal goes from being a bad guy at his trial to some kind of victim once he’s in prison, according to public perception,” he added. “We officers hate that, because we’re the good guys.” He agreed when I suggested that some of the officers’ persistent image problems were of their own making: They shunned publicity because so often it was bad. “But we’re coming out,” he insisted. “We’re going to tell our story.” Puma promised that we would talk again soon and that he would introduce me around. Then, without explanation, he stopped returning my calls. I pestered him for months, and finally, through the press liaison, I was invited to attend the union’s initial bargaining sessions for its new contract with the state. There I became friendly with a handful of union reps, including Rick Kingsley, of Washington Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Comstock, New York.

  Kingsley and I ate dinner near the Quality Inn in Albany. He’d been a dairy farmer for years, he said, before switching to corrections thirteen years earlier, succumbing to economic inevitability. His brother, once in car sales, had become a CO, too; and many family members lived nearby. He was divorced, with a son he was putting through college, because, as he put it, “Officer after officer will tell you: There’s no way in hell you’d want your kid to be a CO.”

  Kingsley startled me by admitting that probably 90 percent of the officers he knew would tell strangers they met that they worked not in a prison but at something else—say, carpentry—because the job carried such a stigma. Sure it had its advantages, like the salary, the security, and, with seniority, the schedule: Starting work at dawn, Kingsley had afternoons free to work on his land and rebuild his log cabin. But mainly, he said, prison work was about waiting. The inmates waited for their sentences to run out, and the officers waited for retirement. To Kingsley, it was “a life sentence in eight-hour shifts.”

  He invited me to visit his prison and even asked me to stay in his trailer when I did. Getting permission to visit was hard, so I was thrilled to finally be inside. I knew from the first half hour, though, that I was seeing only surfaces. Conversations stopped when Rick and I entered a lunchroom, and officers in the parking lot stopped talking when we walked up. I was like the guy in the loud shirt who steps off a big cruise ship into the commercial district of some tropical port—the locals would show me what they wanted to show me, and two hours later I’d be gone and their real life could resume.

  This feeling was never stronger than when Rick took me to the yard and I met some of his officer friends. They told me the rules they followed to prevent trouble: breaking up gatherings of more than six people; forbidding martial arts practice, group worship (Muslims wanted to pray together and kneel toward Mecca), and contact sports; frisking inmates as they came in. I asked if there was ever trouble despite all the precautions. They looked at each other and then at Rick, whose expression I didn’t catch. No, they replied after a split-second but telltale delay; there really wasn’t. It was a tight ship.

  Bullshit, I felt like saying. But I couldn’t.

  Rick had told me about the Academy, and it seemed like a great subject to write about: the place where the values of the profession were first imparted, where guys from the sticks first learned the ways of the prison guard. He thought my idea of profiling a new recruit, following him all the way through, was a good one. I set about trying to make it happen.

  But DOCS turned me down flat. They offered no explanation and were not interested in hearing my reasons. It just wasn’t done. I was disappointed. And it made me want to know about this world more than ever.

  I saw that the only way into the Academy was to enter as a recruit, like anyone else. In 1994 I put in an application to take the next correction-officer exam and, several months later, I sat down with a test booklet in a large room full of people desperate for a job. Then, for months, I waited.

  Our session gathered the next morning in a classroom in the basement, near a lounge and the mess hall. The Academy’s instructors were all correction officers with a training credential. Ours, luckily, was Vincent Nigro (“NY-gro,” he was careful to tell us), a CO from a downstate maximum-security prison called Eastern Correctional Facility. A jolly round man with a buzz cut, Nigro said that inmates had nicknamed him Abbott, after the partner of Costello. One of his training specialties was chemical agents, he said, explaining with a wink that “chemical agents make you fat.” He seated us alphabetically around the room—our session contained people with surnames from A to F—and then gave us a mock quiz. “What’s the first three things you get when you become a CO?” he asked. We waited. “A car. A gun. A divorce.”

  Thus began our education in the ways of the Academy. Our days would start before he arrived in this, our “homeroom,” Nigro said. Having left our dorm rooms spotless, we would gather in the classroom and check one another’s uniforms: collar brass had to be straight, name tag placed just so, a single pen in our breast pocket, wallet pocket buttoned, shoes perfectly shined. Then we’d proceed, silently and in single file, to the mess-hall queue. There was a prescribed way to turn corners: You had to pivot on the ball of your inside foot, not interrupting your stride. Breakfast was to be eaten in silence. We’d regroup in the classroom at around seven forty-five and he’d be there by eight. Then, every day, two different officers would count the class, as if we were inmates, and present the completed count slip, along with a fire and safety report, to Sergeant Bloom. Nigro acknowledged that Bloom was a little scary and said he’d try to help us steer clear of him.

  Each instructor had a specialty, and Nigro explained that each would lecture us before we were through. The subjects would range from report writing to the use of force, from penal law to “standards of inmate behavior,” from tool and key control to drug awareness. There would be tests every Friday, on which we’d have to score 70 percent or better; if we didn’t, we could take the test only two more times. That, along with first aid and CPR, was the academic stuff. In addition, we’d have two hours of physical training—PT—every afternoon, and we’d have to pass a physical performance test in our last week. We’d learn how to use a baton and how to fight hand to hand in a course called Defensive Tactics. We’d have to qualify on a shooting range. Finally, we’d be exposed to tear gas (“CS gas” or “chemical agents,” they insisted on calling it) and learn how to fire gas guns.

  Among the things we could get fired for, Nigro advised, were arriving at the Academy late or drunk—once we were allowed to go out, that is—or, oddly enough, sleeping in class. I had thought one of the advantages of corrections work was the chance for a bit of shut-eye now and then. But Nigro said that if we felt ourselves falling asleep, we were to stand up and walk to the back of the class. In future days, the number of recruits trying to remain conscious against the back wall would be an accurate indicator of the deadly dullness of a given lecture.

  Nigro questioned the class, in roughly alphabetical order, about what we had done before coming to the Academy. The Antonelli brothers, handsome identical twins from the Buffalo area who were into bodybuilding, ran a landscaping business, which they had temporarily entrusted to their brother. Don Allen, one of three black men in the group, had worked in detention centers for the state’s Division for Youth (DFY). Tall and thin Aisha Foster, one of four black w
omen, had been a guard at Rikers Island. Her Academy roommate, bubbly Tawana Ellerbe, had worked a clerical job for the New York City Police Department. Dave Arno, though he had a four-year-college degree and part of a master’s, had managed a Burger King, unable to find any other job in the Syracuse area. Cleve Dobbins was a scatterbrained former Army M.P. in his forties. Carlos Bella had been a guard/counselor for New Jersey’s juvenile detention services department. Felix Chavez, a courtly Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, had worked as assistant to a building’s super. I too had managed an apartment complex, I could answer truthfully, and had also driven a cab. Peter DiPaola had worked as an accountant for a vending machine company. Matt Di Carlo, a Navy veteran and CO’s son, had run a gas station and, for the present, was still doing so on weekends. Diandre Dimmie was another former DFY guard; judging by his sharp suits, it made sense that he had also worked in a men’s clothing shop. Brian Eno was an intelligent, pear-shaped former emergency medical technician. Diminutive Anthony Falcone had recently finished his hitch with the Army.

  To see if any of us were going to have trouble with the physical-performance test, Nigro hung a whistle around his neck after lunch and marched us, four abreast, across the Academy parking lot to the gym. The gym was set up for a run-through of the test, and the first thing I noticed when we came in was the heavy gray dummy dangling limply from the high ceiling by a noose around its neck. He was going to be part of the test. Another dummy lay next to him on the floor. Nearby stood a large track-and-field timer sign and a lot of other equipment.

  Nigro explained that there were ten stops on the circuit, and we had to complete all of them within two minutes and fifteen seconds. Every task simulated an actual situation we might have to deal with as correction officers. Nigro said we’d better clap and cheer as our classmates ran through the course. A dozen preceded me; suddenly I was next. Nigro blew the whistle.