by Ted Conover
But even in its lesser forms, contraband had many interesting subtleties. As officers, we were not allowed to bring through the front gate glass containers, chewing gum, pocket knives with blades longer than two inches, newspapers, magazines, beepers, cell phones, or, obviously, our own pistols or other weapons. A glass container, such as a bottle of juice, might be salvaged from the trash by an inmate and turned into shards for weapons. The chewing gum could be stuffed into a lock hole to jam the mechanism. The beepers, newspapers, and magazines were distractions—we weren’t supposed to be occupied with any of that while on the job. Nor could we make or receive phone calls, for the same reason. Apart from inmates smoking in their cells, smoking was generally forbidden indoors.
And yet plenty of officers smoked indoors. Many chewed gum. The trash cans of wall towers were stuffed with newspapers and magazines.
A much longer list of contraband items applied to inmates. As at Coxsackie, they couldn’t possess clothing in any of the colors reserved for officers: gray, black, blue, and orange. They couldn’t possess cash, cassette players with a record function, toiletries containing alcohol, sneakers worth more than fifty dollars, or more than fourteen newspapers. The list was very long—so long, in fact, that the authors of Standards of Inmate Behavior found it easier to define what was permitted than what wasn’t. Contraband was simply “any article that is not authorized by the Superintendent or [his] designee.”
You looked for contraband during pat-frisks of inmates and during random cell searches. One day in A-block, I found my first example: an electric heating element, maybe eight inches wide, such as you’d find on the surface of a kitchen range. Wires were connected to the ends of the coil, and a plug was connected to the wires. The inmate, I knew, could plug it into the outlet in his cell, place a pan on it, and do some home cooking. I supposed it was contraband because of the ease with which it could start a fire, trip the cell’s circuit breaker, burn the inmate, or burn someone the inmate didn’t like. And it must have been stolen from a stove somewhere inside the prison.
I was proud of my discovery and asked a senior officer on the gallery how to dispose of it and what infraction number to place on the Misbehavior Report.
“Where’d you find this?” he asked.
“Cell K-twelve, in a box behind the locker,” I said.
“K-twelve—yeah, he’s a cooker,” the officer said. “Cooks every night. Can’t stand mess-hall food. I don’t blame him.”
“Yeah? So what’s the rule number?”
The other officer said he didn’t know, so I made some phone calls, figured it out, and did the paperwork during lunch. While I was at it, an inmate porter stopped by and pleaded on behalf of the cooker. “He’s a good guy, CO. He needs it.” A few minutes later, to my amazement, a mess-hall officer called.
“You the guy who found that heating element?” he asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Turn it in.”
“Oh really?”
“Yeah. Why?”
There was a long pause. “Oh, nothing.” He hung up.
I finished my Misbehavior Report and stepped out of the office to let inmates back into their cells from chow. When I returned to the office, the coil, which I had placed on the desk, was gone.
“Where’d it go?” I asked the senior officer. “Did you move it?”
“What—oh, that heating thing?” he said offhandedly. “I gave it back to him.”
“Gave it back? Why’d you do that? I just wrote up a report.”
“Look, he’s a good guy. Never gives any trouble. I think he’s vegetarian. He really can’t eat that stuff they serve down there. Why don’t you go talk to him?” He made for the door.
I stared at him skeptically. He shrugged and was gone.
Unsure exactly why I did so, I went to talk to the inmate. He did seem like a nice guy, and thanked me profusely for not turning him in. Oh what the hell, I thought.
Not long afterward, I found another heating coil during a cell search in B-block. This time my sergeant, Murphy, saw it in my hands and insisted I turn it in. The paperwork that Murphy told me to fill out was even more elaborate than what I had imagined. Specifically, he said, I’d need to make an entry in the B-block cell-search logbook; to write a contraband receipt for the inmate, with copy stapled to a misbehavior report, to be signed by a supervisor in the Watch Commander’s Office, where I would submit all the paperwork and get the key to the contraband locker in the hospital basement, where I would also sign the logbook. Oh, and on the way to the Watch Commander’s Office, I should stop and pick up an evidence bag from the disciplinary office, in which to place the burner.
It was the end of my day. I knew that many officers, rather than plow through all this when their shift was over, would just drop the contraband in a trash can by the front gate and be done with it. Sergeant Murphy would never follow up. But some contrarian impulse drove me on. I finally made it to the Watch Commander’s Office and waited twenty minutes for my turn with the lieutenant. He looked at the heating element, then at my paperwork.
“Do you think this is a good use of the Adjustment Committee’s time?” he asked.
I shrugged and said I supposed it was. My sergeant must have thought so when he told me to write all this up, I added. The lieutenant blathered on about major versus minor offenses, the need to make judgments, and so on, apparently expecting me to say, “Oh, I get it!” and withdraw from his office. But it had been a lot of work. I had stayed late. I was pissed off about this and other things. I didn’t move.
“Okay,” the lieutenant finally said. “Leave it with me.” I stood to leave, wondering how to take this. The lieutenant hadn’t signed a thing. A CO at a desk near the lieutenant’s translated for me as I walked out. “If in doubt, throw it out!” he said with a big smile. And that was that.
No sooner would an officer become savvy as to which rules were commonly ignored, however, than somebody in a white shirt would appear to shake up his whole understanding of accepted practice. That person, for me and many other new officers, was Sergeant Wickersham. While everyone knows that prison can warp or distort the personalities of prisoners, few stop to consider how it can do the same to those who work inside. The most extreme example of this at Sing Sing was Wickersham, who seemed to be on duty every time I was assigned to A-block.
Wickersham, whose full head of silver hair, mustache, and chiseled good looks made him resemble a misplaced Marlboro man, was a rara avis even by Sing Sing standards. For one thing, he was the only white sergeant of the dozen or so there who wasn’t waiting to transfer somewhere else. Wickersham had seniority, but Sing Sing was home. Nor was he using his seniority to get a desk job, as were most of Sing Sing’s old-timer sergeants, the majority of whom were black. Sergeant Wickersham chose to work A-block, a high-stress post, because he wanted to, because he seemed to feel at home there.
Wickersham’s sworn mission, as any new officer knew, was to give new officers a hard time—to ride them, chew them out, dress them down. Most sergeants were more like support personnel, there to set you straight when you erred, but mostly to help when you needed a hand. Not Wickersham. His goal was to put the fear of God into new guys. But not in the manner of a drill sergeant. Wickersham wouldn’t raise his voice. He would not smile, would not move his eyebrows. His voice had little inflection, and he always seemed to speak through clenched teeth. This utter self-discipline reminded me of the actor Clint Eastwood playing an unsmiling renegade cop. But behind Eastwood’s super-machismo, redeeming it, was always a flicker of dark humor. No such humor appeared to reside in Wickersham. The word among new officers was: Watch out for this guy.
But watching out for Wickersham wasn’t easy, because he liked to operate with stealth. He had a public mode, and you’d see him early in the shift or at lunch, with a coffee mug in his hand (he’d clip it to his belt when finished) and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, talking to other ser
geants or to a coterie of more senior officers he favored. But once the blocks got busy and officers were rushing from cell to phone to center gate, Wickersham would put down his coffee, pick up the radio, and head out on a solitary patrol, creeping up and down the empty south staircase, peeking around corners to catch us in slipups, blatant or imagined.
My first encounter with Wickersham took place on my first day as a regular officer. I was working on A-block’s J-gallery, one floor up from the flats. Someone had asked me to let a keeplock out of his cell, since he had an appointment outside the block. I was, of course, in the midst of doing ten other things, and the keeplock, when I walked down the gallery to get him, was in his boxer shorts and needed a few minutes to get ready. Five minutes later, when I returned to his cell, he still wasn’t ready. As I stood outside and waited, I could hear my phone ringing. Slowly, the keeplock emerged. But then, despite my urgings, he dragged his feet; he had things to discuss with the inmate in the cell next to his, and the one next to that. Official procedure was to escort a keeplock down a gallery by walking behind him, but with this guy that was going to take an hour. Meanwhile, my phone rang on. I knew I would see the inmate when he got to the center gate, so I hurried ahead to answer it.
Blocking my way suddenly was Sergeant Wickersham. He hadn’t been there a few seconds before. I nodded in recognition, but he didn’t nod back. “Why is that inmate out?” he asked in his Darth Vader voice. It looked painful for him to speak.
“Keeplock officer asked for him,” I said.
“Why,” continued Wickersham, drawing out the word sarcastically, “are you in front of him?”
He’d caught me cutting a corner. Months later, a seasoned officer would advise me, “Always have an answer in corrections. Always have an answer, and you’ll do just fine.” That day I had an answer of sorts—my phone was ringing, I was in a hurry—but I doubted it would fly with Wickersham. I had no problem with admitting mistakes, however, and thought the sergeant might be pleasantly surprised by candor.
“Guess I messed up,” I said. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Sorry?” he said. His expression soured ever so slightly, as though he’d just swallowed some grounds with his already-bitter cup of coffee. His anger turned into disgust. He’d wanted a fight and I’d just rolled over. Wickersham now looked at me as though I were beneath contempt. “Huh,” he said. And walked away.
Another time, I was taking the count on M-gallery when Wickersham again appeared out of nowhere.
“You afraid you’re gonna lose your keys?” he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about. “What do you mean?”
“You’re walking with your hand against them,” he observed acidly. “Are you afraid somebody’s gonna take ’em?”
I looked down at the dozen or so keys hanging near my hip. Sometimes I felt like a horse with sleigh bells when I walked with those things, and when I had enough time to think about it, and didn’t want to advertise my approach to inmates who might be doing something illicit in their cells, I would put my hand against the keys to quiet them.
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked. This offense, I felt sure, was entirely of his own invention.
“Don’t do it.”
“Don’t? Why not?”
Wickersham walked away.
Another day, I was working upstairs with an older officer named Robinson. Thirty or forty keeplocks were due back from rec, and we had just heard an announcement to clear the galleries of all other inmates in anticipation of this return. As I was clearing O-gallery, a friendly inmate gave me a heads-up: Wickersham was lurking near the end gate. I finished and walked over to K-gallery to see how Robinson was doing. A few inmates were still out but, much more ominous, Wickersham was now at Robinson’s end gate, talking into his radio. I had an idea what was about to happen, and I was right. A few seconds later an announcement boomed over A-block’s PA system: “Officer on K-gallery, clear your gallery!” chided Rufino. “Keeplocks are on their way! Repeat, clear your gallery!” Wickersham, instead of speaking to Robinson directly, had radioed down to the Officer in Charge. Now everyone in the block knew there was some problem with the officer running K-gallery.
I started helping out the surprised Robinson, but then he caught a glimpse of Wickersham and figured out what had happened. Furious, he stormed down to the gate to confront the sergeant. With only some wire mesh between the two men, their shouting battle raged for five minutes. Robinson returned, sputtering, “I’m forty-four years old, and I will not be treated like a child. I hate that fucking asshole!” By mutual agreement, Robinson joined the ranks of officers embargoed from A-block because they couldn’t deal with the sergeant. I envied those officers, but I wasn’t the shouting-match type.
The humiliation tactic was one of Wickersham’s favorites, and I saw him use it again not long after the incident with Robinson. An OJT named Swiatowy was doing a pat-frisk. He had the inmate against the wall and properly told him to take everything out of his pockets and hand it over. During the transfer, the inmate’s comb fell to the floor. Sounding insolent, the inmate told Swiatowy that he’d better pick it up. Swiatowy was declining to do so when Wickersham stepped up.
“Do you have a problem with picking this inmate’s comb off the floor?” he asked. Swiatowy just stared at him. (“I think I’ve still got the scar tissue on my tongue,” he told me later.) Swiatowy said he would do it, but in the event, the inmate did. Wickersham may have had a procedural point to make, but humiliating the officer seemed to be a larger one.
“You can’t act afraid of him, though,” Miller counseled me one day in the lineup room. Miller was a recruit from my class who’d been spending a lot of time in A-block. He told me that it was all a test, that Wickersham would leave alone those officers who stood up to him. They’d earn his respect. On my next run-in, I decided, I’d try it.
I didn’t have to wait long. It was at the end of a difficult day—in B-block, actually—during which I’d had trouble getting some of my porters to follow orders. I was back on R-and-W gallery, which I had learned was known as a porter gallery, because so many of its inmates worked somewhere in the prison as porters. The problem with this situation for the gallery officer was that porters, in recognition of their labor (which, many days, amounted to little), were usually offered showers in the afternoon, after other inmates left the gallery for recreation. But some officers would give porters their showers early, and it was a constant struggle, if you were trying to follow the rules, to keep the shower-eager porters inside their cells and off the gallery until you had decided showers could begin.
The largest contingent consisted of gym porters, and because many were longtime inmates and there was power in numbers, they were especially demanding. On this day it was a gym porter who appeared outside the locked shower stall, wearing only a bathrobe and slippers, half an hour too soon.
“No showers till rec,” I told him. “You gotta wait in your cell.”
“I always get a shower now, CO.”
“Not today,” I said. “Return to your cell. No porter showers till rec.”
Mama Cradle had started “dropping the programs”—calling out inmate destinations, such as law library and commissary, waiting for the inmates to assemble near the front gate and then sending them out with an escort—so I was very busy pulling brakes. The inmate wouldn’t return to his cell. I ordered him in again. He was still there the next time I walked by, so I gave him a “direct order,” preliminary to issuing a Misbehavior Report, and a moment later, seeing that he was still out, I deadlocked his cell. This way, I figured, he’d be unable to leave the gallery, since he couldn’t reach his clothes, and I could deal with him when I had more time.
Then an inmate on my gallery got called on a visit, and he was entitled to a shower. I opened up a shower stall for him. My renegade porter lingered outside it. “You’d better not go in there when he’s done,” I warned him. But when I next saw him, that’s where he was, soapi
ng himself. (Most shower stalls had no curtains.) I can’t wait to write this fucker up, I said to myself.
Finally, with recreation having been called, most inmates off the gallery, and things settled down, I went to find my disobedient porter and lock him into his cell. He was going to have to stay there today, missing rec, learning that actions had consequences. I was sure I’d find him standing outside it, still dripping from the shower, now feeling a little contrite. But he wasn’t there. I checked the other side of the gallery. Gone. Shit. He must have borrowed clothes and shoes from a friend and gone off to the yard with the others. But I knew who he was, and I could write him up anyway. The next officer could lock him in his cell.
By the time I finished writing up the Misbehavior Report, the sergeant for my shift had left. A less helpful sergeant was there in his place. He couldn’t sign my report, he said. I’d have to take it to the Watch Commander’s Office.
I sighed. The last time I’d been there was on my journey with the ill-fated heating element. After a long day on a difficult gallery, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to go through that again.
But now here I was, back before the same lieutenant. Watching him read this time, I realized he was only semiliterate. I helped him as he stuttered through my report, trying hard to be patient, trying to take a little refuge in numbness. It was only two paragraphs. Finally, he got to the bottom.
“There’s too many loopholes in here,” he declared, twice. The infraction was so cut-and-dried, and my writing so plain and direct, that I was about to explode from frustration. “I don’t understand this,” he said finally, dropping the paper on his desk.
“What don’t you understand?” I asked, fighting the sarcasm that seemed my only defense against incompetence. Behind me, though I hadn’t seen him, Sergeant Wickersham had entered the room. Apparently, he signaled to the lieutenant.