by Ted Conover
Colton was in a rotten mood, hardly talking, clearly homesick and hating Sing Sing. “How’s it going?” I asked anyway. “I could live without it,” he replied. He seemed uninterested in and even averse to the dramas unfolding before us, but I was fascinated. If you’d ever wondered about inmates’ lives outside prison, here were some of the missing pieces.
I watched a young woman who came in, found her table, put her head down, and went to sleep while awaiting her beau. He awakened her with a kiss—Prince Charming—and I wondered whether they always did it that way. Then there was another couple whose visit started icily. She practically put an arm up to keep him from hugging her, he settled for a squeeze of the hand, then the two retired to the side-by-side seats in the back of the room. Three hours later, I noticed, they were kissing passionately, the freeze having thawed.
On the other side of the room sat an aging couple, there to see … a son? Almost every visit began with an embrace, but some beginnings were shy or tentative. The son and his parents touched only arms, not chests; he might have given his mother the briefest of kisses. Or was she a foster mother? Was he a stepdad?
One inmate was thronged by three little kids the moment he left our desk. They jumped around him and held on to his legs as he made his way toward their mother—his wife? or was it his sister?—who tried to clear a space for him at the table amidst the crayons and coloring books. It made you happy, this sight, but also very, very sad.
Several regular officers worked the room with us. Since Colton was incommunicado, I began chatting with a regular named Eveillard, who was born in Haiti, he said. Eveillard, balding and with a dirty shirt, had been deflecting the barbs of some of the American-born officers, with limited success. He seemed glad to talk to someone who wasn’t going to make fun of him. As he was sealing an envelope, he told me the story behind it. He had just returned from a vacation in Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. I had never met anyone who vacationed in Santo Domingo, I said. Got to go! he said enthusiastically. He had met a beautiful woman there and had fallen in love. He spoke some Spanish, and that was how they had communicated, but he could not write Spanish. Fortunately, a porter—he gestured toward a young inmate cleaning the children’s play area—had written a love letter for him in Spanish.
Eveillard had me walk around the room with him. A boy was about to follow his father into the inmates’ bathroom. “Sorry, that’s not allowed,” Eveillard told them. You had to keep an eye on them, he emphasized. Though visitors were screened with a metal detector, they could not be pat-frisked unless there was reason to suspect them, and this was one way drugs came into the facility. A woman could have some dope in a packet in her bra, the man could swallow it, and—voilà. And there were lesser scams, too.
“You know they can’t have sneakers worth more than fifty dollars, right? Well, their homeboy comes in wearing new Air Jordans. The inmate takes off his old sneakers, and they switch ’em under the table. Maybe we’ll catch the inmate on his way out, but maybe we won’t.” I thought I would probably notice an inmate wearing Air Jordans.
It had also happened that a visitor wearing a double layer of clothes left one layer in the bathroom for his inmate friend. The inmate, dressed in civvies, might try to walk right out of the Visit Room to the street at the end of the day. Of course, there were procedures in place to prevent this—an ultraviolet stamp applied to the visitor’s arm when he entered and then checked when he left was one of them—but you had to be careful. An inmate had escaped from the Rikers Island Visit Room that same summer, despite the many fail-safes.
With Eveillard, I stopped at a table where a young woman in a red dress had left her chair and was sitting in the lap of the inmate. “Not allowed!” Eveillard said, making a loud tsking noise. Reluctantly, and slowly, she moved. As long as each person stayed in his or her chair, feet on the floor, with no intimate touching besides kisses, we would leave them alone. But the battle against lust required constant oversight: I had to order the same woman off the inmate’s lap an hour later. Eveillard told me he’d actually had to interrupt an act of standing intercourse a few months before. The Visit Room had an outdoor annex for warm days, and the couple had been standing behind some of the playground equipment—not exactly family entertainment.
There was also a special sealed-off area provided for no-contact visits. This was the kind of visit space that movies and television made out to be the norm, with partitions, windows, and telephone receivers, and with both parties anguished because touching was impossible. The reality, at least in Sing Sing, was different. Inmate and visitor were kept separated only if one of them requested it. Just the week before, Eveillard said, a woman had arrived and requested a no-contact visit—she was going to tell her husband she wanted a divorce, and feared his reaction. As anticipated, he exploded, and officers had to restrain him.
Another reason to stay alert was that, instead of a disintegrating relationship, an inmate might have an extra one. Every longtime officer seemed to have witnessed a wife arriving when an inmate’s girlfriend was already there, or vice versa. Fireworks were guaranteed.
Eveillard had worked the Visit Room for a long time and liked it. I did, too, because I didn’t feel as much in prison myself here, and I got to witness positive interactions instead of the customary conflictual ones. But, like a great many other officers who worked the Visit Room, Eveillard found one aspect of this duty really galling: the number of attractive young women who visited inmates.
“You saw the one in the red dress. And look at that one!” Eveillard hissed under his breath. “What does she see in him? What can he do for her? Nothing!”
I found the presence of attractive young women here curious but not vexing. But to Eveillard it was infuriating, evidence of female delusion and divine injustice. “You see her?” he said quietly of a woman holding hands with an inmate at a table. I recognized the inmate from B-block. He was frequently called out for visits. “She comes here after working a night shift, almost every day. To spend her time here! She is doing his time for him!” I knew what Eveillard meant. There was almost no limit to the number of visits an inmate could have, even if he was keeplocked or in the Box. As long as his visitor was there, he could be out of his cell from around 8:30 A.M. to 2:45 P.M., Monday through Friday (and alternate weekends), enjoying the relatively pleasant environment.
He pointed out another woman, this one pregnant, accompanied by a small child and looking very happy to see her inmate. “See her? That’s his wife! She met him seven years ago, when she came here with a friend who was visiting another inmate. First they got married. Then they did the FRP [Family Reunion Program—a program allowing for occasional conjugal visits]. And now she’s pregnant again. Unbelievable!”
“That is strange,” I had to agree. “Maybe she just likes having a husband who isn’t around.”
“But how can he support her?” he asked, exasperated.
Well, there was welfare, and a few inmates had means, but it was mostly a mystery. I wondered what kind of love the woman felt for the inmate. Was it romantic—the desire for something you could never have? Was it practical—a way to raise children without interference? The COs couldn’t figure it out, because these men could never support the women, and the goal of solvency animated officers’ entire lives.
On the other hand, I had gotten to know such a woman while doing research for a magazine article I’d written about a hatchet murderer. The killer had secretly created and then marketed software from within the Minnesota state prison system while participating in a vocational course that allowed him access to the Internet. This woman had had a crush on him since she was a teenager, long before he committed the murder. So strong was her attraction that when the inmate was paroled, seventeen years after his conviction, she divorced her husband (the father of their two kids) and took up with him.
“My whole attitude was, it really didn’t matter,” she had told me of t
he murder and conviction, which she considered one-of-a-kind occurrences brought about by a fluky convergence of factors. And practicality, she felt, should always take a backseat to true love.
Since many of the women in the Visit Room were from the ghetto or at least the poor side of town, the absence of loved ones due to incarceration was a fact of life in their world, something they had to accommodate. A line in the movie Birdman of Alcatraz seemed to capture this situation exactly. The “birdman” murderer, Robert Stroud, had been transferred to Alcatraz and away from a midwestern woman he had met by mail while in Leaven-worth. The woman, whom he had married, showed up one day at Alcatraz to visit him, and Stroud, speaking for every person who had ever puzzled over this question, demanded to know why on earth she had come all that way.
“Because,” she said, “you’re the only life I have.”
I returned to sit at the desk with Colton. Both of us were tired. But I got the feeling that exhaustion made him more “cop” and me less “cop.” We finished up our paperwork, and at 2:30 P.M. Colton announced through the microphone that all visits had to end; everyone had to be out of the room by 2:45 P.M. As the minutes ticked off, little girls clasped their daddies’ necks, lovers hugged as though the embrace had to last through all eternity, and an old woman got teary-eyed. The positive side of visits was made tragic by the truth that prison, over time, eroded or erased practically all relationships. Despite what I had seen in Minnesota, I knew that precious few survived. People on the outside moved or met new people or died. They moved on. Did Colton share any of these thoughts? As we stood up to herd everybody out, I couldn’t help myself. I gestured out at the sea of emotion and asked, “Does it make you a little homesick?”
“Oh sure,” said Colton wryly. “It’s a regular Hallmark card.”
I stopped at my local garage to get my car inspected on my way home. It was a small place near the tracks in Yonkers. The hardworking owner, Marty, looked upset this evening. As I sat in the waiting room, I overheard him telling another customer that something had happened to an elderly friend of his.
“Harry’s retired, and he’s walking home with a toolbox last night after doing some volunteer work at his church. And these guys knock him down, beat him up, send him to the hospital. Just to get a couple tools.” He shook his head in disgust.
That brought me down to earth, rechanneled some of my sympathy. I know those guys, I wanted to tell Marty—I spend every day with them.
It was all about absence, wasn’t it—the absence of imprisoned men from the lives of the people who loved them; the absence of love in prison. And also—what you could never forget—the absence in the hearts of decent people, the holes that criminals punched in their lives, the absence of the things they took: money, peace of mind, health, and entire lives, because they were selfish or sick or scared or just couldn’t wait.
WALLPOST
The old chair was comfortable, the view stupendous, the feeling of being left alone delicious.
I was up there by myself—just me, my guns, my newspaper, and the toilet—working Wallpost 18.
It would be satisfying to a closet sniper, this job, because he could spend long hours playing out scenarios of whom he might have to fire at, with which weapon, and under what circumstance. It was satisfying to me because, again, it was a reprieve from the noise and stress of the blocks. The old prison wall was studded with nine of these towers; there was a total of eighteen towers, including the ugly new square ones around Tappan. I loved the architecture: Sing Sing’s old octagonal towers were the prison’s main emblem, the image on the souvenir history booklet, union key chains, and the coffee cups and T-shirts sold by enterprising officers in the parking lot on payday. Each tower had a catwalk around it, with spotlights affixed to the railing, and the feeling inside was of a cozy bungalow. I loved the breeze blowing through, and my privileged position firmly astride the prison wall, with both sides in plain sight.
All of the actively used wallposts contained a small arsenal. The gun rack, set between two of the eight windows, held a Remington shotgun, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, a tear-gas gun, and many rounds of ammunition. Around my waist was a belt and holster with a Smith & Wesson .38 Special revolver. Across the room were some chemical-agent canisters in a special vest, next to a riot helmet and megaphone.
There was nothing much to do, and yet you had to stay alert: That was the joy and difficulty of a day in a wall tower. But mostly it was a joy—I had wanted to run up and kiss Sergeant Holmes when he assigned it to me. New officers did not get up here very often. The regular, I found out, was on a two-week vacation.
You enter the wall tower through an ancient gate outside the prison wall. The towers were considered the facility’s last line of defense, so they were to be inaccessible from within the prison. To get the key, you presented yourself at the gate and waited for the officer you were relieving to drop the key down in a bucket on a rope. The key itself was marvelous—the oldest I’d seen in Sing Sing, thin and short, with two circles cut out of the grip and the edges softened by a million touches. Sargent & Greenleaf Co., it read on the grip, Rochester, N.Y. No. 101. I would later see a similar one in a display case at the retired federal prison on Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay; that one dated to 1909.
Inside the tower was a corroded iron spiral staircase. One complete turn took you up some twenty-five feet to the metal hatch in the middle of the floor above. By the time you arrived, the officer who was headed home had lifted the hatch so you could climb in. You exchanged pleasantries and the key, which he used to let himself out and then placed back in the bucket for you to pull up with the rope. Then you were secure, ready to start your shift.
Sing Sing had three “sally ports,” or vehicle passages, to the outside world, and Wallpost 18 sat above one of them. The port had two huge sliding metal gates which, for security reasons, were controlled not from the ground but from my tower. A vehicle entering or leaving the prison would pass through one gate, stop over a submerged inspection bay, and wait for inspection and clearance for passage from officers on the ground, who signaled me when all was clear. Then I would turn one of the big black switches on my control panel, the other gate would open, and the vehicle would proceed. The simple rule I had to remember was to always close one gate before opening the other.
Fortunately, this sally port was used mainly for official vehicles—prison vans, state-police cars, ambulances—and it was a weekend day, so there wasn’t much traffic. I could relax a little. Using binoculars, I watched a sailboat regatta down by the Tappan Zee Bridge and saw the slowly moving traffic on the bridge above. I scanned the facility, land of a zillion red bricks. And, resting my eyes, I watched a flock of geese exploring the chapel lawn in front of me. That particular swath of lawn was also pictured in a photograph taped to the wall next to the window. A square yard of it was indicated with Magic Marker. That was where I was to aim any warning shots.
I checked the weapons, counted the ammunition, made the required phone call to the watch commander to say that everything was okay. I flushed the toilet: It was a steel commode/basin combination, just like the ones in the psych unit. A jury-rigged burner and pot also looked inspired by, if not commandeered from, inmate facilities. I glanced into the ambulance log. One seemed to enter the facility every three or four days, on average. A bunch of memos were stuffed into a clipboard. One was headed DISABLING OF HELICOPTERS. First you were to fire into the rear rotor, it directed. Only after that, because of the high risk of explosion, were you to shoot into the engine cowling. Third, after warning shots, you could “fire to disable any inmates who may approach.” But only if the exploding helicopter hadn’t already wiped all of us out, I supposed.
A second memo, from a captain, seemed aimed at shaking up the tower personnel, who were no doubt a bastion of complacency. “It must be realize [sic] by all staff that the perimeter is the first and last lines [sic] of defense in maintaining the high degree of security necessary for the secure opera
tion of a maximum security Facility,” he wrote. “We all must be cognizant of the close proximity of this Facility to NYC which is home to a major part of our population …” Blah blah blah.
Another memo, four years old, described the Family Reunion Program, probably soon after its inauguration. Entrance to the family-visit trailers was through the sally port at Wallpost 15, where I would work later. Each unit had an outdoor grill and picnic table, and they shared a swing set; inside, I was told, there was a television, a kitchen, and separate sleeping areas for kids and adults. Married inmates on good behavior were eligible to stay there every few months. The Felon Reproduction Program, some officers called it.
On the memo, a wall-tower officer had penned in a telling editorial change in one sentence. “Purpose: To provide for a Family Reunion Program which helps preserve, enhance, and strengthen family ties that have been disrupted as a result of incarceration.” The word incarceration had been crossed out, and handwritten in its place was the word individual. Family disruption wasn’t caused by incarceration, in other words; it was caused by actions of the individual that resulted in incarceration. The distinction was important to officers, who wanted no personal responsibility for the harmful effects of the system.
Down on the street outside the wall, the roach coach honked its horn. I stepped out onto the catwalk and hollered to the driver: “Pizza and coffee?” I pointed to the bucket on the rope, and he nodded. I lowered a five-dollar bill to him and, soon after, pulled up my lunch and my change.
As I ate, I read CPO Family, the magazine of the Correctional Peace Officers Foundation, a group that offered money and support to the families of slain correction officers. (I joined this organization.) The best article was written by a New York State officer.
“What would the average citizen say if it were proposed that police officers be assigned to a neighborhood which was inhabited by no one but criminals and those officers would be unarmed, patrol on foot and be heavily outnumbered?” asked Donald E. Premo, Jr. “My beat is totally inhabited by convicted felons who, by definition, are people who tend to break laws, rules, and regulations. I am outnumbered by as much as 20, 30, and even 40 to 1 at various times during my workday, and, contrary to popular belief, I work without a sidearm. In short, my neck is on the line every minute of every day.”