by Ted Conover
Finally, V chow was called, and Smith and I each pulled a brake lever, releasing our respective sides. Hungry inmates emerged up and down the gallery, closing the cell gates behind them in a chorus of metal-on-metal thumps. Many inmates greeted Smith as they passed. This was so unknown, in my experience, that I wondered if he was too soft, if he gave them too much free rein. The real test, I knew, would come upon the inmates’ return from mess hall, when they’d have to do something they were never keen on doing: lock back in.
While we waited, Smith talked. He himself had had a use-of-force on his second day of OJT, he told me, down in Tappan. It was much like the one I’d heard about in A-block a few days before: An inmate took one hand off the wall during a pat-frisk, was warned by Smith, and then did it again. Smith crunched him against a wall, and a shelf of the inmate’s books came tumbling down in the process. His sergeant wasn’t quite as celebratory as ours had been. “He wrote that I was ‘excessively aggressive,’” Smith said, sounding a bit offended.
He told me about a few of his inmates. Two had murdered policemen, and one supposedly was set to inherit a chunk of the World Trade Center but had murdered his brother (“He’s got clippings”). These guys were in for drugs; that guy did some kind of computer extortion. I loved hearing these histories, because officers were not supposed to know them. The idea was to protect inmate privacy and to ensure that officers treated all inmates the same—that we weren’t unduly harsh to the cop killers or child molesters or anyone else whose crimes might strike a nerve. Of course, there were unofficial ways of finding out, and sometimes the inmates themselves would tell you (though you couldn’t always believe them—the child molesters, for instance, always claimed they had done something else). But to my surprise, most officers seemed to have little interest in inmates’ histories. Smith was different. V-gallery was, for much of every week, his neighborhood, and he wanted to know who lived there.
A gate swung open at the gallery’s end, and the inmates began to return from breakfast. We took up positions among them, keeping our eyes open. Some went back into their cells promptly and voluntarily, but many talked, traded cigarettes, or even jogged away from their own cells to pass something to another inmate at the other end of the gallery. Smith waited a couple of minutes, then rapped his baton on a gate and shouted, “Lock in!” Half a minute went by, and he repeated the cry. By now, only a few inmates were out. Finally, Smith lifted up an arm and yelled “Lock in!” a final time before indicating that we should pull the brakes. The remaining inmates entered their cells, and the gallery was clear.
In four weeks, I’d never seen that, and I told Smith so.
“I thought it up in the car driving home one day,” he said. “I call it Presto. I tell them, ‘I’ll give you three warnings, but then it’s on you.’ If anyone’s still out, I write down his cell number, and”—Smith made a key-turning motion with his hand—“I lock ’em in.” Because this was the first step in keeplocking, it always got an inmate’s attention. Most knew that an officer wasn’t likely to fill out a misbehavior report over slowness to lock in, but they could never be sure. Smith, in a gesture that I would later realize earned him stature among inmates and yet accomplished his goal of discipline, would let them back out for rec if he felt he’d made his point.
After lunch, true to his word, Smith locked the cell door of an inmate who was late stepping in—but the inmate was taking such a long time that Smith locked it before he even got there. The guy was stranded out on the gallery, alone. He came over to plead his case with Smith, who, arms crossed and with a small smile on his face, heard him out. “I’m not convinced,” he finally announced. But an inmate down the gallery was waving his arm out between the bars. He wanted to plead his friend’s case, explain the extenuating circumstances. “Sometimes I’ll let ’em use a ‘lawyer,’” Smith explained to me as we walked over there, “but if the lawyer doesn’t change my mind either, sometimes I’ll lock them both up.” That might be an interesting reform for American courtrooms, I thought. As Smith stood listening to the lawyer’s explanation, I heard him say, looking bemused, “If you’re gonna give me bullshit, at least give me good bullshit.” In the Case of the Lone Lingerer, the lawyer didn’t convince him, either. But this time, Smith didn’t lock him up.
Things hadn’t always worked so smoothly for him, he told me. At the beginning, the inmates had been difficult, and some sergeants had given him a lot of “ass-chewings.” But worst of all, surprisingly, had been other officers. One, named L’Esperance, who had worked V-gallery before Smith, disapproved of the way he ran it and, upon becoming gate officer stationed at the north end of Q-and-V, let everyone know about Smith’s supposed shortcomings—to the point of taking OJTs aside and telling them. Smith would leave at the end of the day with pain in his face and neck, which he only later realized was due to stress.
The model of an officer in total control was a lie, Smith said. “Did they tell you in the Academy about the guy who’s in such tight control of his gallery that you can usually find him with his feet up on his desk?” he asked. “Well, that’s a myth.” Even the best officers, he said, had to scramble around to put out fires; it was just a question of degrees.
Officers critiqued the permissiveness they perceived in each other more than any other quality. In a profession that placed a high value on control, that made sense, but I also could see how, in a case like Smith’s, permissiveness was a charge that a stupid and unimaginative CO might level against one who was effectively flexible. To me, Smith didn’t seem permissive. But sometimes he achieved his ends by engaging in a dialogue instead of simply saying no. Later that day, for example, when the keeplocks were returning from “keeplock rec”—the hour they were allowed each day in a fenced-off section of the yard—and passed briefly through the south end of V-gallery, two of them wandered up our way. They were not supposed to. Together we approached one, who begged to be allowed to pass by us in order to go speak to a friend, but he was refused by Smith. “Come on, man!” the inmate implored. Some discussion ensued. Near the end, Smith said, “I know you got to do your twenty-four hours; just let me do my eight.” The man said okay and left.
The other keeplock was standing at the bars of a friend’s V-gallery cell, chatting away, when Smith approached. Not saying a word, Smith moved closer and closer, acting as a party to the conversation and entering the inmate’s personal space until he stepped back in frustration. “They can’t stand it when you do that,” Smith said with a wink as the keeplock retreated.
Smith kept explaining things to me up till the very end of the shift. During the last hour—often a “freebie” period, when most inmates were out at rec or at their programs and their cells were deadlocked—most gallery officers found a chair and another CO to chat with. But Smith waved at me to join in a conversation he’d started with one of the few inmates left in his cell. He was Big D—Dominick Dwight, the computer embezzler. Smith had told him that I had some questions, and Big D, Smith said, might have some answers. I raised an eyebrow at what would have been considered heresy in the Academy—we’re going to listen to an inmate’s thoughts on how we should do our job?—but Smith said to go ahead.
This wasn’t his first bid, Big D explained. (Inmates used the same slang word for sentence that we used for elected post.) He had also done time at Attica, Clinton, and Wende. Even though he knew it made inmates nervous when there was a corrections bus outside waiting to take them to one of those places, he said that he and most others preferred them to Sing Sing because they were more orderly. Sing Sing was chaotic, he thought, largely due to its proximity to New York City and the number of recent transfers from Rikers Island. “They come in from HDM [a unit of Rikers] and they’re all full of it,” he said. With time and distance, men cooled down.
If inmates preferred to live mainly by the rules, I asked, then why did they give new officers like me, who were trying to enforce them, such a hard time? Why didn’t they appreciate a strict CO?
“B
eing a hard-ass just doesn’t go with the system here,” said Big D. “You’re not going to change everything.” And if you tried to make individuals do something they weren’t used to doing, he said, they’d feel unfairly singled out.
“You’ll get shitted down,” said Big D. “And the smell of that shit will stay with you a long time.”
On the other hand, he said, we couldn’t let them run all over us. “You give an inmate an inch, and he’s got a mile.” Smith said the trick was to be firm without being nasty or egotistical. Otherwise, you’d have simmering rebellion.
I left work that day happier than I’d been since starting at the Academy. After weeks of hanging out with senior officers who seemed to bring little more to the job than machismo and forbearance, who would say things like “If they’re happy, you’re not doing your job,” here was a guy—Smith—who saw gallery work as an art, something you could perform creatively. Interpersonal skills were a big part of it, though nothing like the IPC skills the Academy had described to us. Smith melded toughness with an attitude of respect for his inmates. In turn, he was respected back. What he seemed to understand was that at the root of the job was the inevitability of a kind of relationship between us and them—and that the officer played a larger role in determining the nature of that relationship.
At the Academy, this principle had never been mentioned. The job, we heard over and over, amounted to care, custody, and control: We gave the orders, in accordance with the rules, and inmates were to follow them. Simple as that.
In reality, of course, the jailer-inmate relationship was anything but simple. And traditions governing it, if in fact they existed, were vague. Take as simple a matter as saying “Good morning” to an inmate. One senior training officer, who happened to be black, had suggested that there was nothing wrong with such a greeting and that we ought to get in the habit of using it with our inmates. I had immediately flashed back to the Academy, where Officer McCorkle, describing his own gallery work, pointedly avoided saying “Please” or “Good morning” or any other pleasantry, and who, when greeted by his own inmates, informed them, “This ‘Good morning’ crap will cease!”
“They’re only nice to you because you’ve got the keys,” McCorkle had told us. Well, and they’re only jerks to you because you’ve got the keys, I’d thought. They’re the way they are and you’re the way you are because you’ve got the keys. Now, where could you take it from there?
Many rap and hip-hop songs had lyrics referring to the “overseers,” meaning any kind of cops. The term derived from the days of slavery, when plantation overseers made sure that the work was done and the discipline maintained. Lots of officers, I thought, liked to think of themselves as overseers, as enforcers. A training officer had mentioned that several of us had already been the target of inmate grievances, and one officer had even received two. Di Carlo smiled—he was the guy, I knew, and he was proud of it.
Getting grieved wasn’t my goal. But neither was it to make the inmates like me. Another trainer, Luther, told us he once stepped up to a fellow officer whom he had seen give an inmate five and then walk down the hallway, arms over shoulders, with him.
“Hey, man, it’s a black thing,” the officer had told Luther.
“Bullshit,” Luther had replied. Referring to each side’s state-supplied clothing, he told us, “It’s a gray thing and a green thing, and nothing more complicated than that.”
Somewhere between those poles lay the way I wanted to be.
Two days after my time with Smith was Conversion Day, when we became regular officers. We had to don our dress-blue uniforms again for the occasion. I talked with Arno outside the QWL building. He’d finally abandoned his efforts to wear long hair and had cut it all off—he was clean-shaven, right down to his skull. He looked good but tired: He’d worked the three-to-eleven shift the night before and had only had a few hours’ sleep. But, he said, it had been an interesting shift. He’d been working the first floor of the Hospital Building when an officer in B-block was struck on the head with a broom handle by an inmate. Officers had brought the prisoner down to the Hospital Building, which also housed the disciplinary offices and the watch commander’s office, where most of the white-shirts hung out. There, from a room near the ER, Arno said, he and many others, including inmate porters, had heard a white-shirt shout, “You think it’s funny to hurt an officer?” and the guy responded with prolonged cries of pain. Arno said this went on for about twenty minutes. A month earlier, I would have reacted negatively to a story like that. But now, seeing how outnumbered officers were and feeling more like prey than predator, I found in the tale a grain of comfort.
The superintendent was coming down to speak with us, but first they wanted to show us a video the Department had made of our training class in Albany. It all seemed so long ago, and so transparent now too, as I watched us getting yelled at in the Academy halls and on the floor of the gym—the breaking us down in order to build us back up. And though military boot camp had been the model, it was arresting this time around to see how much it really was like prison.
There we were, in only a slightly more upscale way, doing all the things that inmates had to do: receiving our uniform allowance, waiting in endless lines for chow, getting counted, wearing numbers on our T-shirts during rec, getting sprayed in the face with chemical agents, enduring a nearly single-sex environment and constant supervision, and living by a zillion mindless rules. There was DiPaola marching in the funny mincing step we learned just for graduation—I remembered the day we discovered the note from Sergeant Bloom, penalizing our room for a tuft of fuzz left at the bottom of the trash can. “If he comes by here now,” Deep suggested, “let’s shit him down.”
Now, however, we were at the ceremonial crossroads between our infantilization and our investiture with life-and-death powers. Soon we’d be holding the keys. Lieutenant Wilkin conducted a brainstorming session with us in which he wrote on a big art pad our suggestions for improving CO training. To my surprise, maybe a third of my classmates thought the training should be longer (training for the state police lasted something like five months, we learned). No doubt the prospect of real work around the corner—many, like me, had to return at 6:45 A.M. Sunday morning—led to some sentimentalizing of our Academy days. Others suggested that a longer Academy would not be necessary if short classes weren’t booked into long class periods, leaving us to practice pool shots in the lounge for a couple of hours each day.
Our trainers got in the last word, telling the older women in our class that they’d better get used to being called Grandma and the black officers that they should become accustomed to hearing “You been workin’ in the white man’s house; you a house nigger.”
“Good luck” or “Godspeed” were what you might expect to hear at the conclusion of on-the-job training for some other kind of work. Here, our bon voyage had a definite CO flavor:
“You’re the zookeeper now,” said Officer Luther. “Go run the zoo.”
CHAPTER 4
NEWJACK
I still had his collar in my left grip. I pulled his head toward me and swung. No peace officer with any sense, even in dire circumstances, punches where it will leave marks. My right connected above his ear and back from the face.
—J. Michael Yates, Line Screw, 1993
The [new] pig was standing in the run with another pig in the midst of teeming inmates going to and fro. Striker pulled up beside the pig and hung about ten inches of that knife into his belly and gutted him. The other pig spun around to face Striker and was hit in the stomach several times as he ran backward to get away. Then Striker turned back to the other pig and stabbed him again with long deep thrusts in the chest area.
—Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast, 1981
Lo, the poor guard! In his mind’s eye he can see us as we were in the free world; with money, ravishing women, all the sensual delights which must be forever unattainable to him. We have had this. He has never had it, never will have it.
Therefore, enviously, gloatingly, he exacts vengeance upon us for the unalterable deficiencies in his own life.
—Victor F. Nelson, Prison Days and Nights, 1932
Sing Sing was a world of adrenaline and aggression to us new officers. It was an experience of living with fear—fear of inmates, as individuals and as a mob, and fear of our own capacity to fuck up. We were sandwiched between two groups: Make a mistake around the white-shirts and you would get in trouble; make a mistake around the inmates and you might get hurt.
At the Academy, prison had been likened to a village—a self-contained world with its own school, workshops, hospital, and so forth. But what they didn’t say was that prison was also a microcosm of a totalitarian society, a nearly pure example of the police state. The military provided the model for the chain of command; enlisted men and women were marshaled daily by their superior officers into a battle of wills with the mass of angry and resentful prisoners. We who were in uniform controlled nearly every aspect of their lives. And prison, more than any place I’d ever been, was about rules.
The Academy had taught us about rules the way a fundamentalist teaches the Bible in church, taking literally the injunctions about moneylenders and Armageddon and wives who existed to serve husbands. And then the congregation went out into the world, where most Christians were flexible about such strictures but still considered themselves devout, and justifiably so. A good cop, after all, wasn’t the one who ticketed you for doing thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. A good cop enforced selectively, using his judgment.