by Ted Conover
Fifteen minutes later the roles were reversed, and I was holding the massive arm of one of the Antonelli twins as he sputtered and teared. Nearby, as Arno recovered, someone pointed out that the cap hanging from his belt was covered with puke. Brown sheepishly confessed that he was responsible. For a while, Bella was spitting up blood. We took off our shirts and shook our hair, since the chemical agent lingered in both. The instructor handed out garbage bags for us to place our uniforms in and offered us the rationale for this ritual of suffering. It was necessary, he said, so that we didn’t panic if it occurred inside a prison. He painted a scenario: Chemical agents were released into a mess hall containing unruly inmates, and officers too. The inmates would soon be rushing outside to the yard, hopping mad and “looking for the first uniform they can find” to beat up. If we officers could calmly remain inside the mess hall, we would be more likely to remain safe.
This was just barely plausible. Who said the mess hall would have an exit to the yard? And that it would be open? Our afternoon on the range made more sense to me as a rite of passage that might bring us closer by making us feel we’d endured something awful together. In conclusion, the officer assured us that the chemical agent, “once you’re out of it, will be nothing more than a painful memory.”
At chow that evening, somebody commented that the exposure had caused “the worst pain I ever had.” I thought about that, and about the instructor’s remark—kinds of pain, kinds of bad memories. For a pain of fifteen-minute duration, this was probably the worst. But I’d had worse pain, duller and more long-lasting, from various injuries. And how did you compare these nerve-related pains with heartache, or with the pain—call it soulache—of imprisonment, the kind of pain, no one seemed interested to observe, that we were going to administer in our chosen profession? It hardly seemed right to use the same word for all of them.
Concomitant with the rise of imprisonment, there were 239,229 correction officers nationwide at the beginning of 1998, up from 60,026 just sixteen years before. In large areas of New York and other states, corrections is the only growth industry, the most likely profession for thousands of young people. But how odd to devote yourself professionally to confining others in a small space.
“You’re just a forty-thousand-dollar baby-sitter,” one instructor told us in summary, after describing the misbehavior of inmates. Only, most baby-sitters can’t get away with the use of force, and most are not seriously endangered by their charges.
“You leave here and become a boss,” another instructor asserted. “You’re automatically a supervisor, because supervising inmates is your job.” This instructor, Turner, who was not very good at telling a joke but clearly intended one, proceeded to read us a passage from The One Minute Manager: “‘Take a minute out of your day and look at the people around you—they’re the most valuable resource that you have!’” He put the book down and cleared his throat. “Of course, that doesn’t really apply in a correctional setting,” he said. “Get rid of these, and there’s ten thousand more out there waiting.”
In one sense, Turner said, prisons were like little towns—with infirmaries their hospitals, commissaries their department stores, chapels their churches, exercise yards their parks, gyms their health club, mess halls their restaurants, and we a special sort of police department. If our job title, “correction officer,” suggested a role in setting people straight, though, Turner suggested we think again. Because in reality, he said, “rehabilitation is not our job. The truth of it is that we are warehousers of human beings.” And the prison was, above all, a storage unit.
Turner offered this opinion after the warning that was issued in two thirds of classes at the Academy: “What’s said here doesn’t leave this room.” That was always a signal to pay close attention, because we were about to learn something of actual value. Police work must be like this across the board: There’s the official line and then there’s what you really need to know, and the invaluable instructors are the ones who can cut through the crap and, perhaps at their peril, tell you the truth.
We learned many things this way. To be attentive to the location of surveillance cameras, as in our Coxsackie tour, was one of them. One instructor said that in past years it was true that a team of COs would patrol the blocks and “adjust” individual inmates who had been causing trouble, but that it really didn’t happen anymore; on the other hand, the Antonellis had heard there was a room in Attica where troublesome inmates would still “get a tooth through the lip” as encouragement to change their attitude. We learned that you probably wouldn’t get in big trouble for showing up at work slightly drunk or unshaven, or even for falling asleep once in a while, but call in sick or punch in late one too many times and you were history.
At the same time, the Academy seemed to embrace an institutional denial that what we were being taught to do had a moral aspect. The moral weirdness of prison was never discussed—the racial inequality and the power inequality; the them and us; the constant saying no.
I thought about this during “range week,” one of the most enjoyable periods of training because of the time we got to spend away from the Academy, at a shooting club. We learned all about the Department’s three standard firearms—the Smith & Wesson Model-10 .38 Special revolver; the Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle; and the Remington 870P 12-gauge pump-action shotgun—and their ammunition, and we practiced loading, unloading, cleaning, storing, and, by far the most fun, firing them. The concentric circles of the targets were set inside the shape of a dark human torso, but I was so busy working to get my qualification card and trying to outscore gun-nut Dieter (owner of seventeen pistols) that I hardly noticed. What finally got my attention was the shotgun instruction. In the event of a riot in the yard, one instructor said, simply stepping outside the wall tower with a shotgun held high or pumping it near the microphone of your public address system could be enough to get inmates to stop. Similarly, he added, shooting at the ground in front of rioting inmates, rather than directly at them, could be highly effective, as it sprayed buckshot at several individuals instead of giving only one man the full force of a blast. We were firing our shotguns into the ground in front of a high bank of dirt to see how this worked when I faced the fact that this class was essentially about killing and wounding inmates.
Sergeant Bloom called us into the chapel at the end of our last day on the range to read us some announcement. I don’t remember what it was; I only remember thinking it was strange to have spent so much time learning details about firearms (on our weekly test we were asked about the range of the different kinds of buckshot the Remington could fire, the direction in which the crossbolt safety button had to be pushed to enable the gun to fire, and a zillion questions of nomenclature) while never once being asked whether we thought we could shoot somebody. Or never discussing what shooting someone meant, in an ethical sense—how officers might be not only legally but morally justified in doing it. Probably, it was true in all of the police agencies, as well as the armed forces, that training had its own physical and intellectual momentum and the spiritual side was left to the student. A Black Muslim inmate would later opine to me that this kind of denial was the very reason for military discipline; it was necessary, he said, in order to make men do something unnatural, something they ordinarily wouldn’t do. Maybe that was true; or maybe it was more a matter of needing to have strict control over the behavior of those who held life-and-death power over other men.
In any event, here we were in the chapel, illuminated by stained glass of men who had aimed to do right by God, and our job as correction officers, it seemed to me, was to think about those godly things as little as possible.
With four weeks to go, Dieter was really starting to get on my nerves. (I’m sure it would delight him to read this.) Now nicknamed Sarge by many in our session, he had in the first week been elected session leader—our group’s liaison to the instructors and Sergeant Bloom. This was, in large degree, because he knew how to march and had other militar
y training that could keep us out of trouble. Even I had voted for him; he seemed conscientious and responsible. He was elected over his own objections: He was too impatient with people, he freely admitted, and was basically a misanthrope. “I’m best off by myself,” he said one day.
His new authority seemed to give freer rein to his mean streak. Dieter had a sixth sense that told him I was somehow out of place in the Academy, and he didn’t like things that were out of place. He would ride me in a joking way in the room, criticizing my housecleaning or the way I wore my uniform.
I can’t remember having met a person who was more unlike me than Dieter. Our every habit was opposite—he rising at the earliest moment, I catching a few winks; he enamored of the martial life, I skeptical or oblivious of it; he in love with firearms and hunting, I indifferent; he a smoker and drinker, I doing little of either; he fond of gay jokes and full of violent fantasies about liberals and women, I counting among my friends many who are gay, liberal, or female or all three.
One night, when we had turned the lights off, he flat-out asked what I was doing in the Academy. I flat-out asked him back. “My job didn’t pay too good,” he said. “Not much security.” “Well I could say the same,” I retorted, with less than total candor. No other officer, in my entire state service, would ever ask me a question about my past, whether employment or education; the lack of curiosity surprised and relieved me. Previously, I’d vaguely told two or three classmates that I’d been involved in publishing and printing. Dieter now suggested I tell people I’d been working a job they’d understand. “Tell ’em you’re a ball-joint chromer,” he suggested. “Sure,” I said. “Tell me how that goes.”
Dieter would accuse me of shaking the bunk bed when I turned over; he joked that if I didn’t stop, he’d bring in one of his guns and shoot me. That left me no choice but to murder him before the weekend, I retorted. Then he started saying he’d shoot me whenever I did anything to irritate him—like when I wouldn’t move quickly enough out of his way when he was headed for his locker, which was directly beneath mine or, later, when I caught a cold.
I’m pretty sure Dieter gave me the cold. He came back from home with one on a Sunday night. By the end of the week, I had it. As his subsided, he treated me as if I had the plague. He wouldn’t touch anything I’d touched, whether it was a doorknob or a faucet, and he winced whenever I blew my nose. We always tried to sit apart in the mess hall, but sometimes seating arrangements were out of our hands, and one night we found ourselves across the table from each other. I had a stuffy nose and was sniffing. “Don’t you blow that thing!” he warned, in what surely sounded like a joke to the woman sitting next to him; she smiled. But I knew, in the way I knew Dieter at some level did think about shooting me when he merely joked about it, that he was serious. I tried not to blow my nose, just for the sake of peace. But finally there was no other option. I took a napkin, turned away from the table in my seat, and blew my nose.
“Fuckin’ asshole!” Dieter muttered, throwing down his fork and standing up to clear his tray. He stormed away. The woman looked at me. “Was he serious?” she asked.
“He’s a different kind of guy,” I answered.
That night, when Dieter was telling Gary about how he had murdered his little brother when the kid sneezed at the dinner table, I knew we were near the point where something was going to give: Dieter was in abuse mode nightly. He threatened to shoot me in the top bunk as he shot the birds on the roof of his barn, made jokes about “fucking bitches”—indeed, about skinning them as you would skin a deer you’d shot—and about smashing the heads of toddlers. They were I’m-sick-and-I-like-it kinds of jokes. Would we fight, I wondered, or would I go to Nigro or the sergeant?
In the end, we were saved by a Howard Johnson’s motor lodge. So desperate was the state for new COs, they had started another training session before ours was finished; for our last three weeks, we were given rooms at a HoJo so that newer recruits could move into our dorm rooms. The motel rooms were doubles, and to my profound relief, my roommate was mild-mannered Gary.
Monday morning, and Colton and I had drawn the chore of reporting the count to Sergeant Bloom. Toward the beginning of our stay at the Academy, this job scared everyone, because of the likelihood that Bloom would find some fault in the presenters; you had to say things just right, look just right, move just right. But now we’d had a lot of practice, and neither Colton nor I had run badly afoul of Bloom. Also, Colton seemed among the most capable of my classmates. He had a degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Law in New York City. He scored well on our weekly tests. And he even had a sort of preppie, arrogant air about him: If I’d run into him wearing tasseled loafers in some uptown real estate developer’s office, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Here, he seemed supremely overqualified. Nigro went over the drill with us as we left the classroom, but I felt we hardly needed a refresher. Colton and I were bulletproof: We were going to blow Bloom away.
We checked each other’s appearance and then smartly wound our way through the halls. Coming upon the open door to Bloom’s office, we slowed, then halted, Colton in front. We could hear Bloom on the phone. Wait, or proceed? Nigro had been late arriving, so we would certainly be the last session to report—and it was getting later by the minute. We waited at attention for a while and then, consulting each other in whispers, decided to proceed. Colton reached around the doorway and rapped on Bloom’s door. Bloom kept on talking. Finally, we heard the phone being slammed down. “Come in!” he roared.
Spinning on our toes as required, we stepped into Bloom’s office and then stood side by side at attention before his desk. Bloom rose and approached to get a close look at us. “Correction officer recruits Colton and Conover with the seven forty-five A.M. count, sir,” said Colton. “It’s twenty-seven total, twenty-six in, one out.” I handed him the paperwork.
Bloom looked at the clock on his wall. “It’s eight-fifteen,” he said accusingly. We stared straight ahead, not responding. He glanced at the count slip, the classroom inventory and, finally, the meal evaluation form. (We had learned the first week never to criticize any of the food. After our class gave the inedible pea soup an “unsatisfactory” rating, Bloom angrily demanded of the messengers why they hadn’t taken it up with the kitchen staff before complaining to him.) The meal evaluation we gave him now was for the preceding Friday. Bloom noticed that we had rated Friday’s dinner “good” and barked out that we hadn’t eaten dinner at the Academy on Friday—we’d gone home.
“It’s a false report!” he yelled. He paused as we stood still. “Well? Get me another one!”
Colton and I beat our retreat to the classroom and filled out a new form. Nigro rolled his eyes when we told him the mistake. In a matter of minutes we were back before Sergeant Bloom. He scrutinized the new report and acidly noted that we had neglected to sign it. Caught in some continuing confusion over whether to carry pens in our shirt pockets or hide them in our pants pockets (there was no official Academy policy; all that mattered was that everyone in a session did the same thing), Colton and I realized that we did not, at the moment, have pens. We had taken them out before coming to see Bloom, since none of the other sessions carried pens in their breast pockets. Bloom stared at us as we realized our dilemma.
“May we borrow a pen, sir?” Colton finally asked, with trepidation. Sighing loudly, Bloom handed Colton his. Colton signed and handed the report to me; I signed and returned it to Colton, who said, “It’s the sergeant’s.” I smiled and, with a little laugh, handed the pen back to Bloom.
“Why are you laughing?!” Bloom thundered, reddening. (“Because who on earth could ever take this seriously?” I wanted to say.) He was now beyond his usual ruddy color—he’d gone deep crimson. “I have to buy these!” That was even funnier, I thought, but the sight before me took care of my smile. Colton decided that our duty was done. We slunk back to the classroom and assured Nigro that our second trip had gone just fine.
Things were getting
worse at Coxsackie. We’d heard rumors of disturbances there since our visit, the first week of March. Colton came back one Sunday night in early April and said he’d heard through his father that two officers had been stabbed there the week before. Later that week Chamberlain, whose father was a sergeant in the department (and had, incidentally, been Sergeant Bloom’s roommate when both of them were at the Academy), said he’d heard that three more had been hurt. Finally, on a Monday morning in mid-April, Nigro asked us if we’d seen the papers: Eight Coxsackie COs had been hospitalized on Saturday, and two more on Sunday. And, related or not, another large group of officers had been hurt at a midstate medium-security facility called Mohawk. The journalist in me wanted details: Where in the prison had the attacks occurred? What had instigated them? How unusual were they? But as I was learning, part of being a CO was appearing indifferent to such details. Curiosity, perhaps, was not very macho. I prayed that somebody would ask Nigro for more information, but nobody did; and there the discussion ended.
But it cast a pall, this news. The very place we’d visited was in turmoil. Experienced officers, not newjacks, which we’d soon be, were getting badly beaten up. Despite the silence, I knew everyone was thinking the same thing: Would we be next? The feeling must be somewhat similar in the military among troops about to be dispatched to faraway trouble spots: Some of us are going to get hurt. And yet the nature of both jobs was that, ceding the decision making to commanding officers, you went anyway. In this agreement to go, there was solidarity.
During the pain from chemical agents, the classroom boredom, and—especially—my conflicts with Dieter, I had always consoled myself with the knowledge that my career as a guard might easily end after seven weeks, with graduation from the Academy. My real life was still waiting for me, and there was plenty of work out there.