Newjack

by Ted Conover

  LINEUP ROOM

  For officers, the lineup room represents the transition between the outside and the inside. There, you can rest a minute with a cup of coffee, talk with your fellow officers about work before actually going in to do it, and prepare yourself mentally. The day after the SHU extractions, CO Konoval showed his videotape in the minutes before lineup. Everyone was eager to see what had happened down in the dungeon. Nervously expecting to be transported back, I instead found the footage sort of dull: Konoval’s video, with its poor lighting and bad sound, captured none of the atmosphere of madness, the endless chanting and shouting, the high anxiety. It just looked like tough guys doing a cartoonish job, the kind of thing you might see on a crummy TV show.

  In general, the pattern in lineup follows a routine. After 6:45 A.M., when we’re called to attention, come the announcements—everything from new parking rules to the schedule for upcoming sergeant tests to reminders about blood drives and retirement parties. Then, sometimes, the day’s watch commander, a lieutenant, will step up and say a few words, often a rundown of notable happenings from the shifts before.

  There is a strong speechifying tendency in corrections. Another tendency, in the wake of anything gone wrong, is Monday-morning quarterbacking. Someone can always be counted on to tell the victim of some unfortunate incident how he could have handled the situation better.

  My favorite watch commander was Lieutenant Goewey. A heavyset man who was somehow more blue-collar than a lot of COs—he could have been the boss of a trucking firm, to judge solely by appearance—Goewey almost always took advantage of his prerogative to speak, and his words were always wonderfully coded. He wouldn’t tell you the state police had been at Sing Sing the day before to arrest the longtime CO suspected of supplying drugs to inmates via the package room; he would simply say, “In case you haven’t heard, there’s a job opening in the package room.” He wouldn’t say he thought the previous superintendent was an idiot who neglected the security personnel in favor of programs and housekeeping; he’d just say, a couple of times a week, “Security is once again the top priority of this administration.” I found it enjoyable to read between his lines.

  There was a chalkboard on the wall right behind the front gate, and one morning it read, “CO Diaz had arm broken by a con 8/19/97 and is awaiting surgery.” Following up on this, Goewey explained to us that Diaz, a well-liked officer posted to the Adjustment Committee (which conducted disciplinary hearings), had retrieved an inmate from the blocks and was placing him in the disciplinary bullpen to await a hearing when an inmate already in there went after the guy. In the struggle, the gate slammed on Diaz’s arm.

  Lieutenant Goewey, in his predictably coded way, said, “The incident occurred at about two, and I didn’t hear about it until twenty minutes later. When I got there, the guy was just sitting there, happy as a clam.” There was a long pause. “Now, these days you can have a use-of-force. Whatever it takes at the time, you can do it. But twenty minutes later … I’m not saying it didn’t used to happen, but these days you can’t just knock all a guy’s teeth out and shove ’em down his throat. Twenty minutes after an incident.”

  He continued: “Now, I know there’s gonna be a lot of armchair quarterbacking about this—he should have had another officer there, should have looked, that kind of thing—but it’s dead.”

  In other words, Goewey had just told us: I hope you’ll forgive me for not beating the shit out of the perp who did this, and Diaz probably could have prevented it.

  PSYCH UNIT

  You didn’t have to work the galleries long to realize that a large proportion of inmates were mentally ill. The symptoms ranged from the fairly mild—talking to oneself, neglecting to bathe—to the severe: men who didn’t know where they were, men who set fire to their own cells, men so depressed they slashed their wrists or tried to hang themselves.

  Prison, said the department’s assistant director of mental health services at the Academy, was “a hard place to be crazy.” He told us that the “last good study,” now more than ten years old, had indicated that of the state’s 70,000 inmates, 5 percent, or 3,500, were “seriously and persistently” mentally ill—people who would be in a psychiatric hospital if they weren’t in prison. But corrections had beds for only 1,000 of them. Another 10 percent, or 7,000, were under the supervision of a psychiatrist, “taking some drugs.”

  Stress, he said, worsened almost any condition, and prison—obviously—is stressful. “Many people break down for the first time in prison,” the official said. In other words, prison not only made crazy people worse; it drove people crazy.

  Working as COs, he said, would make us “students of human nature.” He gave us thumbnail sketches of people with schizophrenia (and symptoms like psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia) and those with personality or mood disorders, like manic depression. Once we got to Sing Sing, however, these distinctions were never made again, at least by officers. A crazy person was a bug—slang used by both guards and inmates. Working a gallery was like sharing a crowded urban street with a higher-than-usual number of disturbed street people. Mostly, you just learned to live with the bugs. Occasionally, however, a bug went off the deep end, and—particularly if he got suicidal—would be sent to the psych unit.

  Sing Sing’s PSU, or Psychiatric Satellite Unit, occupied the second floor of the Hospital Building. It was run by employees of the state Office of Mental Health (OMH) and by a handful of officers, who were there to provide security.

  The door from the building’s staircase to the PSU floor was always kept locked. Half of the floor comprised offices for the various mental-health-staff members—psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers. The other half, separated by an iron gate, held the sick inmates.

  The worst-off and most dangerous of these men were kept in six special high-security cells. These cells, with bars front and rear, had dense screens installed from ceiling to knee level to keep the occupants from throwing things out. Inmates assigned to them had their clothing taken away and replaced with—in severe cases—paper gowns and hospital slippers. The toilets and sinks were a single stainless-steel unit, such as were found in most newer jails and prisons but not generally in Sing Sing. The remainder of the floor’s residents—up to sixteen, who were considered less dangerous—were held in a dormitory room down the hall. They had a TV lounge across the hall, with games and newspapers, and a small room next to that where they received meals.

  A very few inmates were transferred from the PSU to the state mental hospital at Marcy. This was a hard transition to make, however, since space at Marcy was limited: they had to come really close to killing themselves—slashing their wrists deeper than merely the skin, or “hanging up” in such a way that they came close to death. The only other way I ever saw an inmate get to Marcy was by making a credible threat. “I’m gonna be in here a lot of years, but I’m gonna remember you and when I get out I’m gonna find you,” he had said to a female psychiatrist. She must have believed him, because he was shipped out the next morning.

  The general understanding among officers was that many inmates played a bug game—worked the system—in order to get themselves into the PSU or Marcy. They did this because life in those places, even though they were surrounded by bugs, was more tolerable than among the general population of a max. In the psych ward, you didn’t have to worry about gangs or weapons. You had more room to yourself, and there were more staff looking after you.

  For the same reasons, I was always glad when Sergeant Holmes sent me to the PSU after a period on the galleries. It was quiet there, and clean; the inmates were carefully controlled, and there wasn’t much for a CO to do. Most of the time, the PSU was a relief. The most obvious evidence that things were better here was the presence of longtime officers. Because of seniority, they had their pick of easy jobs, and there always seemed to be an old-timer on duty in the PSU.

  The one who was there my first day—and many times after that—was a tall, grizzle
d guy named Birch. He spent his days minding the staircase door and the center gate, making sure things on the floor ran the way they were supposed to, reading religious tracts, or doing crossword puzzles to pass the time. When I arrived, he was speaking through the screen of a high-security cell to a tiny Dominican named Colon, who had decorated the cell with a carpet of shredded pieces of magazine. Tassels of toilet paper festooned every bar, and some thirty wads of toilet paper had been stuck to the walls with toothpaste. I knew Colon from B-block—he had set fire to his cell and destroyed its fixtures once when I was there. As Birch walked away, Colon angrily scooped water from his toilet bowl with his hands and threw it out into the hallway.

  “Oh, I know that guy,” I told Birch. “I wrote him up once for disobeying a direct order. But when I handed him the ticket, he told me I was wasting my time. He went and dug up a whole pile of tickets he’d gotten, which he said were always thrown out because he was crazy.”

  “There’s a lot of guys in here like that,” Birch said. “And no, you can’t write ’em up. Keeplocking ’em just makes ’em worse. Can’t write ’em up.” He shook his head.

  “Guy like you in here yesterday told me he’d written five tickets so far in his first five weeks. Five! That’s more than I probably wrote in my whole career. I’m part of the old school—we took care of things without all the paperwork then. Inmates knew that if they misbehaved, we were gonna fuck them up.” That, I should have realized right away, was how the PSU worked.

  At midmorning, Officer Birch told me it was time for the lock-down inmates’ interviews with the mental-health staff, and he handed me a ring of keys. One at a time, I was to escort the inmates into a conference room where the staff was gathered, make sure they were seated, and then remain standing behind them ready to protect the staff in case of any outburst. This was a nerve-racking assignment, as I’d had no experience with any of the patients. And it was complicated by the fact that the interviews—with a psychiatrist, social worker, nurse, and two other staff members—were interesting to listen to.

  First—carefully, so as not to get wet—I tried Colon. “Will you talk to the committee now?” I asked.

  “Fuck, no! Fuck them!” he cried. Birch had told me that this was how he’d reacted for the past several days and that I could skip him if he did that. He’d calm down later.

  The next inmate, a tall skittish man, went along without a problem. He described to the psychiatrist how two demon COs were using secret symbols to communicate with space beings who landed on the roof of A-block. The COs intended to jinx him with voodoo. Glancing up at me with a hint of a smile, the psychiatrist suggested to the inmate that he consider taking Haldol (an antipsychotic medication). The man shook his head. “Once you start takin’ that shit …” he muttered.

  The psychiatrist then proposed a drug that was milder, and the others at the big table nodded. Still the man demurred. But then the doctor laid it on: “Wouldn’t you take antibiotics for a cold or if you had a small infection?” he asked.

  The inmate said he would.

  “Well, this is like an infection in your head,” said the shrink. The inmate finally agreed to the daily medication.

  I had already guarded the next inmate that morning, during a one-on-one interview with a caseworker in her office. He was a heavyset black man who had seemed calm during the meeting. As soon as he left the office, though, he’d begun to speak loudly and incomprehensibly about Mike Tyson. Now, he was calm during his meeting with the committee.

  The psychiatrist, reading from a folder in front of him, said he would pretend to do a cross-examination. Was that all right? Sure, said the inmate.

  “It says here you sometimes scream when you’re all by yourself. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “That you have an entirely new personality lately?”

  “Yes.”

  “That you often feel very angry, and go around yelling at everyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “That you think you’re the fifth Beatle?”

  “No! That’s not true!”

  The psychiatrist smiled. “I might have made that one up,” he said. Others on the committee chuckled.

  “That you break things in your cell.”

  “True.”

  The inmate agreed to a new course of medication, much to the committee’s satisfaction. This was their main purpose, it appeared: to find a way to manage the inmates such that, with daily meds, they could return to the general population. Guard slang for these meds was bug juice or the cure, but everyone knew it was not a cure. (Many inmates believed that taking them would addle your brain permanently.) The PSU was a holding tank, not a place where people improved. No one, as far as I could see, improved in prison. It took weeks for an inmate in the general population to get an appointment with a therapist, and the wait between appointments, once a relationship had been established, also seemed to be weeks.

  His interview concluded, the inmate left the room. The minute I closed the meeting room door, just as before, he resumed his rant: “Mike Tyson fucked ’em up, and now they’ll pay him, they’ll turn it around,” he bellowed. I was relieved to get him back in his cell.

  The next two trips to the conference room passed without incident, but the interviews continued to enlighten me. One inmate, a Latino, seemed candid when describing the drugs he’d done in prison: marijuana, crack, powder heroin, Valium. I was surprised at the variety, but the committee wasn’t. And he knew the lines to use to impress them. (“But I know it’s important to stop drugs so that I can get my life together and, if I’m fortunate enough to earn parole, be a good provider to my kids.”) The next inmate, who was white, seemed more lost. He rambled on about the people who wanted to get him and a threatening letter he’d received. The committee seemed to know all about it. Abruptly changing the subject, a counselor said, “And you know what to stay away from, right?”

  “Homosexuals, drugs, dice …” he began.

  “Gangs, gambling, gays, and drugs,” she said.

  “Right.”

  Gays? I wondered. It sounded more like a political point of view than a therapeutic strategy. But I couldn’t ask. My radio squawked, as it often did, and the inmate glanced back at me nervously.

  “Could you ask him to leave the room?” he said to the committee members. The psychiatrist nodded and gestured for me to leave.

  And so the inmates went in and out, doing kind of a shuffle, perhaps a by-product of medication, perhaps because we had confiscated their shoelaces so they couldn’t hang themselves. Regardless, they seemed authentically sick to me.

  They saved the worst inmate for last. Massey was a medium-size, twenty-something black man who was zoned out, like a zombie. Arriving at his chair, he wouldn’t take his seat. “Sit down now!” commanded the psychiatrist strictly and, very slowly, the man did. “Stand right behind him,” a female therapist whispered to me. “He might get up.” I don’t remember much about his interview because I was too busy worrying about what I would do if Massey did get up. I placed one of my hands on the end of my baton. There were general questions about the voices Massey heard, about why he wouldn’t take the medication. “That’s all for now,” said the psychiatrist.

  Massey didn’t budge.

  “I said we’re done now. You should leave the room,” the psychiatrist directed firmly. I removed my baton from its ring and walked into view of Massey. Slowly he stood. I held open the door. Slowly he moved through it. He seemed unresponsive to normal stimuli, sealed off in his own world. The way to his cell was straight ahead, but he turned right, toward the center gate, which led to the civilian offices. Birch was sitting beyond the gate. “Hey!” I yelled.

  Massey bent for a drink at a fountain, then stood up and continued his walk. The center gate wasn’t closed as it was supposed to be.

  “Stop right there!” I shouted, but Massey plodded on. Birch rose to his feet and stretched his arms across the open gate. “Go back to your cell!” he ordered. M
assey walked on in slow motion, right into Birch, trying to push him out of the way.

  In a split second, Birch had a hand around Massey’s throat, and I found myself joining him in pushing the inmate against the wall. Birch punched him in the stomach, yelled angrily, then punched him again. I twisted one of his hands into an ordinarily painful aikido grip, but Massey was oblivious. He stared blankly and struggled to get loose. With difficulty, we began moving him back toward his cell. Just then, a huge keeplock officer from B-block named Phelan appeared—in the nick of time, as far as I was concerned, for Massey was surprisingly powerful. With Phelan, we moved him to the door of his cell, but there progress ceased, for Massey grabbed the bars and held on like a crab. It took ten or fifteen seconds for the three of us to pry him loose, during which Birch’s gold watch clattered to the floor. Even after we placed him on his cot, Massey got up and resumed a somnambulant march toward the door.

  Phelan lifted him into the air and slammed him against the cell’s metal wall.

  “Stop all this bug-game shit!” he yelled.

  The inmate seemed insensate. No emotion passed across his face, no sign of fear or pain. Bam! Phelan slammed him up against the wall again. This time Massey looked more discouraged and didn’t try to stand. We locked him in and dusted ourselves off.