Newjack

by Ted Conover

“Not today. Try me another time.”

  His friend, standing at the periphery, had been listening and now asked me the same thing. “How about it, Conover. One for me, too?”

  “No!” I said impatiently, turning away.

  The next fifteen were:

  —CO, would you call to check the money in my commissary account?

  —CO, can you find out when my disciplinary hearing is?

  —CO, can you call to see why my laundry bag didn’t come back?

  —CO, can you take this over to W-46 for me? (The inmate held out a paperback book by Danielle Steel.)

  —CO, do all you guys get your hair cut in the same place? (a joke)

  —CO, do you have an extra roll of toilet paper?

  —CO, you got any more state soap?

  —CO, can I go on the W side and borrow a belt from my homey? I got a visit.

  —CO, will you call to see if they got a new package list?

  —CO, can I have some soap balls to mop out my cell? (These were cellophane-wrapped packets of powdered soap that dissolved in water.)

  —CO, can I use the slop sink?

  —CO, you got any Tylenol? (Sometimes there was a box of it in the office.)

  —CO, will you let me out when they call for the movie?

  —CO, did you find my clothes in the shower?

  —CO, can you find out where R-7 moved to?

  Not all of these were improper requests; but the others were mainly favors, to be done when I had spare time, which was seldom. You had to get good at saying no, and learn a couple of rules about it. One was to never say, “Sorry, but …” That was pure self-defense. It kept the aggrieved inmate from responding, “You ain’t sorry, CO—don’t give me that bullshit,” or, “Yeah, you are sorry—you a sorry-ass excuse for an officer, you know that, CO?” Another was not to get angry, even if it was the one thousandth annoying request, because sometimes they were just baiting you, hoping to make you mad. There were, of course, times it was important to say yes.

  —CO, can you give me a State Shop form?

  —CO, can you sign this form for a new I.D.?

  —CO, you got a light?

  —CO, I need a plumber, man—my toilet won’t stop running and it’s gonna overflow.

  Inmates were always messing with their toilets, and early on I tried to find out what they might have done to cause the problem. Some inmates, for example, would try to flush something huge, like a bedsheet, in hopes it might foul up the entire block’s plumbing or allow them to flood the gallery. But I seldom asked anymore; there wasn’t time.

  “What cell?”

  “W-forty-two.”

  “I’ll try to get a plumber this afternoon.”

  “Thanks, CO.”

  A keeplock was waving his mirror at me from inside his cell, so I stepped down the gallery to talk to him.

  “Officer Conover, did you check that out, what I told you?”

  This inmate had transferred a couple of weeks before to R-gallery from the Box, but they had not yet returned his personal property. All he wanted was his watch back. The shaved-headed man, of Indian or Pakistani descent, had been unfailingly courteous to me, which was the only reason I was trying to help him with this problem. Box time probably meant he’d assaulted an officer, and the Box was so full that he might technically still be serving Box time even though he was now on a gallery and therefore might still not be entitled to have his personal property back. Trying to get his watch could have turned into a wild-goose chase, in which I’d spend a long time on the phone with obscure clerks, only to learn that the inmate couldn’t have his watch yet, anyway. Finally, in the event, after two phone conversations, I learned that he was supposed to have his watch by now; somebody had fucked up.

  “You have to write down in a letter your name and number and the date you were supposed to get the watch, and then I’ll sign it and have a sergeant sign it and maybe before 2000 you’ll see your watch,” I said, smiling.

  “Thank you, CO!” he said, beaming, and I felt I had made a friend, which was a good thing. (Two weeks later, when this inmate’s arm—with the watch on it—waved me over again, this hope was confirmed. “CO,” he whispered. “Have this one take the drug test.” He handed me a scrap of paper with a cell number written on it. The inmate being ratted out was difficult and disrespectful, so I didn’t mind passing the tip along to a sergeant. Still, I was puzzled. “I won’t tell who gave it to me,” I whispered back. “But aren’t you worried he’ll come after you?” I wondered how he could trust me enough. He shook his head in a way that said, “Don’t worry about it.” He had clout or connections, I supposed; he felt his armor was in place.)

  On my way back to the office, I saw escort officers arriving on the gallery to do the count and go-rounds, and glanced at my own watch. “Five minutes till the count, gentlemen,” I called loudly. “Please step into your cells.”

  The cell adjacent to my office was one of two on the gallery that were double-bunked. Overcrowding in the Department had led to the start of double-bunking in maxes a few months before. The newest arrivals went in there, usually guys straight from Rikers, and the typical wait for a single cell to open up was around eight weeks. But they all complained loudly: “Can’t you do something for me, CO? This guy snores like a motherfucker.” I could sympathize—there was barely room for two men to stand in there, with the extra locker—but there was nothing I could do. Unless … Two weeks earlier, I had discovered that Department policy let guys who were 300 pounds or over get out of their double-bunked cells, for obvious reasons, and I had been able to alleviate the misery of a 350-pounder and his squeezed-in roommate. And today’s complaint looked promising.

  “I got the top bunk, CO”—the newest guys always did—“but I still got a bullet in my knee and I can’t really get up there.” The forlorn-looking young man showed me the bullet hole near the patella; there was no exit scar.

  “How about you guys just swap?”

  His roommate shook his head. “No way, CO. I waited a month to get down here on the bottom bunk.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Two or three minutes till the count. Suddenly, an angry-looking Puerto Rican murderer named Olivero appeared, glaring at me. “Well?”

  “Okay, be right there.”

  Olivero made belts and wallets in his cell and had permission to use a special class of leather-working tools, so he wanted to make sure his cell was deadlocked every instant he was away—a reasonable request that he demanded unreasonably. He would glare at me—a glare so overdone it was stagey but so intense it sometimes scared me—if I wasn’t right there to lock his cell behind him when his run was called. He would often shout, “Get over here! Do your job!” He pronounced it “yob.”

  “Patience!” I would say to him. “My yob involves locking more cells than just yours.” I had trouble believing that anybody could be as angry as he appeared to be with me all the time, and so, hoping for the flicker of a smile, I would say, “Yes, sir!” ironically, or beg, “¡Discúlpeme, maestro!” as I came over to let him in or lock him out. He would swear at me in Spanish, occasionally smiling, but more often thinking, I imagined to myself, how much he’d like to rip my head from my body or slowly disembowel me with his tiny leather-work tools.

  Lunch that day began like any other: a ten- or fifteen-minute window starting at count time when I had no immediate demands to satisfy other than those of my stomach and could wolf down the sandwich and chips I’d brought. But just as I lifted my sandwich and opened my mouth, an announcement came over the PA: “Gallery officers, secure your galleries and report to the flats. All gallery officers.” My annoyance yielded to excitement as I realized what was happening: This was Mama Cradle’s last day. There was about to be a send-off for her downstairs.

  In my admiration for Cradle, I hadn’t paid attention for a while to what people were saying about Mama. I had heard the burnout rumors as just the kind of complaints that always swirl around strong per
sonalities. Then Sergeant Murray had canvassed the more senior B-block officers about Cradle. There seemed to be a lot of discontent. She was too often overwrought, and increasingly prone to abusiveness. I began to reassess her a bit. She was a great figure, but things did seem to run better when she was away.

  Finally, the rumors were confirmed: Cradle was leaving. She planned to transfer, probably to the Downstate Correctional Facility, about forty-five minutes north, as soon as a good post opened up for her. With all her seniority, people said, she ought to be able to bid something good—meaning easy.

  I hadn’t, until that morning, heard anything for weeks. And now suddenly it was upon us: Cradle’s last day. I stepped onto the flats just as they were taking out a big chocolate cake, upon which was written WE’LL MISS YOU, L.B.—B-BLOCK. Anywhere but prison, there would have been somebody snapping photos—Sing Sing forbade it. Cradle was beaming and a little bit choked up. There were cans of soda and a lot of paper plates and forks and presents. Somebody gave her a bottle of massage oil called Boob Lube.

  “It’s only enough for one!” quipped Cradle’s likely replacement as OIC, a tall bodybuilder named Chilmark.

  “Should have got the forty-ounce size,” Ebron chimed in.

  There was raucous laughter. Another officer pretended to give her a good spanking. It was all very raunchy and fun, not sentimental. Somebody dropped an entire piece of cake on the floor and, it being Sing Sing, didn’t bother to pick it up. It was left for Cradle to plant her boot heedlessly in the middle of the dropped cake.

  Our party was delaying the inmates’ lunch, but strangely there were no complaints: The departure of Cradle, which they now must have apprehended, was an occasion of moment. As things quieted down, the veteran OIC hugged everyone—it was only the week before, I found myself thinking, that Cradle had put her arm around my shoulders and assured me that I’d make a good officer someday. On the periphery, senior officers speculated that she might be back, and I could see what they meant. Cradle enjoyed such authority in B-block, it was hard to imagine the place without her.

  “Remember that time she chased Sergeant Murphy out of her office?” I asked D’Amico, and we laughed. Whatever idea Murphy had been putting forth had not met Cradle’s test of reasonableness, and that was the end of it. Many sergeants and officers, and certainly most inmates, were glad she was going. The strong personality that was so useful in running a block could easily cross over the line into abusiveness—look at Rufino in A-block. But Cradle’s chewing outs always seemed to me to be born more of exasperation than meanness.

  She didn’t come back. We heard she got a job at Downstate sitting in a little booth and flicking a switch that opened and closed a gate—in other words, that she’d gone from one of the most frontline, demanding, and interactive posts to one of the most brain-dead. It was the CO version of early retirement, and I hope it was what she needed.

  The cake was my lunch that day. Returning upstairs, I released my feed-up workers—inmates who delivered meals to the keeplocks—and then, finishing a log entry, was interrupted by an officer I didn’t know, who handed me a copy of the go-round sheet. “W-twenty-nine needs to go to the emergency room,” she said.

  “Is that right? What for?”

  “Something about his ear.”

  “Oh. The ear guy.”

  I had forgotten the cell number, but I knew W-29. A couple of weeks before, as an escort officer, I had taken the kid to the ER for the exact same complaint. On the way, we had chatted. Often, the younger guys, the more recent arrivals, were more talkative. He wasn’t from the city, like most other young inmates, but from near Poughkeepsie, where he had held up a supermarket (“stuck a Grand Union”) with a couple of friends a year or so before. His dad was a CO, he told me, his uncle a policeman, his sister a scientist. “I’m the only one who’s no good.” I was thinking: the projects, special ed/learning disability, juvenile offenses. There was something kind of open and appealing and needy about the kid. He told me he was twenty-one, but I would have put money on him being younger. “I think there’s a cockroach stuck in my ear,” he had told me. I’d peered in there as we waited for a gate to open, expecting to spot a couple of wiggling antennae, but couldn’t see anything.

  I’d stayed in the room while the nurse examined him, as we were required to do. There was no cockroach, she announced, just a lot of wax. She gave him something to pour in there to loosen it.

  “Was this an emergency?” I’d asked her as we left, and she gave me a look like, Are you nuts? Normal procedure was to put in for sick call the night before, but we had to respond if inmates claimed there was an emergency—a rule, it only later dawned on me, that was open to interpretation. That day, as I was eating my lunch, I just thought, okay. I called downstairs and got him an escort, thinking all the time to myself that this is a kid who never got any attention—no, this is a man who is really a kid who never got any attention, and now he’s stuck with COs and inmates and we can’t give him enough attention so he wants some from the nurses.

  On my way out of the prison at shift’s end, I had to wait at a gate. Through the bars, I saw an escorted group of B-block inmates coming back from the hospital, among them the young man I had sent again that afternoon.

  “Hey, CO!” he said to my surprise. He sounded almost desperate. He put his face up to the bars.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But where you goin’?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “You’re going home?” He looked like a kid who had learned that his father was leaving when he saw him headed out the door; nobody had warned him in advance.

  “Yup, home,” I said, giving a little wave as the gate opened and thinking, God, you poor knucklehead, why didn’t anybody take care of you? Where were your parents?

  CHAPTER 7

  MY HEART INSIDE OUT

  Ninety-five percent of the guards I’ve met are doing their job simply because they need the money.

  —Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms, 1997

  If the inmates are failures, at least they were reaching—most in very small ways, but some reach is certainly preferable to no reach at all. The cop, as I’ve stated before, is a guy who can do no other type of work, who can feed himself only by feeding upon this garbage dump.

  —George Jackson, Soledad Brother, 1970

  The publicity has shifted to the trial, and to the sentence; the execution itself is like an additional shame that justice is ashamed to impose on the condemned man; so it keeps its distance from the act, tending always to entrust it to others, under the seal of secrecy… . Those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector [which] relieves the magistrates of the demeaning task of punishing. In modern justice and on the part of those who dispense it there is a shame in punishing, which does not always preclude zeal. This sense of shame is growing: the psychologists and the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics proliferate on the wound it leaves.

  —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1978

  If prison were constructed to make any living thing happy it might have been cats.

  —John Cheever, Falconer, 1977

  “Leave it at the gate,” you hear time and again in corrections. Leave all the stress and bullshit at work; don’t bring it home to your family. This was good in theory. In reality, though, I was like my friend who had worked the pumps at a service station: Even after she got home and took a shower, you could still smell the gasoline on her hands. Prison got into your skin, or under it. If you stayed long enough, some of it probably seeped into your soul.

  I had thought that being only a visitor to the world of corrections, I would be immune to this syndrome. My whole project, after all, was to keep one foot in and the other out, to be self-consciously aware that what I was doing was an experience, not my life. It’s called participant observation, this research method of anthropology. Every afternoon upon arriving home, I sneaked in the back door so that my two young kids wo
uldn’t hear me and planted myself in front of the computer for an hour or so, taking notes and settling into my real skin. I breathed in the smell of the books on my shelves and counted the days until I had a weekend off, counted the weeks until I could take a vacation, counted the months until the year was over.

  Between the time I emerged from my study and let the babysitter go and the time my wife came home, I had about two hours. Two hours, it sometimes seemed, to get healthy, because the kids were pure and I was dirty. My daughter, one, and son, now three, would be thrilled to see me, and I treasured this time together. But it could also be the worst time of the day, because in a way, I’d been dealing with difficult children all day long.

  That August evening on the day Cradle left, we played in the yard and, when it got dark, went inside and played with Lego blocks. One of the accessories we had inherited from a neighbor was a little jail. It came with a policeman (badge, cap with visor, uniform) and a bad guy (five o’clock shadow, eye mask, thug’s cap).

  My son asked me about it. “Who goes in jail?”

  “That burglar,” I said, pointing him out.

  “Then what does the policeman do?”

  “He puts him in jail.”

  My son looked puzzled. “Then he’s the bad guy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s the bad guy because he puts the other one in jail.”

  “No, no,” I began, trying to explain. “The burglar has to go to jail because he did something bad first. The policeman puts him there to keep us safe.”

  “Then the burglar’s bad, and the policeman’s bad.”

  “No,” I said, “only the burglar’s bad.”

  But my son didn’t quite get it. And by that time he wasn’t the only one.

  As usual, playing with Lego lasted only so long. My son wanted to wrestle. His sister was tired. I gave them a bath. Then she was ready for bed, but my son still wanted to wrestle. “Why don’t we read a book instead?” I suggested.