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  I grabbed a big silver fire extinguisher and, awkwardly, sprinted about thirty-five yards with it (to put out a fire set by an inmate, of course). Turning, I pushed with all my might against a movable wall (simulating an inmate barricade) and then climbed up and down a ladder attached to the side of the gym (simulating a wall tower). The 160-pound dummy—a stand-in for a suicidal inmate—was next: I wrapped my arms around his middle and lifted him up to relieve the pressure around the neck. Presumably, during the time I was holding him, another officer would be cutting him down. A whistle blew after I’d held him there for ten seconds, so I let him down gently (“Don’t break his neck!” Nigro shouted) and quickly went to the lying-down dummy. This, apparently, was the dummy who didn’t make it. The job here was to drag him about fifty feet.

  I was breathing hard when that was done, but right in front of me lay an eighty-pound barbell to raise from floor to standing position and hold for several seconds more—here I was carrying my end of a stretcher. The next stop was a gymnastics horse to vault (just to show we were not too out of shape); to my dismay, I wiped out on the far side. But my classmates cheered anyway, and in a flash, I had staggered to my feet and was threading my way around three quarters of the gym through a red-cone slalom course and then running up a staircase to the gym’s second floor and back down. Finally, to simulate pulling together the arms of a struggling inmate in order to handcuff him behind his back, I squeezed together a pair of calipers representing fifty pounds of resistance. And was through.

  As I stood aside panting, the next recruit took off. Several more of them fell while coming over the horse, and two of the women had trouble squeezing the calipers. But everyone made it around in time, and Nigro, who might have had trouble negotiating the course himself, looked relieved.

  New York’s seventy-one prisons are scattered across the state. Among them are famous maximum-security prisons—Sing Sing, Attica (in western New York, near Buffalo), Auburn (midstate), and Clinton (in the northern Adirondacks, near Canada)—as well as a variety of mediums and minimums, and work-release and mental-health facilities. (State prisons hold people with sentences of a year or more. Inmates awaiting trial or those serving shorter terms stay in local jails, such as New York City’s giant Rikers Island complex, near La Guardia Airport. Federal prisons generally house criminals convicted of federal crimes—often, drug dealers.)

  Fifty of the state’s seventy-one prisons were built in the last twenty-five years, a period in which the number of inmates has increased nearly sixfold, from 12,500 to over 70,000, due mostly to mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. The majority of these inmates are young men of color from New York City. Because the state government is based in Albany, however, and the state senate is dominated by politicians from rural precincts, nearly all the prison construction has been outside of and away from New York City, where job-hungry communities clamor for it.

  A state salary goes far in small-town New York—correction officers, after eight years, make nearly $40,000 and enjoy numerous job benefits. Reflecting the demographic makeup of the state’s small towns, the officer corps is overwhelmingly white. As inmates are overwhelmingly minority, the racial hierarchy at most facilities resembles that of South Africa under apartheid.

  Both inmates and younger officers tend to be on the move. Inmates are often shifted, with little notice, between facilities, according to obscure agendas of the Department. Officer recruits leave home to go to the Academy, then typically spend the next few years trying to get back: often, their first posting is Sing Sing, which always needs staff because of its chaotic reputation and location in pricey Westchester County. (Because of the prison’s proximity to New York City, the regular staff of Sing Sing is predominantly minority—an exception to the statewide rule.) The more desirable prisons have seniority-based waiting lists of up to several years. Until they get where they really want to be, most correction officers will hit the road for home at the beginning of two days off, even if it means a six- or seven-hour drive. And they’ll play hopscotch, transferring upstate from one “jump jail” to the next, until they can finally live at home again. Thus most of my classmates, starting with their seven weeks at the Academy, were becoming a kind of migrant worker.

  Sergeant Bloom hoped to weed out the unsatisfactory recruits as soon as possible. With that goal in mind, he explained to us later, he sent our section on a field trip the second day, to a real prison called Coxsackie.

  It was about a forty-minute drive from the Academy. We didn’t know another thing about it until the driver of our state school-bus, CO Popish, pulled up to the old complex of brick buildings ringed with tall fences and swirls of razor wire and shut off the engine. There were a few bare trees around, and some snow gusting over dead brown grass. Popish swung around in his seat. He was chubby and pale, and the other instructors didn’t seem to respect him much; driving the bus was, apparently, a chump job. But when Popish began to speak, our nervous chatter quickly stopped. Coxsackie, he said, was “a prison for youthful offenders.” Things had been rough here lately; there had been attacks on guards, he added. With that the bus grew completely silent. It rocked slightly in the wind. Two officers had been slashed in the head, Popish said; one was now on disability. Two years ago, the Box was attacked, and the guy in the control booth held hostage. Popish described having seen the baton of a CO who came face-to-face with a shank-wielding inmate; the baton had a large slice cut out of it.

  Our guide here, Popish said, would be McCorkle—one of the officers who had harassed us on the night of our arrival at the Academy. When he wasn’t training officers, he worked as a CO at Coxsackie, which he called “Gladiator School,” or “the Whack.” All I associated with Coxsackie was the respiratory virus that had first been discovered in the town, and named for it.

  Once McCorkle’s bus arrived, we circled around the facility to the “sally port,” or vehicle gate. Normally a prison of this vintage would have a wall around it, not a fence, I was thinking; later I read in a DOCS newsletter from 1949 that Coxsackie had begun life in 1935 as a state “vocational institution” that aspired to “reformation rather than punishment” of youth through “care, supervision, and training.” (In the newsletter photo, there appeared to be no fence at all.) But those goals seemed to have slipped a bit. We were told to get out of the bus so that guards could search it, and then we were all scanned with metal detectors. It began to rain. We slogged through mud to a rear entrance, showed our I.D.’s, passed through another metal detector, and then marched down a long gray corridor.

  We peered into cells and the mess hall and watched young inmates pass us, walking in double file with their hands in their pockets (as required), as we went by the metalwork and woodwork shops. All the inmates were male, and almost all were black or Latino teenagers. (Now and then I spotted older men—they were thrown in, our guides said, to lend a bit of social stability.) They all wore the dark green pants issued by the state, but a surprising amount of individuality was expressed by their shirts—they were allowed to wear any color but blue, black, gray, or orange, which were our colors—and by their haircuts, beards, and mustaches. Some looked at us briefly as we passed by, but apparently we were not a particularly unusual sight. The officers were almost all white men, middle-aged or older.

  Yellow lines on the floor indicated traffic patterns for inmates, telling them where to line up and where to wait. McCorkle pointed out overhead video cameras, which had been installed in prisons all around the state to provide a record of altercations and other incidents, and said we might be smart to remember where they were. Then, conspiratorially, he offered to show us a place that we couldn’t tell anyone, particularly Sergeant Bloom, we had seen: the Box, or Special Housing Unit. We reached it via an isolated, unheated corridor. “This can be a long, cold walk for an inmate who’s assaulted staff,” said the officer who escorted us, noting with a wink that there were no cameras in the corridor.

  We passed through a heavy door and into the B
ox. Suddenly the atmosphere felt close, like in a bunker; the light was all fluorescent. On our left was an officers’ room and on our right a windowed control center; an officer standing inside it pressed a button and we continued on, into a larger room ringed with solid cell doors, each with a small clear window. A few inmates appeared at them to examine us. At a signal from our guide, the control officer remotely opened an empty cell so that we could take a look. It had a cot bolted to the wall, bedding, a sink, a toilet, and nothing else. When they first arrived, the officers told us, inmates segregated here received no privileges beyond an hour of daily exercise—no reading or writing materials, no personal property. In fact, the most intransigent got fed “the loaf” for the first few days. Nigro had told us about the loaf—a nutritious but awful-tasting bread invented at the Great Meadow maximum-security prison solely for the purpose of feeding the worst inmates. Supposedly, the facility’s superintendent rejected an early recipe because it tasted too good. The current version would keep you alive—if you could get it down. There was a slot in the door through which guards passed food to the inmates; inmates leaving their cells put their hands behind their backs and stuck them out through that same slot to be handcuffed.

  We peered through windows into other cells. The men inside either glared back or ignored us in a way that suggested mental illness or depression more than sullenness. We had heard that the Box here was always run by the same bunch of officers—a group of guys who were all related, cousins and brothers—but the men who showed us around didn’t look related. They walked nonchalantly and talked tough, explaining how the hour-long recreation period was mandated by the courts. “What if they won’t come back in?” one of our group asked the officer. He looked surprised by the naïveté of the question and offered a wry smile. “Oh, they’ll come back in, all right,” he assured the recruit. I tried to imagine the scene in his mind’s eye just then, the little movie replaying, the recalcitrant inmate being “encouraged” to return to his cell …

  Back outside, our guide told us how in 1988 inmates had smashed through the reinforced glass of the control room (now replaced with Lexan) and taken hostage an officer who was attempting to escape to the roof by a ladder. Other officers were beaten and held hostage as well. I guess it would have been bad form to bring that up while we were inside.

  The Box was spooky, but I was scared more by the sight of a sergeant who stopped to chat with us in the corridor. He was a union official, a deputy of Joe Puma’s, with whom I had had a two-hour lunch two years earlier, when I was first exploring this subject. I’d forgotten he worked here. Either he didn’t notice me now or he had forgotten me altogether. Maybe my wearing the uniform helped; once in uniform, I suspected, a person seemed more standard-issue, less an object of curiosity.

  Next we visited a keeplock gallery. The Box held only around thirty inmates, a fraction of those who were under disciplinary restriction. The remainder, because there wasn’t enough room for them in the Box, were “keeplocked” in their cells or placed on the special gallery we were now visiting. They were locked in for twenty-three hours a day, just like Box inmates. We walked out to the exercise courtyard, where these inmates were placed in large chain-link cages to exercise several at a time.

  As we assembled in the courtyard, a barrage of catcalls began raining down. The inmates whose cells surrounded the courtyard were shouting obscenities at us through their windows. They knew we were fresh meat, and in this setting there was no accountability. We couldn’t see them, so we couldn’t figure out who they were. Even if we’d been able to, there was nothing we could have done. Those recruits who stood out—the fat guys, like the smart but funny-looking Eno; the short guys, like Falcone, five-foot-one and pugnacious as hell; the women; and the blacks—caught the worst of it. “Hey, Shorty,” “Yo, Uncle Tom,” “Black bitch—yeah, you. Come suck my dick!” The yard was not large, and it had brick buildings all around it, so the noise was amplified—it was loud and intimidating.

  Over the noise, our tour guide told us that earlier in the morning, the guards had had to break up three fights in these cages, which were being used to hold inmates on a tier that was being fumigated for roaches. “And tell ’em how you broke it up,” suggested McCorkle to his colleague with a slight smile. I moved closer, because it was hard to hear. “Well, you wait for backup,” the officer replied. People couldn’t hear. He raised his voice. “You sure as hell ain’t going in there alone. In fact, two or three may not be enough. You wait until there’s a lot of you, and then you all go in together. And by the time you do, who knows?” He smiled too, now. “Maybe they’ve stopped fighting.”

  As we walked back into the building, a tiny folded bundle of paper dropped at our feet; it was an inmate’s tobacco envelope, which had somehow fallen en route to a neighbor’s window overhead. McCorkle opened it, smelled it, paused, and looked up … then emptied the contents on the ground. Howls of protest issued from above. One of the Antonelli twins looked around, wide-eyed. “They’re animals,” he said.

  It dawned on me, as we ate lunch in the prison auditorium, that there had been no particular need for us to go into that yard, or to linger there. Seeing those cages was hardly crucial. Instead, from a comment I heard from a portly CO with a candy bar sticking out of his shirt pocket—“How’d they like X-yard?”—it became clear that our taking the abuse out there was part of the initiation. The old-timers wanted to see how we’d handle it, wanted to cull the faint of heart. If nothing else, the experience was good practice in the cop art of being stony-faced, of not tipping your hand. Certainly, all the guards we passed in the halls had adopted blank, tough expressions that betrayed no weakness or curiosity, no disgust or delight. I wondered: Was this only about closing the blinds on your own soul so they couldn’t see in? Or was it also about self-control, staying on top of your feelings, repressing those that got in the way of an emotionally difficult job? If you could make your face do it, in other words, maybe the rest would follow. Maybe.

  Sergeant Bloom debriefed us soon after we returned to the Academy. He looked around the room as he asked for our impressions, trying to see if anyone had flipped out. (Nobody had, visibly.) But he also shared with us his surprising view that even at the most tightly run prisons, “we rule with the inmates’ consent.” There were several times every day when inmates, if they were organized, could take over most of a prison, he said. But the fact of the matter was, inmates were almost never that organized. And it was during disorder that they were most likely to get hurt, particularly by each other. In an orderly situation, they were relatively safe. Therefore, as a group, he thought, they quietly conspired to keep things calm.

  Once Sergeant Bloom left, CO McCorkle openly disagreed with his thesis: “Maybe the inmates run things on Rikers Island, maybe they run things at Sing Sing, but not where I work. Not at my facility, Coxsackie. And not in the rest of the state system, either, from what I hear.” For him, this question of control was a matter of considerable importance—as it would be for the many officers I’d come to know later. Many judged themselves and their peers on the degree of control they were able to maintain over inmates. To McCorkle, Sergeant Bloom had sounded a bit off-the-wall, a maverick theorist selling out the program.

  That night on the dorm floor, there was much recapping of the day’s events, particularly the abuse we had received in the Coxsackie yard. In our room, Gary demonstrated a technique for polishing his gleaming dress shoes, the same pair he had worn in the Air Force many years before. I paid close attention, because my black Doc Martens were one of many pairs of shoes Sergeant Bloom had accused of lacking sufficient shine during a spot inspection. Across the hall my bunkmate, Dieter, was exchanging military insults with Di Carlo, a Navy veteran whom he now called Commodore; Di Carlo in turn recited the shortcomings of jarheads he had known. “Being a Marine is like having a lobotomy,” he said. They warmly attacked each other. And they assured those of us who hadn’t been in the service that the Academy was “nothing lik
e” a real military boot camp.

  DiPaola, the vending-machine accountant, and Colton, the lieutenant’s son, spoke of how DOCS was a stopgap until they heard from the state police or federal law enforcement groups, such as the U.S. Border Patrol and the Treasury Department police. The Antonellis had just withdrawn from the Florida Highway Patrol academy—which, they said, was much harder than this—when family trouble called them home. For all those other jobs, you needed some college, but not to become a correction officer. “I know a guy from back home who got through this academy and he’s as dumb as this post,” said one of the Antonellis, whacking the pillar of his bunk.

  Finally we started turning in. Gary, a quiet sort who seldom offered his opinion of anything, unbidden, said as the lights went out, “My son’s almost as old as some of them, and the worst trouble he could get into is a fistfight or drugs.” He was speaking, of course, of the young inmates in Coxsackie, most of them violent repeat offenders. Who knew what world they came from? No one said a word in reply.

  Classes started in earnest the next day, and among the many sleep-inducers—Note-Taking, Tool and Key Control, Cultural Awareness—were a few that made everyone sit up and take notice. A good-natured, shaved-headed, bullnecked older black man named Kirkley taught a class called Use of Force, in which we learned when it was okay to lay our hands on somebody. You had to wade through a pile of handouts—“Article 35,” “Directive 49,” “Employee Manual 8.2,” “Chapter V,” “Correctional Law 137–5”—to figure it all out, but the bottom line was that you could “lay hands on or strike an inmate” if necessary “for self-defense, to prevent injury to a person or to property, to quell a disturbance, to enforce compliance with a lawful direction, or to prevent an escape.” The requirements seemed pretty tough until you focused on the second-to-last one: “to enforce compliance with a lawful direction.” That was the clincher right there, 99 percent of what you needed to know. If the inmate wasn’t doing what you told him to, as long as it wasn’t “Shine my shoes,” you could use physical force on him.