by Ted Conover
When I thought back on the altercation, though, what stuck with me wasn’t the cover-your-ass part so much as the inmate calling down to Plummer and asking how he’d feel if it were his little brother. “My little brother wouldn’t have called him a house nigger,” I imagined Plummer saying to himself. But it went to the heart of the complicated situation for minority officers. They were working for the Man in an unequal, sometimes unjust society—I doubt that many would quibble with that description. It didn’t mean their position was untenable; it just meant they had to put up with a lot of shit that white officers did not.
House nigger was the leading epithet. As one inmate on R-gallery had explained it to me, “In the old South, you had your house Negroes and your field Negroes. The house Negroes were the maids and the cooks and the butlers and such. And the field Negroes were the brothers and sisters out there with dirty hands. And even though slavery’s gone, technically, you still got your house Negroes and your field Negroes. And the difference between them is that the house Negro’s gonna be sad when the house burns down. And the field Negro ain’t.”
It wasn’t just the black officers who were compromised. In June, an escort officer up on T-and-Y had marched with a law enforcement contingent in New York City’s annual Puerto Rico Day parade. I was listening the next day when other officers asked him how it went. He shrugged. “Lot of people watching give you shit, man. They don’t cheer. I’m not going to do it next year.” It took no more explanation than that; his listeners all understood. “But I’m, like, Hey, at least I’ve got a job,” he added.
Outside the mess hall another day that fall, I spoke with Brown, a young black woman officer from the Bronx whom I respected, about the same general conflict. When inmates gave her trouble about her job, she said, she told them, “Do you know right from wrong? Then what’s the problem? Why you talking about the system, the man? There’s you and there’s me.”
But surely minority officers’ allegiance to the system was constantly tested in ways that white officers’ was not. Alcantara, for example, told of one day double-parking his van in Harlem so that he could drop off something at a relative’s apartment. With his wife waiting in the passenger seat, he had jumped out of the van and begun to jog down the sidewalk to the building’s front door. His wife watched in horror as two undercover cops appeared, trained their pistols on him, and told him to freeze. Alcantara said he did exactly as told, lying on the sidewalk, and then asked the officers to remove his wallet so they could see his badge. The crisis was over in a moment, but these kinds of things happened all the time. Smitty, who drove a Lexus with tinted windows, said he was pulled over in lower Westchester every month or two. As a young black man in a nice car, he took it for granted that he fit a police profile.
“I don’t even take my hands off the steering wheel till I can talk to them,” he said. “I look straight ahead and say, ‘Officer, I am a New York State peace officer, and you’ll find my identification next to me on the seat.’ I wait for them to tell me to move my hands, and then I do it very slowly.”
I, meanwhile, hadn’t been pulled over for years. I was even kind of looking forward to it so that I could beat a ticket by showing my badge. But it didn’t happen.
Then there was the complicated matter of minority officers recognizing new inmates. More than once, I’d heard a colleague tell a sergeant that a new inmate was somebody he had known in high school or in the old neighborhood and the sergeant then asking if that was going to be a problem. (“No, I just wanted you to know” was the typical answer.) In some cases, maybe this led to officer and inmate being too close. But just as often—or even more often, it seemed to me—it led to them keeping a greater than normal distance.
My most impressive lesson on the lives of minority officers came on the mess-hall bridge with Smitty and Brown. In between pat-frisking inmates as they entered or exited the mess hall, there was time to just stand around and gab. The subject turned to the Internet. I asked whether either of them had heard about the website that listed all New York State prison inmates, along with their crimes, their dates of birth, the date of their first eligibility for parole, and so forth. All of it was information we weren’t supposed to have, and I thought they’d be intrigued by this new situation, particularly Smith, who had learned so much about the individuals he was in charge of during his days on V-gallery.
“But what about privacy?” he asked. He had learned whatever he knew by just asking the inmates.
“Well, think of it as a way to check what you’ve been told,” I said.
Smith shook his head. Brown, too, looked deeply skeptical. I didn’t see why, and she tried to explain. “Look, I’m from the Bronx,” she said. “There are six of us kids and I’m the youngest. My older brother was riding the subway one day. Guy across from him drops his gym bag by mistake, and there’s an automatic in there and it goes off. It hits my brother in the leg. The leg had to be amputated. Now, can you imagine what I would have done if I caught that guy?”
“I don’t know you well enough to know.”
“Well, I would have hurt him, or even maybe killed him if I could. I’m a person who respects the law, but … sometimes there’s things you can’t help, right?”
Smith agreed: There were things you just couldn’t help. Anyone could get caught up in the heat of the moment.
Their point was that anyone could end up inside. The black officers I knew, especially, seemed to feel this—that the line between straight life and prison life was a very thin one and that sometimes the decision about which side you were on was not yours to make.
Prisons reconvene old neighbors as well as people with even deeper connections. Shortly after I left Sing Sing, there was a story in The New York Times about a man named Baba Eng, who had been at Sing Sing for twenty-two years. He was “serving a life sentence for murder, when a new inmate walked into the shower room one day and stared at his face.
“‘Dad!’ the stranger finally exclaimed.
“The man was his son, whom Mr. Eng had not seen since his arrest, and who now was in prison himself for armed robbery. ‘It was the worst moment of my life,’ Mr. Eng recalled. ‘Here was my son; he had tried to imitate my life.’”
Prison life creates its own pathologies. Experts are increasingly worried about the effect of a parent’s imprisonment on children—both the increased likelihood that a child of a criminal will become a criminal himself and the idea that prison itself may become a twisted rite of passage for young men. But can rite of passage possibly be the correct term for a kind of suspended animation that leaves you older, weaker, less sexually attractive, and less connected to community than before you went in?
Stone told me that when he had worked at Green Haven, among the inmates had been a father, his grandfather, and his son. On W-gallery, we had an uncle and his nephew. On R-gallery, we had Twin, a murderer, whose twin brother was imprisoned upstate. My wife and I were mugged in the eighties in Brooklyn Heights; the criminal was a crack addict who was finally apprehended after robbing several other people. His three brothers, detectives told us, were already imprisoned upstate.
I knew no story stranger than that of Foster. The tall, troubled black woman from my training section, a single mother and former Rikers guard, had wept openly from the pain of Defensive Tactics, had made us late and gotten us in trouble with her chronic tardiness, and had, according to rumor, been chastised at Sing Sing for falling asleep on the job and, of all things, for speaking in tongues during chapel services for inmates. She had transferred up to Bedford Hills, the maximum-security prison for women in Westchester County. There, according to my classmate Buckner, who preceded her to the women’s prison, an older woman inmate was in the habit of bragging to officers about her daughter, the correction officer. He and other transfers from my class recognized from snapshots the daughter of whom the older woman was so proud: Foster.
To have a mother in prison and become a guard there yourself—that was the strangest bond I he
ard all year.
Early in my V-gallery days, one of my double-bunked new-arrival inmates got keeplocked. This was a big bother for me and his cellmate, because it meant I had to keep the bolt on the cell deadlocked all the time. His roommate had to get my attention every time he wanted in or out.
“How’d you manage to get keeplocked so soon?” I asked him. “Most guys, it takes at least a few weeks.”
The inmate smiled somewhat sheepishly. Unlike many keeplocks, he had no problem with authority—or no problem with me, at any rate.
“Just a hassle with another inmate, CO,” he said. “Something I had to do.”
He was unremarkable enough to me at that point that I never even bothered to check further about what he was keeplocked for. He remained a face in the crowd until one sweltering day in July when he was no longer keeplocked. B-block could get hot and sticky if there was no breeze outside, and on this day, many of the inmates who went to the yard after midday chow peeled off their shirts before heading outside. Delacruz, as I’d learned this inmate was called, was one of these. As he did, I noticed the large tattoo spread across his chest like a banner: ASSASSIN! it read. That was fairly interesting, but then I noticed his back, which was almost entirely covered by a long poem in Spanish, tattooed in a flowing script. That was fascinating, and in my surprise I said something like, “Whoa, what is that?”
Delacruz gave a little smile and said, “It’s a poem,” and continued on his way out to the yard.
When he returned I tried to find out more. He brushed off my question about what poem it was, but he did explain how he’d gotten it. A white guy at Rikers Island was the artist, he said. The “ink” was made by burning plastic—a pen or a toothbrush—under a metal surface, like the bottom of a bunk. You wiped off the thick soot, mixed it with toothpaste and soap, and there was your ink. Your pen was a pencil with two needles tied to the point with string. The string soaked up the ink. The artist’s many jabs left its residue under the surface of the skin.
Five days later, Delacruz finally told me about the poem. It was from a book in the Rikers library that “really meant a lot to me,” he said, though he didn’t like to talk about it.
“But who wrote it?” I asked.
“Oh, it was a Jewish girl during the Second World War. I translated it into Spanish.”
“You mean Anne Frank? The one who wrote a diary?”
He looked surprised. “Yeah, I think that’s it,” he said. “Anne Frank.”
On my next day off, I took Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl off my shelf and reread it. The parallel between a prison cell and the tiny space where Anne and her family had hidden from the Nazis in 1942 was immediately clear, as was the way that Anne, at thirteen, was imprisoned by her Jewish identity, by the very fact of who she was. There was no poem in my version of the diary, however, and I assumed it must have been included in a different edition.
The next time I saw Delacruz, I told him about my rereading the book. I even let him know that I had visited the Anne Frank house on a trip to Holland and had seen the rooms where she had hidden. Delacruz didn’t really react with the interest I had expected, and I worried I’d gone too far, maybe sounding like a braggart or claiming a personal interest in this story that was greater than his or seeming to pry. Or maybe the thought of a CO who had been to Europe and was into Anne Frank was just too fucking strange. So I laid off for a while.
Delacruz, in the meantime, graduated to his own cell, but it was way upstairs on U-and-Z, not on V. So we’d acknowledge each other in the mess hall or wherever else our paths would cross. Then, months later—December—I was back on V preparing to let my keeplocks out for their daily rec when I discovered that among them was none other than Delacruz. He’d been locked up two days before, he explained, and then moved downstairs.
“Hey, you want to read that book again?” I asked him.
“Yeah!” he answered enthusiastically. “I loved that book.”
Thus our acquaintance was reestablished. I brought the book in—smuggled it, technically—and peeked in on Delacruz as he savored it. He skipped rec and read it cover to cover. Then over the next few days he read it again, slowly. I saw him discussing it with the inmate next door (another robber, named Perez) and I worried he’d tell the man I’d brought it in—I didn’t want inmates to have anything on me, no matter how minor. That’s why I let Delacruz return the book, accepting it back with a measure of relief. He parted with it like an object of love.
“It’s the best book I ever read,” he said this time. “I cried all the way through.”
I asked him if he’d seen the poem in there. No, he said. But the book he’d read the first time hadn’t looked exactly like this one. Another edition, I again figured.
After that we talked often and easily. I liked Delacruz initially because of the poem, and then later because I didn’t think he bullshitted me or tried to get anything from me. He was keeplocked this time, he said, for extorting from another inmate in the commissary.
“Hmm, sounds bad,” I said.
Delacruz didn’t pretend to be ashamed. “What can I tell you, Conover? It’s what you do to survive.”
Delacruz was short, fit, handsome, and dark-complected, with brown eyes and thick eyebrows. He was in for robbery—his fourth prison term, he said, after three in Virginia (two for a period of months, and a third for four years). He had entered Virginia’s most famous prison, nicknamed the Wall, at age sixteen, he said, because the state believed he was eighteen: His mother had brought him into the United States from Puerto Rico using the birth certificate of his older brother, who had died at age two.
“That was the worst time, man, being sixteen, sitting in that bus, looking out the window at the Wall.”
Prison now, at age twenty-six, didn’t seem so scary, and time didn’t weigh on him as it once had, though he was serving a sentence of ten years. In fact, he told me, he was lucky that it was only ten years. The immigrant victims of two of the robberies he had been charged with most recently had refused to testify against him. (I knew that this kind of reluctance was one reason that immigrants were often muggers’ targets.) He said he didn’t even know the exact date he was keeplocked until but thought it was later that month. “And it’s a good thing it doesn’t bother me, Conover, because it isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”
About ten days before Christmas, it snowed overnight. Delacruz and his neighbor, Perez, were two of several keeplocks who reasonably opted against recreation in the yard the next day: Inmates had no waterproof footwear. When I peered into his cell later that morning, after my other inmates had all gone to their programs, I saw Delacruz dozing. Perez, who had started acting friendly toward me since my dealings with Delacruz, was staring straight ahead. I had a few moments of free time.
“So,” I said, leaning against the bars and letting a moment of silence pass. “What’s up?”
For a few moments, Perez didn’t answer. He may have been deciding whether to tell me. “Thinking about the robberies I’m going to do when I get out,” he finally said, with the candor of his neighbor. “A year you plan. You think I’m not going to pull it off?”
I raised an eyebrow. Delacruz, I noticed, had sat up on his bunk and was rubbing his eyes.
“I know it’s not a positive thing, but what else do I have to do here?” Thinking through the robberies in advance, he reasoned, ensured their smooth execution. His preferred targets were pharmacies and “numbers joints.” The planning involved considering every contingency: what to do if they reached for a gun (shoot them, of course, even though you wouldn’t want to), what to do if someone else entered the store, where to go afterward, and so on.
“You’re thinking about specific places when you do the planning?”
“Sure,” he said, as though it were obvious.
“They’re in poorer neighborhoods?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me something I’ve always wondered. Why don’t you ever rob p
eople in richer neighborhoods? They probably expect it less and are carrying more. You wouldn’t have to rob as many times then.”
Here, Delacruz joined the conversation, explaining that you might get more cash robbing a rich person on the street but that you’d have to be in their neighborhood, and judges would hit you harder for that: They would know the victim was white because of the name, the address, etc. It was much safer, obviously, to rob less prosperous people of color.
Still, spur-of-the-moment jobs could land you in trouble. Like the last one. Perez had robbed somebody his first day out from a previous bid, he told me, using a gun borrowed from a friend. He hadn’t gotten caught, but it had made him feel reckless.
“It’s like I’m addicted,” he admitted. “I’m not into drugs. I don’t like hanging out with other criminals,” he told me. “I always do the jobs alone.” His friends didn’t even know where he got the money. “They probably think it’s from selling drugs.” And money was the sole reason for them.
I didn’t want to argue with Perez, and entertained no illusions that it was within my power to change his ways. But I had to ask: “You know robbery, um, hurts people. Scares the shit out of them. Makes them poorer. I’ve been robbed, so I know. How do you justify that?”
“Conover, you know if you got a felony record you can’t even get a job at McDonald’s? Plus, you’d need a GED. You can’t get any job.”
I said I didn’t believe that you couldn’t get any job, that I knew people who had. Here, Delacruz jumped in again.
“Okay, maybe, but it’s going to pay shit and it’s going to take a couple months. And what are you going to wear while you’re waiting? In the ghetto you get no respect if you don’t look right, have a car, a Mercedes-Benz—those things. No woman will go out with you. Don’t get me wrong, Conover—I’m going straight this time. But it’s gonna cost me. That’s reality.”