by Ted Conover
“I don’t give a shit about the inmate,” he said, unexpectedly. “An officer could’ve been cut. Who here could live with that?” We were quiet. I don’t think anybody had expected the case to turn into a lesson about protecting our fellow officers.
Keys were power. And they were responsibility—because many, many bunglings could be traced back to a set of keys and the person who had been entrusted with them. When to lock and when to unlock was, by one reckoning, what we were here to learn. “You are never wrong, in prison, to lock a gate,” a sergeant had reassured us at lineup one day. But it was more complicated than that. Gates had to be unlocked for the prison to function smoothly—and then, at the right moment, to be locked again. Sing Sing was a place of, probably, over two thousand locks, many with the same key. The cardinal sin, the one thing you were never, ever to do, was lose your keys. A lost key could fall into inmates’ hands. A lost key was a disaster.
I was back in B-block a few days later, responsible for half of Q-gallery, on the flats, as well as the center gate—the main access point from the flats to the galleries above. To learn this job, I had to handle the keys. But while the regular officer, a fat, powerful-looking cigar chomper named Orrico, was at pains to explain the job, he was not handing me the ring of keys. Instead, he played with them, twirled them around a big finger, caught them in his meaty palm. There were several, I could see: the cell key, the brake-padlock key, a gym-door key or two, an end-gate key, a center-gate key, a fire-alarm key, and at least one other, all of them different. The pewter-colored cell key was the biggest, its shaft as thick as a Mont Blanc pen, with a silver dollar-sized handle at one end and skeleton key-like chiselings in a tab at the other.
In case of a red-dot emergency, Orrico was saying, I was to get to the center gate as soon as possible. It was the main passage to the upper floors, and I would need to let through all the officers who had to pass, then lock it back up. In no case was I to follow the responding red-dot officers upstairs—even if my best friend worked up there, even if I heard officers screaming out in agony—because control over the gate was essential to the block’s security.
Concluding his lecture, Orrico left to pursue a cup of coffee and handed me the keys. No sooner had he disappeared than the red-dot alarm sounded. Officers were dashing toward the center gate, arriving before me. I rushed through them to open the gate, then realized I had no idea which key to use. My heart rate soared as I stood there fumbling with the key ring while more and more officers shouted at me to hurry up. “Somebody just take it!” I heard someone say.
I had just stuck the right key into the lock when the officers disappeared behind me. The alarm wasn’t upstairs, they’d realized, but through the short passage, to V-gallery. I peered around the corner and saw them massing in two huge piles, evidently on top of inmates. Then bang bang bang—on the center gate again. This time, officers were on the other side of it, responding from upstairs. Among them was my classmate Don Allen. “Come on, Conover, let’s go!” he yelled excitedly. I found the key again. I turned it. A second flood of officers pushed by me.
A few minutes later, everyone was back on his feet, including three mashed-looking inmates, who were handcuffed behind their backs. Each inmate had an officer holding the chain of his cuffs and marching him back to my gallery. First came a young black man with some swelling over his brow and a lot of blood flowing down the left side of his face. Next was a long-haired Latino with no shirt. Finally, there was another young black man, bleeding from gashes around the temple. They were to be locked in empty shower stalls on Q-gallery, and for that they needed keys.
Orrico appeared. “Where are they?” he demanded, holding out his open palm. I checked my belt. They weren’t there! I looked in the center-gate keyhole—not there either. My heart sank. “What?” Orrico demanded loudly. “You don’t have them?” This was the cardinal sin. Orrico called out to the milling officers, “Anybody got the center-gate key?” From the throng of officers came some questioning looks. Finally, Don Allen emerged holding—God bless him—my keys. Orrico snatched them away in disgust.
“You dropped them,” Allen said quietly. I had no idea how it had happened. Allen quickly and kindly changed the subject. He had seen part of the incident from above, he said. Apparently, the attacker was a V-gallery porter who had been sweeping the flats with a push broom. When another inmate appeared, walking down the flats, the porter attacked him, first breaking the broom handle over his head and then trying to gouge his face with the splintered ends. How the third inmate got involved, Allen didn’t know.
Allen had already seen a lot of action. “You heard about the guy who hung up yesterday?” he asked me. I’d heard it mentioned at lineup, a minor news item; for seasoned officers, this was a mundane occurrence. “I was there when they cut him down,” Allen told me. “He’d tied his shoelaces up high on the bars, but I guess not high enough to kill him, so he’s there all pale going gaagaa-gaaghh.” Allen, a natural comedian, was so funny making this sound with his eyes bugging out that I laughed despite myself. “We cut him down, then we carried him to the infirmary. My God, this place is crazy.” Allen, who had previously worked in juvenile detention for the Division for Youth, knew from crazy.
He left me to my thoughts, which mainly concerned my own adequacy. There would be no official repercussions—no sergeant had seen what happened, and Orrico hadn’t turned me in. But the incident troubled me. Was I up to the job, to the frequent emergencies? A couple of days before, while hustling up a staircase to back up an officer who was arguing heatedly with an inmate, I’d slipped and my baton had popped out of its ring, bouncing loudly down the metal stairs to the hands of officers below—a total embarrassment. And now this. During various crises in my prior life, I had responded well, keeping cool when a friend broke his leg skiing or when a girlfriend lacerated her leg in a fall from a motorcycle or when something in the oven caught fire. I was the guy who, when someone tripped over the cord, caught the falling lamp.
Somehow, that didn’t seem to translate to prison work. I wondered about the reason. During those other incidents, my starting point was a calm, which was then interrupted. The starting point in prison, however, was stress, much of it born of hostility. Early indications were that I didn’t handle it so well.
With a seasoned officer named Martinez, I spent the next day on guard at the foot of the tunnel leading up from Tappan. The gate was outdoors, but there was a little shack next to it where I sat with Martinez. He was short and seemed tough. Around us were the abandoned original stone cellblock, boarded up but looking solid enough to last till eternity; the A-block yard, with a weight-lifting area and handball courts visible to us behind high chain-link fences; and a garden, which stood between us and the Tappan dorms. Martinez told me to watch out for inmates who were carrying more than they should be. A lot of contraband was passed between Tappan and Sing Sing, and most of it probably came through here, he said. As we chatted, he told me about a softball game he’d witnessed in which inmates from the two opposing teams went after each other with the bats. “Compare your baton to a baseball bat, and you’ll know why we didn’t rush in there to break it up,” he said.
We were relieved early and walked over to the chapel, where Martinez sat notarizing inmate legal documents for an hour. His brother, who looked just like him, was in charge of the chapel. Things were quiet, and Brown, a new officer from up north, offered to show me around the inmate-programs area in the basement. Reading a newspaper in the Hebrew Affairs Office was one of Sing Sing’s more celebrated current inmates, Dr. Charles E. Friedgood, a Long Island surgeon serving twenty-five years to life for murdering his wife—the mother of their six children and a stroke victim—with a massive overdose of Demerol. A week after he had sworn on her death certificate that she died of another stroke, a relative alerted the police that Friedgood was about to leave the country for London. They stopped the plane on the runway at Kennedy Airport and removed the doctor, who was carrying some $650,000 i
n negotiable securities, and jewelry that had belonged to his wife. He was headed to Europe, police said, to join his Danish mistress, a former nurse, with whom he had had two children.
Friedgood liked Brown, and had apparently spoken to him before about Judaism. “Yes, Mr. Brown, we’ll see about you!” he said, smiling, as we left. “Have to have you circumcised one of these days!”
Outside in the hall, I said, “Circumcised, huh?” But Brown seemed embarrassed, whether about the idea of circumcision, an inmate referring to his privates, or the suggestion that he had discussed conversion, I couldn’t tell. He didn’t say anything.
Martinez was the subject of our pre-shift OJT briefing two days later. Apparently, he had stopped an inmate passing through the gate and asked to see what he was carrying. When the man resisted, Martinez had wrestled him to the ground but was by no means in control of the situation. Two OJTs were among six officers standing nearby who, Martinez had complained to the union steward, did nothing to help him out. Finally, the officer driving a van that ferries disabled inmates and others around Sing Sing jumped out and helped subdue the man. Our training officer was angry, and during the regular lineup we were chastised by a lieutenant.
“You OJTs—and a lot of other officers—need to get more confrontational with these inmates,” he said. “If it means you need to get bloody, then get bloody.”
The next day, when I was working in A-block, a group of my fellow OJTs was ordered to pat-frisk inmates leaving the block. This was a common activity, which occasionally netted contraband such as marijuana, cash, or a weapon. Inmates had to place their hands up against the wall and spread their legs while we patted them down from collar to socks. Removing a hand from the wall before the frisk was complete constituted aggression at most other facilities, though at Sing Sing it usually prompted merely a warning. “You fucking OJTs are a pain in the ass,” an inmate apparently told one of my classmates while up against the wall.
“What?” the officer said.
The inmate took one hand off the wall and began to repeat the phrase but was immediately jumped by the frisking officer and several others. When I heard about it, I was proud, because it showed we weren’t wimps. The trainees who had failed to help Martinez probably just didn’t realize what was going on or what was expected of them. Certainly none of us, I now felt, after the lieutenant’s lecture, would hesitate to help a fellow officer in trouble.
I worked a day in Tappan with Officer St. George, who was waiting to be transferred up north. He was slow and flaccid, with the kind of world-weary negativism you might find in employees behind the counter of a fast-food restaurant at a highway rest stop. Though Tappan was a good post by most measures—relatively low-stress, relatively low-danger—he hated life at Sing Sing so much that at 3 P.M. he would hit the road to spend a single day off at home, which was six hours away, on the Canadian border. He’d take a nap the next day and then start driving again at midnight in order to make lineup at 6:45 A.M.
“What town?” I asked, and he shushed me—rightly: He didn’t want inmates to know anything about him. This was the reason we didn’t have our first name on our tags—only an initial—and didn’t reveal other personal information. The reasons for this were best summed up by a story, possibly apocryphal, that I’d already heard at the Academy but which St. George recounted again: A CO pisses off an influential inmate in his block. Three days later, the prisoner hands him a manila envelope. Inside are photos of the CO’s daughter at play on her swing set.
Most of the day, St. George sat at a desk facing the door to a stairwell and argued with inmates. He argued over whose turn it was to sweep and mop the floor. (The names were listed on a chart, so there didn’t seem to be grounds for disagreement, but the inmates could see that St. George had an endless capacity to argue, and probably figured they should take advantage of it.) He argued over when the television could be on, when inmates could cook in the kitchen, and whether someone could leave a box of personal stuff in a common area. And, in the day’s most interesting incident, he argued with an inmate who came in after working in the mess hall with his shirt stuffed with stolen food.
If the inmate hadn’t been greedy, I thought, he might have gotten away with it. But the buttons on his shirtfront could barely contain everything he had taken: two loaves of bread, twenty-four frozen waffles, and a ten-pound bag of apples. St. George made him take it all out and put it on the desk. Leaving the mess hall with food was theft of state property, an offense right out of the book. But St. George couldn’t decide what to do. Instead of writing the guy up, he proceeded to argue with him, and a dozen other inmates who gathered around, about the fate of the contraband. With the fervor of lawyers, the inmates tried to convince St. George that mess-hall workers were paid so little they deserved any extras they could find. (“That’s a good point, you know,” he told me.) One proposed that the officer simply divide the food evenly among the seventy-five inmates on the floor. “Nobody would tell,” he asserted with a straight face. Yet another, tired of arguing, tried simply to intimidate St. George. “You think it’s a good idea to piss off this many people with just you here, CO?” Not only did St. George fail to write this inmate up for making a threat; he later concurred with him, telling me, “You really could get a knife in your back at any time around here.” Of course you could, I wanted to say, but that wasn’t the point.
Still undecided, St. George called the mess-hall officer to fill him in. The man appeared to be about as concerned over the theft as St. George was. Certainly, he didn’t care about reclaiming the food. “Just write him up for 116.10,” I suggested. “That’s what the training officer told us to do.” St. George seemed alarmed. I think he had just remembered that the training officers debriefed the OJTs every day and reviewed the actions of regular officers. Suddenly he appeared to be afraid that I was going to tell our superiors about the incident. He placed all the food in a locker and told the inmates that he’d decide later what to do about it. When I got my lunch bag from the locker a while later, I saw that half the waffles were no longer there, and asked about it. “Aw, I gave them to him,” St. George said. “But don’t get me wrong about these guys,” he added. “I wouldn’t piss on ’em if they was on fire.”
At 11 A.M., a blustery Neanderthal named Melman showed up on the floor to help with the count. He was annoyed because he had just come back from a drive home to discover that a pot of stew he’d put into the communal refrigerator at the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center had been eaten. He had a bad temper, he admitted, telling how last week he had drawn his baton on an inmate in the tunnel leading up from Tappan. He couldn’t wait to transfer, because, he said, “I don’t want to work at a place where you tell them to step in, and they say, ‘Fuck you, CO!’” I found myself sympathetic to that idea, to the sentiment that officers deserved better than they got here.
Like our training officer, this man was fond of referring to inmates, out of their presence, as “crooks” and “mutts.” The conversation left me thinking about the many reasons that an officer might come to regard inmates as savages. If a savage dissed you, what did it matter? And if a savage got hurt (particularly due to an error on your part), who cared?
On-the-job training lasted four weeks, and I’d had several difficult days on galleries by the time, on my second-to-last day, I was assigned to work B-block’s V-gallery with Officer Smith. (V. SMITH, it said on his name tag—I didn’t learn his first name until I noticed it on his time card weeks later; and even months later, when we had become friendly and were swapping shifts, I never used it. That’s just how it was in prison.) The days on the galleries had been uniformly dispiriting. It was an impossible job, was the thing—it would probably take months for an officer to gain any real measure of control. Some of them were too lax, some too brittle, some careless, some too firm, some inconsistent. A gallery was such a huge challenge that it didn’t take long to see the ways in which an individual officer didn’t measure up. I wasn’t sure it was even po
ssible to be a truly competent gallery officer.
Smith had at least three advantages over the others. His gallery was half the size of most—only one side of the cellblock, down on the flats. He was in charge of about sixty inmates. Also, he had chosen the gallery. Although he had only ten months on the job, nobody more senior had wanted it, so it was his regular post. He knew the inmates, and the inmates knew him. Last, it seemed to me that Smith succeeded because he viewed the inmates as human beings and was able to maintain a sense of humor in the face of the stress of prison life—traits that are two sides of the same coin.
With his shaved head and muscular build and his habit of holding his arms crossed in front of his big chest, Smith looked like a black Mr. Clean. He was married and lived in Harlem. He moonlighted as a dry cleaner: He collected dirty uniforms in the parking lot at the end of the day and brought them back pressed, for which he charged $3.50 apiece. He’d graduated from a public high school in the city and worked summers as a lifeguard.
Smith was talkative and tried to answer all my questions. He gave me the keys to the south end of the gallery, and he took the north. Our first order of business was to take individual cells off nighttime deadlock for the morning chow run. (The cells would still be held shut by the brake.) I turned the big cell key in more than thirty locks and finished before Smith; he was stopping at several cells to say good morning, I noticed. During the next hour, we listened as gallery letters were called over B-block’s public address system, which squawked so unintelligibly. Smith explained that on weekdays, the order was, roughly, top to bottom; Q and V galleries would go last.