Newjack

by Ted Conover

  I was intrigued by a Latino officer I’d seen in the lineup room. He was posted to a gallery in A-block. Like the rest of us, he kept his little yellow Standards of Inmate Behavior, All Institutions booklet in his breast pocket, but unlike us, he had written FUCK NO in block letters along the top edge of the booklet—the part that peeked out of the pocket. It was his personal message to inmates and, actually, a pretty good summary of the booklet itself. It made me think he was probably a good officer, funny but tough, an enforcer of the rules. Later, a classmate who would spend a week working with that officer told me how every morning an inmate would fix him his coffee, passing the mug out through the bars of his cell. That made me reconsider. There was no rule against it, but what favors was the officer passing back in the inmate’s direction? How could you ever trust an inmate enough to drink his coffee?

  This fuzziness surrounding the rules was a strange counterpoint to the solidity of Sing Sing’s walls, the seeming immutability of the prison. During that long summer, from mid-May to late September, I thought about it as I walked the tunnels and corridors from the lineup room to various buildings up the hill. My classmates and I had been placed in the resource pool and worked all over the prison. Eyes cast downward toward the floor, I’d watch the yellow traffic lines painted down the middle of most hallways to keep opposing traffic on its proper side. There were broad perpendicular lines at gates, where inmates were supposed to stop and wait for permission to proceed. Of course, they hardly ever did. Had they ever? The lines struck me as wistful suggestions of a stricter time, of rules now observed in the breach, a memory fading like the strict lessons of the Academy.

  A-BLOCK

  Many times during those first months I was assigned to A-block. The mammoth cellblock required more officers to run it than any other building—around thirty-five during the day shift—but the senior officers there seemed particularly unfriendly to new officers, offering little encouragement and lots of criticism. The best way to fend off their comments, I decided, would be to try and enforce the rules as strictly as I could.

  But, assigned to one of the vast eighty-eight-cell galleries for the first time, I found it hard to know where to begin. With the sheets hanging from the bars like curtains? The clothes drying on the handrails? The music blaring from several cells? I decided to start with the annoyance closest at hand: an inmate’s illegal radio antenna.

  Inmates were allowed to have music. Each cell had two jacks in the wall for the headphones its occupant was issued upon arrival. Through one jack was transmitted a Spanish-language radio station; through the other, a rhythm-and-blues station, except during sporting events, when the games were transmitted instead. Inmates could have their own radios, too, but the big steel cellblock made reception very difficult. Telescoping antennas were forbidden, because they might be turned into “zip guns.” By inserting a bullet into the base of an extended antenna and then quickly compressing it, an inmate could fire the inaccurate but still potentially deadly gun. The approved wire dipole antennas were supposed to be placed within a two-by-four-foot area on the wall—where, apparently, they did no good at all.

  To improve their chances of tuning in to a good station, inmates draped wires over their bars and across the gallery floor. Some even tied objects to the end of a bare strand of copper wire and flung it toward the outside wall, hoping that it would snag on a window and that they would win the reception jackpot. (When you looked up from the flats on a sunny day, you could sometimes see ten or twenty thin wires spanning the space between the gallery and the exterior wall, like the glimmering work of giant spiders.)

  Antennas strewn across the gallery floor could cause someone to trip, and if they seemed likely to do so, I’d have the inmates pull them in. But the inmate in question on my first day as a regular officer in A-block—a short, white-haired man in his sixties—had gotten his off the floor by threading wire through a cardboard tube, the kind you find inside wrapping paper. One end of the tube was wedged between his bars at stomach level, and the other protruded halfway into the narrow gallery space between cell bars and fence, like a miniature bazooka.

  “You’re gonna have to take this down,” I advised him the first time I brushed against it.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because it’s in my space.”

  “But I can’t hear if it’s in my cell.”

  “Sorry. Try stringing it up higher on your bars.”

  “Sorry? You ain’t sorry. Why say you sorry if you ain’t sorry? And where’d you get to be an authority on antennas? They teach you that in the Academy?”

  “Look, you know the rule. No antenna at all outside the cell. I could just take it if I wanted. I’m not taking it. I’m just telling you to bring it in.”

  “You didn’t tell that guy down there to bring his in, did you? The white guy?”

  I looked in the direction he indicated. There were no other antennas in tubes, and I said so.

  “You’re just picking on the black man, aren’t you? Well, have a good time at your Klan meeting tonight,” he spat out. “Have a pleasant afternoon. You’ve ruined mine.”

  All this over an antenna. Or, rather, all brought into focus by an antenna. In prison, unlike in the outside world, power and authority were at stake in nearly every transaction.

  The high stakes behind petty conflict became clear for me on the night during my first month when Colton and I were assigned to work M-Rec, one of the kinds of recreation that Sing Sing relied upon heavily in order to give the prisoners something to do. After dinner, instead of the gym or the yard, inmates could gather at the gray-metal picnic-style tables bolted to the floor along M-gallery, on the flats, to play cards or chess or dominoes, or watch the television sets mounted high on the walls.

  “The rule is that they can’t be leaning against the bars of the cells,” the regular officer said to us, “and the cell gates are supposed to be closed.” You could tell from his “supposed” that this rule was not strictly enforced. Still, Colton, a lieutenant’s son, seemed strangely zealous. I think he couldn’t stand the laxity around us. As we walked along the dimly lit gallery, he challenged one inmate after another. I decided that to keep his respect, I had better do the same. At varying volumes, they objected. “What is this, newjack rec?” asked one older man in a kufi who was sitting right outside his own open cell. I gestured toward the door. He told me that he was always allowed to leave the cell door open during M-Rec. Well, not tonight, I said. He yelled and screamed. I closed the gate. He walked right up to me, stood less than a foot from my face, and, radiating fury, said, “You’re going to learn, CO, that some things they taught you in the Academy can get you killed.”

  I would hear inmates utter these exact words several times more in the upcoming months at Sing Sing, a threat disguised as advice. (The phrasing had the advantage of ambiguity, and thus could steer the speaker clear of rule 102.10: “Inmates shall not, under any circumstances, make any threat.”) But I hadn’t heard those words spoken to me before, and that, in combination with the man’s standing so close, set my heart racing. I tried staring back at him as hard as he was staring at me, and didn’t move until he had stepped back first.

  Some of the conflict we saw, of course, wasn’t only a fixed feature of prison life; it had roots in Sing Sing’s frequent changes of officers. New officers, as we’d already learned, irritated inmates in much the same way that substitute teachers irritate schoolchildren. To try to lessen these effects, the chart office would often “pencil in” a resource officer to the post of a senior officer who was sick or on vacation. That way, there wouldn’t be a different substitute every day.

  One day in A-block, however, I was assigned to run the gallery temporarily assigned to one of my classmates, Michaels, whom I knew to be particularly lax. It was Michaels’s day off, which made me the substitute for a substitute. I knew before I even arrived that things would be chaotic.

  My first problem came at count time, 11 A.M. Inmates generally began to
return to their cells from programs and rec at around 10:40 or 10:45 A.M. The officers would encourage them to move promptly to their cells. By 11, anyone not in his cell and ready to be counted was technically guilty of delaying the count and could be issued a misbehavior report. Few galleries, therefore, had inmates at large after 11 A.M.

  But on this day, Michaels’s gallery had a dozen still out. Michaels had grown up in Brooklyn and, more than most officers from the city, considered the inmates to be basically decent guys, his “homies.” He wanted them to like him. Once penciled in to this post, he had quickly learned all their names. I had helped him at count time once before, and when I complained about two inmates who were slow to lock in, Michaels replied that they were good guys. Though I had seen sergeants chew him out for looseness, he had told me privately that the sergeants could “suck my dick in Macy’s window” for all he cared.

  I liked Michaels for acknowledging the inmates’ humanity. He had told me how much he hated A-block’s usual OIC, a big, pugnacious slob I’ll call Rufino, who told jokes such as “How do you know when an inmate is lying? When you see him open his mouth.” But I didn’t appreciate Michaels’s legacy of chaos that morning.

  A group of three or four senior officers strolled by, to my relief—I was sure they’d been sent to help me usher in the stragglers. But they had no such plan. A couple of them glanced disapprovingly at their watches and then at me. They didn’t have to help, so they weren’t going to. Thanks, guys, I muttered to myself.

  About an hour later, a couple of keeplocks returned from disciplinary hearings. The block’s keeplock officer, instead of borrowing my keys and ushering the inmates to their cells, called, “They’re back,” when he came through the gate and then disappeared. One of the keeplocks returned to his cell without trouble, but the second had other plans. It was Tuesday, he told me, and Michaels always let him take a shower on Tuesdays.

  “Keeplock showers are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” I said. “And Michaels isn’t here today.”

  “C’mon, CO, don’t play tough. I’ll be out in a second.”

  “No,” I said. He acted as though he hadn’t heard, grabbed a towel from his cell, and strode quickly down the gallery to the shower stall. I wasn’t overly concerned: I always kept the showers locked, just in case something like this came up, and felt confident that once I reminded him he would miss keeplock rec today if he didn’t go back, he’d turn around. Then I remembered. On this gallery, the lock mechanism was missing from the shower cell door. The shower was always open. Sing Sing. The inmate was a good foot taller than me and well muscled. I yelled through the bars into the shower that he’d lost his rec. He said, “Fuck rec.” I put the incident into the logbook, then wrote up a Misbehavior Report and had his copy waiting in the cell when he got back. He shrugged it off.

  “I don’t give a fuck, CO,” he explained. “I got thirty years to life, right? And I got two years’ keeplock. Plus today, I got another three months. When they see this lame-ass ticket, they’re gonna tell you to shove it up your ass.”

  The frustration was, he was probably right. Of all the inmates on a gallery, keeplocks were the hardest to deal with. There were no carrots left to tempt them with, and few sticks—especially for the long-termers. And now it was time for keeplock rec. I tried to match faces with cells as they headed out to the yard on that hot June day—it could help me when it came time to lock them back in. I was in the middle of letting them out when the keeplock officer reappeared. He gestured in the direction I was walking.

  “Forty-three cell?” he said. “Hawkins? No rec today.”

  “No rec for forty-three? Why’s that?”

  “He doesn’t get it today,” he said, and disappeared.

  I knew there could be several reasons for the inmate not receiving rec. He might have committed an infraction within the past twenty-four hours. Or he might have a deprivation order pending against him; in cases of outrageous misbehavior, a keeplock who was a “threat to security” could have his rec taken away for a day by a sergeant. Or—what I worried about in this situation—he might have pissed off the officer but not had a deprivation order pending. In that case, another officer was asking me to burn the keeplock’s rec as an act of solidarity. I hoped it wasn’t the last possibility and went on down the gallery, passing up forty-three cell.

  The inmate called out to me shortly after I went by.

  “Hey, CO! Aren’t you going to open my cell?” I ignored him until I was on my way back. He stood up from his bed as I approached.

  “Open my cell, CO! I’m going outside.”

  “Not today,” I said.

  “What? Why not today?”

  “No rec today.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I didn’t answer him, but I immediately felt I’d done something wrong. I returned to the office and tried to get the keeplock officer on the phone. I was going to insist on knowing his reason. What was up with this guy? The phone rang and rang. I called the office of the OIC and asked for him. He was outside now; couldn’t be reached, Rufino said. But Rufino was always unhelpful. I called the yard. He’d had to go somewhere, wasn’t there now. Shit, I thought.

  Meanwhile, three keeplocks on their way out to the yard stopped separately to advise me that “forty-three cell needs to come out, CO.” I looked down the gallery. He was waving his arm madly through the bars, trying to get my attention. I walked down to talk to him.

  “You’re not letting me out?”

  I shook my head.

  “Who said so?” He was angry now.

  “I don’t know his name,” I lied.

  “Well, what did he look like?” I declined to help out. “Then what’s your name? I’m writing up a grievance.” I told him my name. When I passed by the cell again an hour later, he had a page-long letter written out.

  Instead of the classic newjack mistake of enforcing a rule that nobody really cared about, I had just enforced a rule that wasn’t a rule, for my “brother in gray.” I knew that many police admired that kind of thing. But it made me feel crummy. And with the grievance coming, I was going to have to answer for it.

  I thought about how the senior officers hadn’t helped me during the count, how the keeplock officer hadn’t helped me when the two inmates came back, and how the same keeplock officer hadn’t explained to me the deal with forty-three, even when I asked. More than once at the Academy, I’d heard the abbreviation CYA—cover your ass. I knew how to do it, though I also knew there could be consequences. In the logbook, I made note of the time and wrote, “No rec for K/L Hawkins, per CO X”—the keeplock officer. And then I waited.

  The chicken came home to roost about a month later. I knew it when I arrived at work and approached the time clock. Officer X, instead of ignoring me as usual, gave me a cold, hard stare. His partner, Officer Y, stopped me and asked if I was Conover. Yes, I said, and he gave me the same stare and walked away. It was because inmate Hawkins in cell 43 had slugged Officer Y the day before (as I’d since learned) that Officer X had wanted to send him a message that day.

  A sergeant who was unaware of all of this approached me with a copy of the inmate’s grievance letter in the mess hall at lunchtime that same day. “Do you remember this incident?” he asked. I said yes. “You’ll just need to respond with a To/From,” he said, using department slang for a memo. “Do you remember why you didn’t let him out? Probably forgot, right?”

  “Well, no, the keeplock officer told me not to.”

  The sergeant wrinkled his brow. “Well, probably best just to say you forgot,” he said cheerily, and turned away.

  “Sarge,” I said. “It’s in the logbook. I wrote in the logbook that he told me.”

  “You’re kidding,” he said. “Why’d you do that?”

  I shrugged. “I was new.”

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said.

  I wrote the memo the sergeant had
asked for, told the truth, and felt conflicted. Days went by. Another sergeant called me in and told to me to see a lieutenant in the Administration Building. My memo was on the lieutenant’s desk, and he was poring over it. “So you say you logged this part about Officer X, right?” he asked. I nodded, expecting to receive a stern, quiet lecture on how not to fuck my fellow officer. But the lieutenant just nodded, cogitated a bit, and then picked up the phone.

  I heard him greet a sergeant in A-block. “So Officer X remembers saying that to Conover now, is that right? And he’s going to write a new To/From? And you’ll take care of the deprivation order? Okay, fine.” And hung up.

  He passed my memo to me over the desk. “Just write this up again, but leave out the name of Officer X,” he told me.

  “And then we’re set?”

  “All taken care of.”

  I was relieved. Officer X was off the hook, which meant that maybe he wouldn’t hate me more than he already did. Apparently, a deprivation order would be backdated to cover his ass. And I had learned an important lesson: If you were going to survive in jail, the goody-goody stuff had to go. Any day in there, I might find myself in a situation where I’d need Officer X to watch my back, to pry a homicidal inmate off of me, at his peril. The logic of the gray wall of silence was instantly clear, as clear as the glare of hate that Officer X had sent my way when he heard what I’d done.

  The single most interesting word, when it came to the bending and ignoring of rules, was contraband. To judge by the long list of what constituted contraband, its meaning was clear. In practice, however, contraband was anything but.

  The first strange thing about contraband was that its most obvious forms—weapons, drugs, and alcohol—could all be found fairly readily inside prison. Some of the drugs probably slipped in through the Visit Room, but most, it seemed, were helped into prison by officers who were paid off. The Department had a special unit, the Inspector General’s Office, which followed up on snitches’ tips and tried to catch officers in the act; the union rep had even warned us about the “IG” at the Academy. A couple of times a year, I would come to find, a Sing Sing officer was hauled off in handcuffs by the state police.