by Ted Conover
“Pal? You’re not my friend.”
“Step in anyway. It’s time.”
“Time for you, maybe, not time for me.”
“No?” I said, on the verge of anger.
Suddenly he grinned. “Chapel porter, CO. I was just leaving.”
“Chapel porter?”
“Yeah, I go every morning. The regular officer knows. Or you can call Officer Martinez over in the chapel.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, jotting down the name.
He’d either bamboozled me or had a little fun, neither of which was the outcome I’d hoped for. I had just decided to approach the next guy who was still out when an inmate called to me from his cell.
“CO! CO! They didn’t call me down for my medication.”
“Yeah? What are you supposed to get?”
I waited half a minute while the man doubled over with a deep chest cough. He started to speak again, then coughed in my face.
“TB pills, man, gotta take my TB pills every day.”
I wiped my face. He didn’t seem to have coughed on me intentionally; he was just heedless. “What’s your name and cell number?”
He told me his name and then pointed out the cell number painted by the door lock. “You’re new here, right, CO?”
“How can you tell?” I said ruefully.
“You know who you look like? You look like that guy on Three’s Company, CO. Know who I mean?”
I nodded.
“Anybody ever tell you that?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll get back to you.”
I went to ask Fay about the chapel porter and the medication when I realized, through the din, that somebody had been shouting “R and W, center gate!” a number of times and that I probably had the key. I fumbled with my rings, tried a likely candidate, and was pulling open the gate when I realized it was inmates on the other side—about four of them—not officers. I hesitated, and stopped with the gate open two or three inches.
“What are you going down for?” I asked.
“OIC porters, CO, come on!”
“I’ve never heard of OIC porters,” I said—which, I would learn, was a mistake. You were never supposed to betray your ignorance to inmates.
“Oh come on, man, you’re new. We do it every morning.”
Without closing the gate, I told them to wait. I’d check it out. I threaded my way down R-gallery, which seemed to have even more inmates on it than W, and finally found Fay, who said to let them through and to call the hospital about the TB pills. But when I returned, the gate was wide open and they’d let themselves through—a significant offense, I thought. Certainly it was one of the ninety-nine rules—inmates were never to touch gates, apart from the doors of their own cells. Or was it my fault for leaving the gate open? I was debating whether to follow up on this when I heard the phone ringing inside the cell used by R-and-W officers as an office. I signaled to Fay over the heads of several inmates, and he indicated I should answer it. Finding the right key took about twenty rings, and at first there was no one on the other end of the line. Then a voice demanded to know why we hadn’t responded to the page over the public address system. The inmate in W-21 had a visit. I hadn’t even heard the page, I confessed. The OIC sounded exasperated. “Are your galleries clear yet?” she demanded. “No, not quite,” I said. “Well, clear ’em up now!” she ordered, and slammed down the phone.
I went to ask Fay what to do about the visit, and he told me to let the guy out. Since I’d never succeeded in locking everybody in anyway, that would be easy, I thought. I went and told the inmate he could go. “I know that,” he said. “But now what about my shower?”
“What about it?”
“You gonna let me into the shower?”
“It depends. Why should you get a shower?”
The inmate’s impatience reminded me of the OIC’s. He sighed as though trying to keep his blood pressure under control. “When you get a visit, you automatically get a shower,” he said in a patronizing tone. Fucking newjack.
I let him into the shower, allowed two officers and an inmate through the center gate, and then returned to the task of trying to clear W-gallery. Every inmate still out claimed he was a porter—an inmate employee who swept, mopped, or cleaned up the common areas at a designated time. There were maybe seven of them. I couldn’t imagine that we needed more than two. I went to ask Fay, who said there should be a list posted somewhere.
“Like where?”
“In the office somewhere, maybe.”
I walked back to the office. The phone was already ringing. A lieutenant wanted me to check the logbook for an entry written three weeks earlier, something about when an inmate had been keeplocked. The logbook was a maroon tome that the first officer—Fay—was supposed to keep current all during the shift, noting who the keeplocks were, what time chow was called, when inmates returned from chow, who went out on a visit, and so forth. Fay hadn’t written a line since signing in an hour and a half ago. I turned back to try to help out the lieutenant, but the handwriting on the day in question was illegible. I apologized, but it was no comfort to the lieutenant, who slammed down the phone. I resumed my search for the porter list. What I found seemed ancient, but I copied down the cell numbers for A.M. porters anyway and returned to W-gallery.
An inmate was standing outside the shower cell I had unlocked for the inmate who had a visit. He was wearing only a towel. “Why are you here?” I asked.
“Gym porter, CO. I can’t take my shower in the afternoon, so I get it now.”
“Says who?”
“The regular officer—he always lets me do it.”
“But you haven’t done any work yet.”
“And I won’t do any work, either, unless I get my shower. You can call over there, CO. Ask for Officer Ebron.”
I decided I would do just that, but then I remembered the more pressing matter of inmates still outside their cells who were claiming to be porters. In the next ten minutes, I managed to anger or amuse most of them, or so it seemed, by trying to enforce my hopelessly outdated porter list. Then I heard new calls to open the center gate. “Sanitation porters,” said three Latino men with plastic garbage bags in their hands. I let them through.
“Who the hell gets to go through the center gate?” I demanded of Fay when I saw him, my stress making itself plain.
“Only those who are authorized,” he answered.
“And who’s authorized?”
“Well, you know, officers, certain porters, inmates on a visit …” His voice trailed off as he reached the limit of his knowledge.
It was barely two hours into the shift, and already I felt I was near the end of my rope. Fay and I weren’t coming close to making the inmates do what they were supposed to do, and I was uncertain about whether I should use my power to compel them. Refusal to “lock in” was considered a petty offense. Tickets, officially known as Inmate Misbehavior Reports, were the means by which we had an inmate keeplocked: After locking him into his cell, we filled out a form, got a sergeant to sign it, and sent it off to the Adjustment Committee. The inmate, once “written up,” faced three or four days of constant confinement until his hearing, and then possibly weeks or months more if the Adjustment Committee agreed that he was guilty. Apparently, there was a way around the paperwork for a petty offense. If I understood the talk, an officer could “mistakenly” deadlock the cell of an intransigent inmate just long enough to make him miss his morning or afternoon recreation. But I wasn’t prepared to try that on my first day.
Before my despair could deepen, the OIC started calling the program runs over the PA system—chapel run, school run, commissary run, State Shop run. Since my inmates would soon be leaving, there was no longer any point in trying to clear the galleries, which was both a humiliation and a relief. At this moment Konoval, one of our training officers, showed up and asked how it was going. “Could be better,” I confessed.
Blithely unaware of how bad things really were, Konoval led me
down the gallery and asked, “How about the cell compliance?” This referred to the rules about how inmates kept their cells—making their beds, not placing objects on the bars, porn on the wall, fabric over their light fixtures, etc. It was the last thing I was worried about, but Konoval strode purposefully ahead, grunting his displeasure at the number of sheets inmates had hung up, the music being played through speakers, even the smell of cooked garlic coming from one cell. (Inmates weren’t allowed to cook.)
“118.21, fire hazard,” he said balefully, pointing out a pile of papers. We moved down the line. “118.30, cleanliness and orderliness. Write these cell numbers in your notebook.”
We passed over to Fay’s side. A few cells down, to my amazement, a young Latino inmate was out on the gallery cutting an older man’s hair with electric clippers. The old man was sitting on an upended box; on one side of his head, the hair was quite short; on the other, still shaggy.
“No, no, no,” said Konoval. “A haircut on the gallery? Pack it up.”
“But, CO!” protested the young barber. “I just need a couple more minutes!”
“Sorry. Now.”
“You gonna make him stop when he’s only halfway through?” the old man asked Konoval.
“That’s right.”
The men grudgingly complied. I was relieved to see an officer command a modicum of respect and wanted Konoval to stick around, despite his tsking over housekeeping. But he had other galleries to check. I let him into the office to sign the logbook—he expressed shock at the lack of entries—and then let him out through the center gate. I turned to wend my way through the large number of inmates responding to the announcements for gym and yard runs—I hadn’t even heard them—when a tall, lanky black inmate in a muscle shirt yelled, “Hey, CO!” As I turned to face him, the short, bulky man at his side went through nine tenths of the motion of landing an uppercut on my chin. He stopped maybe an inch away, and as I jumped reflexively backward, the two of them dissolved into laughter and strolled off down the gallery. 102.10, I thought, threats to an officer. But was it a threat if they were only kidding, if they were just trying to make a fool out of me? I tried to calm my pounding heart and wondered if I should have pulled out my baton. I wondered how I’d last five more hours.
They placed us on different shifts for the next three weeks, and every day I was at a different post—thank God. The idea was that the regular officer at each post would teach us what he or she knew. But even if the regular officers were there (and not on their day off), in practice they were often sick of constantly explaining things to OJTs and tended to ignore us.
This was the case later that first week, when I was assigned to the State Shop along with DiPaola, Davis, and Colton. Apparently, some days in the State Shop were busy—the shop provided blue jeans and button-down shirts to inmates with court dates and inventoried the belongings of inmates on transfers—but this was not one of them. Still reeling from my experience on the gallery, I was mainly relieved to have some downtime, but the others were on edge and found the lack of activity excruciating. We stood around waiting while the regular officers took all available chairs in the tiny dayroom and drank coffee. Finally, a senior officer instructed us to do a Fire and Safety Report—a daily form for which you count and check the readiness of an area’s fire extinguishers, fire-alarm pulls, emergency lights, etc. We discovered that the faucet handle for a fire hose was missing—you wouldn’t be able to turn it on in a fire—and duly noted it on the form. “Oh, I’ve got that in a drawer somewhere over here,” the officer said when he read it. “It’s to keep any inmates from turning it on. They did that once. Hey, don’t worry about it. Write up a new form.”
“Without mentioning it?”
“Right.”
I pictured Sergeant Bloom, red in the face, saying accusingly, “False report!” We might be held liable if the State Shop burned down! But we rewrote it, because we didn’t want the officer to hate us. Reality had set in.
Three more hours passed with nothing to do. DiPaola finally said, “I didn’t think prison work was going to be anything like this. I don’t want to just stand around and play with my fuckin’ dick all day.” Another hour passed. It was now Friday afternoon. Three newly arrived inmates were placed in a holding cell near us, awaiting their issue of clothing, and one started watching Davis.
“Be drivin’ home up north to visit the missus this afternoon, right, Davis? Countin’ the minutes?”
Davis ignored him. But it was unnerving. Inmates had little to do but watch the officers, we’d been told in the Academy; “you’re like their TV.” From careful watching, they’d read his name tag; from Davis’s wedding band, they knew he was married. From our behavior and the way other officers talked to us, they knew we were OJTs (and therefore that we had the weekend off). Statistical probability told them that Davis was from upstate; maybe something in his bearing betrayed it, as well.
Finally, four inmates arrived who had to be strip-frisked before being placed in a holding cell. This was Nuts and Butts, in officer parlance, a very specific procedure that had to be followed to the letter. (Blurred, laminated photocopies of some court order regarding this search were posted in bathrooms; apparently, inmates had won some redress in court because officers had conducted the searches disrespectfully.) We’d quickly been taught the procedure at the Academy, but Davis had spent the entire previous day doing strip-frisks outside the Visit Room: All inmates had to submit to one after a visit, to make sure they hadn’t been passed any contraband (primarily cash or drugs) by a visitor. So Davis went over it with us.
My inmate, Ortiz, was clean-shaven, slope-shouldered, bespectacled, and out of shape; he looked like a college student. He handed me cigarettes and matches from his pockets before entering a small cubicle with a curtain for a door. Then he passed me out his glasses and clothing as he removed them: T-shirt, trousers, socks, shoes. I ran my fingers over each item, hung them all on pegs, and stepped inside.
He stood naked facing me on a small square of carpet, briefs in his hand. He offered them to me, and I checked them quickly. There was some blood in the seat. “You okay?” I asked. He nodded, and I began directing him through the obligatory motions. But he knew them better than I did and was always a step ahead.
“Hands through your hair. Pull your ears forward. Mouth open. Put out your tongue, pull out your lips and cheeks.” I looked quickly under the tongue. “Arms up.” I checked the armpits. “Turn around.” He did, and immediately bent over and spread his buttocks so I could see his anus. “Fine, thanks.”
I left the booth so he could dress. That was my first strip-frisk, and I hated it. I hated Ortiz’s pliant submission. I almost wished he had resisted more, caused me some trouble—I didn’t enjoy his servility. I didn’t enjoy the visual memory of his anus and dick and the blood on his underwear. (“’Roids,” DiPaola would suggest later.) Half an hour before we left, an inmate who was being transferred to another facility (on a draft, in the lingo) came in with his personal property to be inventoried. His state-issued clothing was all clean and immaculately folded: six T-shirts, three pairs of green trousers, three green short-sleeved work shirts, one white dress shirt, one green sweatshirt, one zippered winter coat, six sets of underwear, “Felony Flyer” sneakers, and leather half-height boots. He had a Koran and a couple of spare kufis (skullcaps). It took us all of five minutes.
“Enjoying yourselves?” asked a black officer who I assumed was an old-timer. He’d been out of the Academy only a few months, it turned out, but had already been assigned several times to the State Shop. His take on the boredom was that it “beats working a gallery.” But a given day could bring either one—hair-pulling overwork on a gallery or absolutely nothing to do in a place like the State Shop. I thought of myself as a fairly flexible person, but not knowing what each day would bring was nerve-racking. What were you supposed to do—shut down your brain when you walked into the prison or drink extra coffee and prepare to go into overdrive?
&
nbsp; “I just try to make myself go numb,” he said.
Ten days later, after I’d spent some time in A-block, Davis, DiPaola and I worked together again, this time in B-block. DiPaola was on the U-and-Z galleries, at the very top, and Davis on S-and-X, in the middle. My job, by comparison, was humdrum: I was posted at the front gate, the main passage into and out of B-block. Several times an hour, when I heard the doorbell ring, I’d stick a key into the heavy metal door, twist it, and give the door a big shove to let an officer or inmate with a pass in or out. It didn’t close easily; you had to open it wide and then use its momentum to swing it shut. In an emergency, I was supposed to step outside the block into the corridor and lock the door from there. That way, any disturbance that got out of hand could be contained.
But the job was so dull that I was almost dozing off and could hardly respond when the radio of a nearby officer loudly blared out the emergency tone. An alarm had been pulled on S-and-X galleries, a voice advised. All red dots were to respond.
Half a dozen officers rushed upstairs through the center gate. Shaking myself into wakefulness, I let another half-dozen red dots in through the front gate before stepping out, locking it, and leaving B-block to its fate.
Ten minutes later, the emergency was over and I went back in. The red-dot officers were coming down the stairs with two inmates in handcuffs. One had a deep cut across his face and was bleeding profusely. He was taken to the Sing Sing emergency room. The other, who had attacked him, was locked into an empty shower cell. Apparently, an officer on U-and-Z had mistakenly unlocked a keeplock’s cell. Taking advantage of this error to settle a grudge, the keeplock had walked out of his cell when the brakes were opened to let inmates go to their programs, descended two floors to S-and-X, burst into the cell of his unsuspecting enemy, and slashed him.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, sergeants were interviewing Di-Paola and Davis—they had been working on those same galleries—as well as other officers who had been involved. Within an hour, rumors were circulating among our class that DiPaola had been the one who let the inmate out. He denied it, and of course, there was no way to know for sure. Keys were passed back and forth between officers all the time. Still, regular officers reflexively blamed OJTs when there was a screwup, and often they were right. Before our shift the next day, the training officer underscored the seriousness of what had happened and said that the injured inmate was very likely to sue the Department. A lieutenant entered the room just as this comment was being made.