by Ted Conover
Premo had a good point, I thought, but with the blossoming cynicism of a few weeks in Sing Sing’s blocks, I could see he’d understated his case. Twenty, thirty, even forty to one? How about coming to visit me in A-block or B-block? How about 150 to one?
Looking down the hill, I could see a corner of the A-block yard. Guards who worked towers over a yard had a lot of responsibility. The officers on the ground depended on them for support in case of a disturbance, and yards were a frequent site of trouble. Sometimes, as we’d been told at the Academy, an officer could stop a fight just by turning on his PA system and loudly sliding a shotgun shell into its chamber. Some officers were not shy about actually firing. One OJT who’d been at Clinton briefly told me an officer there had recently shot an inmate’s finger off, presumably while aiming for something more meaty.
My tower was not responsible for the A-block yard, for which I was glad, because even my partial view of it reminded me of the death of George Jackson, the Black Panther and author of Soledad Brother, a collection of letters from prison. Jackson and two other “Soledad brothers” had been accused of helping beat to death a white correction officer at the California prison on January 16, 1970. (Three days earlier, a white tower guard at Soledad had shot and killed three black inmates.) Just before the opening of his murder trial, Jackson was shot and killed by a tower guard at San Quentin, where he had been transferred. The authorities said he was shot because he was armed and attempting to escape. “No Black person,” wrote the novelist James Baldwin, “will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”
The trash can on the outside catwalk was stuffed with contraband daily newspapers, I discovered, which made me feel less bad about having run back to my car after getting my assignment, in order to pick up a paperback novel. I had learned about this new book from an advertisement on the chalkboard by the front gate—Killer, by Christopher Newman. The author, in his acknowledgments, thanked First Deputy Superintendent Charles Greiner (now the superintendent of Sing Sing), and as I read on, I saw that Greiner must have given Newman a tour and a lot of background information about facility operations. Killer was about a New York City police lieutenant who was being stalked by a notorious Colombian gunman who had just escaped from Sing Sing.
The scenario was this: The Colombian knew that his best chance of escape would be during an outside medical trip. With his A-block buddies, he created a fake altercation on his way to supper. Shielded from the eyes of COs by milling inmates, he stabbed himself deeply, purposefully creating a sucking chest wound. It worked. He was driven out of Sing Sing through the very gate I sat astride, in an official van that was soon hijacked by his confederates. In the van with the Colombian was a Sing Sing nurse, who was forced to continue treating him.
Greiner, to my surprise, had authorized a book signing for Killer near the lineup room. Any book that postulated an escape, I would have thought, would have been anathema to the superintendent. The fact that it wasn’t gave me heart. Maybe Greiner wouldn’t be so unhappy when my book came out.
UTILITY 1
Occasionally from a wallpost you would see a decrepit Sing Sing van stop somewhere on the road encircling the prison, and out would pile one officer with a chair and five or six inmates with lawn mowers and Weed Eaters. This was Utility 1, a crew of medium-security inmates whose job it was to mow and clean in the area just outside the walls.
One day I had the job of supervising Utility 1, and though it was supposedly a plum, I found it completely nerve-racking: I was terrified that one of these trusted inmates would run off, leaving me to blame for an escape.
This had actually happened recently to Konoval, the training officer, who had taken a different work crew out mowing near a highway in the Bronx. One of the inmates disappeared when Konoval wasn’t looking, only to be recaptured a few hours later at his mother’s apartment in Queens—luckily for Konoval. Those inmates were supposedly even more trustworthy than mine, and Konoval was supposedly a supremely experienced officer. Thinking of him, I actually felt it was likely that it would happen to me.
The inmates and I got into a fight over this anxiety of mine. Apparently, when they mowed the relatively short stretch alongside the south wall of the prison, the regular officer didn’t object if those in the lead went ahead and kept on mowing around the corner. But around the corner was out of sight, and I panicked when they disappeared. Two of them told me they would refuse to work if I made them stay back. “What’s wrong, CO, you scared? We ain’t goin’ nowhere—the towers watch us all the way.”
“Stay in sight,” I said. “If you refuse, I’m writing you up. Or maybe you don’t care about your job.” This was false bravado—I doubt I could have gotten them fired—but it seemed enough to inspire some hatred of me, if not fear.
We had to go back to a storage shed to swap malfunctioning equipment for barely working equipment. To show the inmates I wasn’t a bad guy, I agreed to their request not to take the steep, curvy route that hugged the north side of the facility but to drive a route that was almost as fast, through downtown Ossining. The inmates were mad to see women—any women—and this route was more likely to gratify.
Like several old Hudson River downtowns in the region, from Peekskill to Poughkeepsie, the neighborhood has seen better days. Parts are a ghetto now, with broken-down stoops, prostitutes at night, and guys playing dice against the curb. There was one corner I had always noticed when I passed on previous occasions. It had a large number of fairly well dressed young men hanging around out front, not drinking or gambling, not visibly occupied with anything except paying close attention to passing cars. The inmates waved at them, and they waved back.
“Looks like a crack house,” I commented.
“Of course it’s a crack house,” said the inmate in the passenger seat next to me. “Been there for months.” He seemed to take offense at some condemnation he heard in my tone. “Just guys making a living is all.”
I nodded. (Two hundred feet farther on and around the corner was a ramshackle wooden house directly opposite wallpost 15. This was actually a CO residence inhabited by a changing cast of upstate officers I had worked with; with no knowing reference to the real one, it had been nicknamed the Crack House.) It struck me as peculiar that the crack trade was flourishing openly perhaps a hundred yards from one of the most famous maximum-security prisons in the world.
It had a little bit to do with jurisdictions, I supposed. The Ossining police probably had several crack houses to deal with, and its proximity to Sing Sing did not constitute a reason to go after that one in particular. In fact, the presence of a crack house was not so stunning alongside what I had seen during a day on another plum job, construction.
Officers on construction detail—like the one who had witnessed me getting slugged in the head that day in A-block—accompanied outside tradesmen doing building or maintenance work inside the prison. Once I spent an entire day on top of the Hospital Building, keeping an eye on a crew of roofers who were removing an old surface laden with asbestos and then laying a new one. Essentially, my job was to make sure they didn’t do anything to threaten security, such as drop tools to inmates or leave out dangerous equipment.
During lunch break, I got to talk to a few of them. Like the inmates, they were startled to find that I spoke Spanish. One in particular seemed happy to chat. He hadn’t spoken to any white people apart from bosses since he arrived from Ecuador the year before, he told me. The trip had been a difficult one, and it cost him over seven thousand dollars: He had flown from Quito to Guatemala, then taken a boat to Acapulco. From there he traveled overland to the U.S. border, crossed over to Houston with help from a coyote, and then finally flew on a commercial airline to New York City.
“So you’re still illegal?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging and looking at the others resting against the wall, thermoses and lunch bags by their sides, “como todos nosotros.” Like the rest.
Here was a man who
had violated federal law—a fugitive, technically—actually working inside Sing Sing. Resting against its very bricks. And not afraid to tell an officer.
TRANSPORTATION
Over four days in my first months on the job, I got to enter another realm normally guarded jealously by senior officers: transportation detail. For people who are in confinement, inmates go a lot of places. They are accompanied outside of prison to court hearings (many, though imprisoned, have additional charges pending), to family funerals, to the hospital, and to other prisons on transfer. Officers on transportation detail get to leave the facility, and because many trips spill over from one shift to another, they rack up lots of overtime pay.
I was sent from lineup one day to work with a transportation officer named Billings. Every trip required at least two officers. If a large contingent of inmates was being moved, even more officers went along. That day, however, Billings and I had only one inmate to transport, a Mexican who had a deportation hearing at an immigration court inside the Downstate Correctional Facility, about an hour’s drive away.
We wore sidearms, and it was instructive to witness the lengths to which the prison went to keep guns—even officers’ guns—out of the facility. First we walked out the prison’s front gate and collected the pistols from the Arsenal’s outside window. Then we drove a state van around the perimeter to Wallpost 18, where I climbed out, my arms laden with the pistols, belts, and holsters. I walked to the base of the tower. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I called, waiting for the tower officer to appear and lower the bucket. He didn’t smile when finally he peered over the railing; COs could be so grim. Then, free of weaponry, we passed through the sally port and went back inside the prison. We placed handcuffs and leg irons on our inmate, helped him into the van, and passed back through the sally port to the outside. Only then, after we had collected our weapons from the wall tower, were we, our guns, and our inmate all finally united inside the van.
The forty-something Billings was an extrovert. He quickly told me about the trouble he was having with his wife due to his extramarital affairs (“I don’t think many men my age haven’t had affairs,” he said) and about the tensions at home due to the return of his pregnant, unmarried teenage daughter. We talked about the union’s new disability insurance program, about the vocational shop at Eastern Correctional Facility where all the state’s highway signs were made, and about an altercation in the B-block yard the night before, during which officers had been injured.
I walked with the inmate into his hearing at Downstate. All morning—from his strip-frisk outside the protective-custody unit to his handcuffing—he had been the soul of civility, and at the hearing he was no different. No, he told the judge, English wasn’t his first language; that would be Nahuatl, the Mexican Indian tongue. But he could understand Spanish well enough. Through an interpreter, the judge explained that the hearing was about whether he wished to fight the government’s plan to deport him to Mexico as soon as his sentence was finished. No, the inmate said, he would be happy to go home as soon as he could. But there was a favor he wanted to ask. He was serving eight to twenty-five years for manslaughter, he said, and for the past three months, he had been held in involuntary protective custody. This was because his victim had been the younger brother of a leader of Sing Sing’s Latin Kings gang and the administration feared that members of the gang in prison would kill him. Couldn’t the judge please intervene and have him transferred?
Conveying all this information to the judge through the interpreter took about ten minutes; the judge’s reply, about ten seconds. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” And that was that.
Certainly, I supposed, the matter was outside the judge’s jurisdiction. The Department of Correctional Services transferred inmates according to its own obscure agendas. I (probably along with most inmates) was always trying to figure them out—and I made a bit more progress later that night.
My shift was over by the time Billings and I got back. As we checked in, a black sergeant, Brereton, was trying to decide on the racial makeup of a team of evening-shift transportation officers to send on a five-hour drive up to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, the max near Comstock, New York. He didn’t want to send “all brothers” to Comstock—it would conform too much to the upstate stereotype of Sing Sing. But his regular white and Latino officers were out. I raised my hand to volunteer, and was selected. It was overtime, he advised me; I probably wouldn’t get back until 4 A.M. “That’s no problem,” I said. This overtime was easy.
Sergeant Brereton took me and another officer along to collect the inmate from his cell in 5-Building. This was unusual. Normally, transportation officers collected inmates by themselves. When we arrived at the cell, Brereton was fierce to the inmate: “Collect your bag! Put your shoes on! We’re leaving now!” The inmate was a young black guy named Hans Toussaint. He did not seem hostile, but maybe Brereton knew something I didn’t know.
“No talking!” the sergeant barked as Toussaint paused at another cell to say good-bye. “Direct order! Walk in front of us now! Stop again and we’ll take you down!”
Inmates in neighboring cells snickered at this and imitated Brereton in low tones. I braced myself, knowing Brereton would expect me to do the taking down if in fact Toussaint stopped again. Fortunately, he did not, and Brereton dropped us off at the State Shop, where Toussaint’s belongings were to be inventoried before he was shipped out.
A small crowd of six or seven officers gathered around for this routine procedure, and slowly I learned why there was all this interest: Toussaint was one of the gang members who had been involved in the altercation in B-block yard the day before. We had seen videotape of this at lineup: thirty or forty seconds of inmates massing, running and stabbing, attacking and fleeing. The story was that the Latin Kings had a score to settle with the Bloods. Their fighters had gotten to the yard first, armed with shanks, and taken positions along the fence. The Bloods had known a fight was going to happen, known they were outnumbered, but had gone out anyway. They were clustered near the yard door when the Kings attacked, stabbing numerous Bloods and sustaining lesser injuries in the process. As the Bloods fled down a fenced-in corridor toward 5-Building, the video showed Sergeant Murray, his baton out, flailing away to separate the combatants.
I had passed the door where that corridor emptied into the main prison, walked by the large pool of dried blood just inside it. It now seemed likely that some of this blood had been Toussaint’s. He had just transferred into Sing Sing from another prison the day before; it had been his first time ever in the B-block yard. The officers were marveling over that circumstance as they sifted through his meager possessions.
“So you knew something was going to happen out there?”
“Everyone knew it was going to happen,” said Toussaint.
“So why’d you go?”
“I had to go.”
“Where were you stabbed?”
Toussaint lifted up his T-shirt and showed the cut in his back. He would have gotten a “big stick” in his side, too, he said, had it not been for his protective vest of magazines.
“What magazines did you use?” asked Anderson, the female CO who supervised the barbershop downstairs.
“Ebony and Life,” said Toussaint, smiling. He was charismatic, I could see. Officers kept peppering him with questions, but he was talking especially to Anderson. She pointed to three parallel slashes through one of his eyebrows. “What are those?”
He shrugged and wouldn’t answer.
She persisted. “Why the big deal about your gang?” The Bloods, originally from Los Angeles, were a growing and feared presence in New York at the time. It was said that membership followed a strict policy of “blood in, blood out”: You had to slash somebody—not necessarily a rival gang member, just someone you were robbing, say—to get into the gang, and leaving was impossible without getting cut up yourself.
“Okay, I’ll tell you once,” said Toussaint. He bor
rowed Anderson’s pen and on a piece of scrap paper wrote B-L-O-O-D in block letters. Then he completed the words he said the letters stood for: “Brotherly Love Overrides Oppression and Distraction.” I had never before heard that Blood was an acronym. Anderson folded it up and said she’d keep it.
Toussaint had nothing more to his name than an incomplete set of state-issued clothes and a fat envelope of letters from his girlfriend in Brooklyn. (“Dear Sweetie,” began one, which an officer had opened. “Your bid’s not that long.”) And, like a bunch of idiot nerd scientists, here we were poring over it all with a fine-tooth comb, grinding along to keep the system going—and the gas in our SUVs. By comparison, he was like the Rebel, ideals untarnished. His girlfriend would have to write to him at Great Meadow, now. Instead of being placed in protective custody, like the Mexican, Toussaint was being transferred out. This transfer made sense: Toussaint seemed combustible, and getting him out of Sing Sing would help to defuse gang tensions. I felt suddenly sorry for him. These gangs of ghetto kids preyed on the weak, but you had to admit that there was a political element to some of them, a mission of self-help and a drive to maintain pride and focus. Toussaint was not unlike an ambassador from a small, fierce, and backward land.
The only thing I could say on our behalf was that just as everything was finishing up, an officer happened upon a tiny plastic bag with a few leaves of what looked like marijuana in it, enough for just one puff of smoke. The officer held it up accusingly.