Newjack

by Ted Conover

  “You chasin’ away my company again, Conover?” Shooing inmates away from the cell of my most popular keeplock was a never-ending job. All sorts of inmates liked to lean on the bars of R-29 cell and talk, talk, talk. Larson was, as I liked to tell him, an “attractive nuisance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s lawyer talk—like a swimming pool with no fence around it; little kids come by and fall in.”

  “Conover!” Larson feigned offense.

  “I know—nobody’s drowning here. But why does everybody want to talk to you?”

  Larson, tall and slope-shouldered, with long, braided hair, was sitting on his bunk as usual. Except for one hour of rec per day and a shower on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, it’s where he was all the time. According to a printout in Cradle’s office, he was the block’s longest-term keeplock, having spent the past seventeen months in his cell, with three more to go, a sentence within a sentence. But instead of seething with anger like so many other keeplocks, Larson had an aura of beatific calm. A stoner’s calm, I had thought at first, given the slow, spacey way he spoke and blinked. And a friend in the disciplinary office lent credence to this speculation, telling me that Larson was keeplocked mainly for the repeated use of marijuana in prison.

  But there was more to him than that. I had at first suspected Larson of being a conduit for contraband—and I never ruled this possibility out—because he was always exchanging everything from magazines to M&M’s with the inmates who stopped by. But that was too cop-brained. Larson was also, clearly, a sort of spiritual figure, and one with a head on his shoulders. His inmate nicknames were Powerful, Powwow, and PW.

  “They come to me because … I’m like family to them,” he said to me that day, as one of my porters stopped to listen. “Most of these guys didn’t have a father, and I can be that.” It was only a partial explanation. But I had connected with Larson better than I did with most inmates, and I wanted to know more.

  Our friendship, if you could call it that, had started a couple of months before with his mocking me, but in a way that I deserved. I was running keeplock showers and came to his cell to take him to his. Though my floor had seven shower stalls (regular cells, with shower heads and drains), B-block’s decayed plumbing and incredibly poor water pressure meant that usually, only three or four were usable. “Word on the street,” I said to Larson as I unlocked his cell, “is that the W-36 back-side shower is the best today.”

  Slipping his feet into flip-flops and reaching for his towel, Larson paused to laugh. “‘Word on the street’? Where’d you hear that? How about, ‘Word on the avenue’? ‘Word on the street’ is like ‘chill out’—dig what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, you the upstate homeboy, CO,” chimed in his neighbor.

  I was embarrassed. I felt the same way I had when I heard my parents say “Groovy!” sometime around 1970.

  “Okay, what should I say, Larson?” I asked, trying to save face. “‘Rumor has it’?”

  He laughed again. “That’s it, CO. ‘Rumor has it.’”

  After that he looked at my name tag for the first time. “Conover,” he said slowly, committing it to memory. He preceded me to the shower, and I locked him in for his ten or so minutes of allotted bliss.

  Larson’s cell decor reflected his difference. Like so many other inmates, he had a dozen or so girlie pinups on his wall, but his were conspicuously clothed. And they weren’t white but African-American, like him. He had a pile of cassette tapes, mostly hip-hop, but he had a much taller stack of books. His Dictionary of Evolution, he told me, he had bought from another inmate for a pack of cigarettes. There were volumes of Afrocentric history like the ones that are sold on the sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn, social science primers, and an academic survey of perceptions of race over the years.

  I had stopped at his cell another day after he knew me a little and asked what he was reading.

  “Here,” he said, passing the book through the bars. “Read this page.” The book was an old work of physical anthropology, and the passage was about the classification of Homo sapiens into different racial strains.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “They used to worry about this stuff a lot.”

  “Who?”

  “Anthropologists.”

  Larson stared at me. “What’s your story, Conover?” he asked a moment later. “You’re not like the other COs here.”

  “What do you mean? You mean because I’m not from upstate?”

  “No. It’s something else. The way you think and the way you walk.”

  My heart rate rose a bit. Except for Dieter, back at the Academy, my passage through the Department of Correctional Services had been blissfully free of anyone, officer or inmate, with the slightest interest about my background. Prisons were full of people who liked to talk more than they liked to listen, and lack of curiosity had been my friend. But Larson was smart and uncannily observant. “You went to college?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And what did you study?”

  “Anthropology.”

  “Anthropology? That’s a hard and deep subject, man. I respect that.” He stared at the wall for a moment. “What are you doing here? You should be a teacher or something.”

  I paused and swallowed. It was my feeling exactly, and I wanted to tell him so. Instead, I evaded by saying, “Life takes funny turns, Larson. You probably know something about that. How did you end up here?”

  It was his third bid, he said. After doing time for assault in Alabama, where he grew up, and a second sentence for weapons possession, he had been in New York, dating a woman who was also dating a CO. He and the man had gotten into an argument in the lobby of her building. The CO had drawn his gun but Larson had shot him first—“too many times,” he said—and Larson had been sent back to prison, with a sentence of eight years to life.

  “Conover, when I came into prison the first time, I couldn’t read or write.” Apart from prison literacy courses, he said, he was entirely self-educated. Instead of wasting so much of the inmates’ time on rec, Larson thought, Sing Sing should put a small library on every gallery so that inmates could sit in their cells and read.

  Over days and weeks, I found myself, like his fellow inmates, stopping by to talk to Larson fairly often. Sometimes I had to wait my turn, as one of my porters, or another person authorized to be outside his cell, would be deep in discussion already. One day it was my porter known as Itchy, for all the time he spent scratching his scalp. “What kind of God lets people suffer?” Larson was demanding of Itchy as I approached. Itchy, a short, middle-aged murderer, wasn’t used to my being party to his conversation and went silent.

  “He’s a Christian,” Larson explained to me.

  “Well, excuse me for butting in, but don’t all gods let people suffer?” I asked. Helping people deal with suffering was a large part of most religions, I ventured, and suggested that none of them promised complete happiness. “What god makes everybody happy?” I asked Larson.

  “Me—my own,” he said, smiling, a little smugly, I thought.

  “If everybody’s his own god, that’s different from a religious God,” I answered, then was called to the gate. The next time I came near, Larson was demanding of Itchy, “Who is your God, anyway?”

  I stood by. Itchy, who usually seemed lighthearted and funny, looked a little mad, and I said so.

  An inmate I couldn’t see from two cells down was listening and chimed in. “He’s mad because Powerful tell him the truth and he ain’t ready to hear it.” Later, I offhandedly asked Itchy if he was still mad. No, he said, he wasn’t. He liked talking to Larson no matter what he said, “because he’s interested in history and where we all came from and what we’re supposed to do.”

  Larson, sounding a bit like the Savior, once said to me of those who came to talk to him, “They can’t love me like I love them because they don’t love themselves. They don’t know who they are.” These two deprivations, he maintained, along with a third one
—that of “a good model of a decision maker to look up to” when they were growing up—were behind most of their criminal careers. They made bad choices, and most had been taught since they were young that they wouldn’t amount to much. His own mother, he said, made comments that “dulled” his “potentials and capacities.”

  Apart from the excitement of meeting a thinking person in prison, I liked talking with Larson because it gave me hope that the inmate-officer gap had some chance of being bridged. Then one day, a few cells down the gallery from his, I got into something of a shouting match with an inmate named Curry, who was angrily refusing to leave the slop sink despite repeated requests. Larson, to my surprise, started adding to the noise with calls of, “Anthropology! Anthropology!” Under the circumstances, it sounded a bit mocking.

  “What’s up with that?” I demanded the next day.

  “What’s wrong, Conover? You don’t want people to know?”

  Larson, I already knew, had talked about me to other inmates; twice in the past week inmates I didn’t know had asked me whether it was true I had a Ph.D.

  “Yeah, there’s that. But maybe it’s also the tone. You didn’t sound exactly … friendly.”

  “And we’re friends, right, Conover?”

  “You tell me, Larson.”

  He sat silently. His question went right to the heart of the matter and left us at … an impasse. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t mock me again, and he didn’t.

  It may be that I was a bit paranoid, given my secret mission, but paranoia was nothing foreign to B-block. Even the seemingly steady Larson suffered from this prisoner’s disease. The fear that if you agitated too much you might disappear on a transfer to another prison or suddenly come down with AIDS was common among black nationalists, he told me. And I soon realized that he himself suspected that the system could probably just do away with you if it wanted to.

  “What about relatives reporting you missing?” I asked.

  “You ever hear about the new gym at Clinton?” he responded. I said I hadn’t. “When they were digging the foundation, they found the bodies of a lot of old inmates.”

  “You mean, like an old prisoners’ graveyard? I think Sing Sing used to have one of those, long ago, up by Wallpost fifteen.”

  “No, not skeletons—bodies,” he said.

  I let that sit for a moment. “Hmm. For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen or heard anything that makes me think that could happen.”

  Larson nodded knowingly, as if now convinced of my naïveté. He told me I must not have met the backwoods clans of guards who run Attica, Clinton, or Comstock—“people who could do anything and hide anything.”

  But conspiracies weren’t his main interest—redemption was. Race and color were his great obsession. He wanted to learn the true meaning of blackness and thereby conquer the stigma; anthropology intrigued him as the study of where humankind began. But his mind was also full of pseudoscience.

  Black, he said, was the color of carbon, the element that was present in all life. Therefore, we were all inherently black. Black, also, was the color of fairness; why else were the robes of judges black? He told me about an article he had read, by a white researcher who couldn’t deny the truth, about the amazing properties of melanin, the source of pigment in the skin. Japanese bullet trains actually ran on it, he’d read. Early hominids with an abundance of melanin in their skin could absorb energy from the glare of the sun or the sound of the wind and convert it into calories if they ran short of food. And they lived longer because of it—up to 150 or 200 years, in bygone days. Again I told him I doubted it, but I felt somehow honored to hear the off-kilter theories of this isolated autodidact, because I knew he wouldn’t tell just anyone, especially not COs.

  “Do you think I’m inferior?” he asked.

  “What do you mean? Because you’re black? Of course not.”

  “But don’t you think other COs do?”

  That one I didn’t want to answer, so I tried to make a joke. “Maybe a few of them, but not the black ones.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Larson replied. He thought that even successful black men were insecure. “Look how they go and marry white women, want to hang out with white people. They’re trying to prove something to themselves.”

  “Not you, though,” I said.

  Larson pointed through his bars, across the gallery walkway, through the chain-link fence, and down to a cluster of white OJTs chatting on the flats. “Nope. Not to one of those peasants.”

  Though deprivation had warped Larson’s vision in a couple of areas, it seemed crystal-clear in another: new prison construction. He passed me a couple of dog-eared photocopies from radical journals that decried the huge social resources being devoted to imprisonment—$35 billion a year in the United States and growing, despite the drop in violent crime. By the time I was writing this book, a cover story in The Atlantic Monthly had made the same points in greater detail. Though the rate of violent crime in the country is down 20 percent since 1991, the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. California, with the Western world’s biggest prison system (40 percent larger than the federal Bureau of Prisons), predicts that at the current rate of expansion, “It will run out of room eighteen months from now [December 1998]. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.”

  Is it possible that violent crime has decreased because so many people are being locked up? Apparently not. Studies have shown that most of the new inmates swelling the system are nonviolent drug offenders subject to mandatory sentencing laws. Though nobody knows for sure, experts think that the real reasons behind the decrease in violent crime are, most likely, the expanding economy, which offers potential criminals more chances for a job, and demographic trends—the number of young men in the United States has been declining since 1980, due to the tapering off of the baby boom.

  Even so, prison construction in the United States seems to have developed an unstoppable momentum. One element of the growth is the rise of for-profit prisons. We don’t have them yet in New York—the unions have kept them out—but many states have been tempted by the prison companies’ promises of cost savings. Larson asked whether I didn’t think it was wrong when companies had something to gain by seeing people sentenced to prison—in other words, when they had a stake in their failure. Cast in that light, it did seem wrong, I answered.

  You could feel the rush of prison growth even in the forgotten backwater of Sing Sing, where the superintendent had said that getting money to build new and bigger vocational shops was his number-one priority.

  “I’d die to stop that,” Larson said, to my surprise.

  “You don’t want to see this place improve?”

  “No. The money should all be put back into the poor neighborhoods, back into education for children, to change the things that send people here.” He held out the articles he had loaned me. “You read these, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Then tell me, Conover, if I understand correctly. It says here in this article that the government is planning right now for the new prisons they’re going to need in ten or twelve years. I got that right?”

  Again I nodded.

  “That’s wrong.”

  “What’s wrong about planning ahead?”

  “Because, dig this. Anyone planning a prison they’re not going to build for ten or fifteen years is planning for a child, planning prison for somebody who’s a child right now. So you see? They’ve already given up on that child! They already expect that child to fail. You heard? Now why, if you could keep that from happening, if you could send that child to a good school and help his family stay together—if you could do that, why are you spending that money to put him in jail?”

  I had no answer for Larson. He had made me feel dumb in my uniform, like a bozo carrying out someone else’s ill-conceived plan. But he didn’t act as if I were to blame.

  “Hey,”
he said by way of good-bye. “Next time you’re back, bring me a couple of theories to talk about.”

  Around 10:30 that morning, inmates began returning to the block in escorted groups from their morning programs—mostly chapel, yard, and gym on a Sunday, but also school, library, commissary, package room, and hospital on weekdays. After glimpsing them on the flats, I pulled open the brakes to release the cell doors and then waited till they made their way up the end stairs to the gallery. They were supposed to go directly to their cells and lock in for the 11 A.M. count, but many stopped to talk with friends, to trade magazines (including pornography, known universally as “short eyes”), or to distribute items they’d bought at the commissary. Many also stopped to talk to me, as it was one of the few times during the shift when they had unfettered access.

  A consequence of putting men in cells and controlling their movements is that they can do almost nothing for themselves. For their various needs they are dependent on one person, their gallery officer. Instead of feeling like a big, tough guard, the gallery officer at the end of the day often feels like a waiter serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large brood of sullen, dangerous, and demanding children. When grown men are infantilized, most don’t take to it nicely.

  That morning, I decided to count the number of times I said no before lunch.

  “CO, you give me a shower? I ain’t goin’ to lunch. I got a visit coming, today or tomorrow.” The request was from Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican with striking green eyes who could have been a fashion model if he hadn’t gone into robbery and murder.

  “Well, which is it, today or tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know, Papi. Just let me have a shower this once.”

  “As I recall, you didn’t lock in around this time yesterday when I asked you to lock in, isn’t that right?”

  “Yesterday? Oh, man, that’s ancient history. I won’t cause you no more trouble, Conover, you do this for me.”