Newjack (12 page)

Instead of laughing, shaking his head, and denying all this, Wilkin, to my surprise, was circumspect. “No officers, to my knowledge, are selling drugs,” he said. “When they have been in the past and we have learned of that, we have arrested them.

“And inmates don’t run this place—officers do. You will see that with your own eyes on Wednesday.

“And as far as following the rules … we are not an upstate prison. We try to follow them to the letter, and we will expect you to. The new administration is committed to tightening security at this prison. But we are a training facility, and not everything is exactly the way we’d like it to be.”

“Training facility” was not an official designation, the superintendent would later explain; it was just the way things had worked out. New recruits came here to answer the chronic shortage of officers, and they had to be trained. Five thousand had started out at Sing Sing since 1988, sixteen hundred of them in 1996 alone. The department had an unprecedented need for new officers right now, apparently due to higher-than-usual rates of retirement and attrition.

A training officer named Hill told us that our job would be unusually difficult, because “OJTs irritate inmates.” Inmates appreciate a constant set of keepers, he explained; they don’t like having the rules enforced differently every day. Not that it was necessarily a snap being an old-timer, either; one longtime employee had had his nose broken during a scuffle in the yard just the previous weekend. Sing Sing had between 700 and 750 “security employees” at a given time; 34 percent of these officers had less than a year on the job.

We broke for lunch, and afterward, we were each issued a baton. Down the row from me, someone noticed that his had dried blood on it. Next, we lined up to have our pictures taken. First, we faced the camera while holding up a little piece of paper displaying our name and Social Security number and the date, and then we turned for a profile shot—just as if we were inmates being processed at a jail. These were “hostage photos,” one trainer told me, for our permanent files, to be released to the press if something happened to us—such as being taken hostage. I laughed, thinking the man had a dark sense of humor. But he was unsmiling and, I
slowly realized, serious. As unsettling to me as the photos’ purpose was the fact that they weren’t called something else—say, employee contingency portraits, or some other euphemism. Calling them hostage photos was like saying we were “guards” in a “prison.”

In the afternoon, we learned more about the inmates. Sing Sing is the second-oldest (after Auburn) and second-largest (after Clinton) prison in the state, and at this time it had 1,813 inmates in the maximum-security prison and 556 in Tappan, the medium-security portion. Of the total—2,369—1,726 were violent felons; 672 had been convicted of murder or manslaughter. In other words, between a quarter and a third of the inmates had killed somebody. Other violent felons had committed rape (93) or sodomy (38) or a variety of crimes including robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, and arson. Eighty percent were from the New York City area. Forty-three percent were ages 25 to 34. African Americans made up 56 percent of the inmate population, Hispanics comprised another 32 percent, and whites around 10 percent.

Sing Sing is unusual for a large max in that it has few vocational or other programs for inmates. Inmates are still required to work for their GEDs, but almost all college-level programs ceased in 1994 and 1995, when state and federal lawmakers ended the funding. “Now there isn’t much to take away,” the programs director admitted candidly during his brief presentation after lunch. “We’re pretty much down to the bare minimum. We have trouble finding things for all the inmates to do—there are only programs for three or four hundred men.” The gap was filled with recreation: unstructured time in the yard or gym. Up to sixteen hundred men might be in recreation at a given time.

The superintendent had less than a year on the job, too. Charles Greiner, who was fit, white-haired, and soft-spoken, stood before the lectern and told us he had come up through the system, starting upstate as a CO. We’d been told he was more security-minded than his predecessor (who, old-time officers complained, was overly concerned with housekeeping and appearances) and interested in tightening up the prison. He told us that he had reinstituted assigned seating in the mess halls, so that inmates couldn’t sit wherever they wanted. He had tried to make sure inmates were more securely escorted from cell to mess hall and back. Other reforms were in the offing but would be instituted very slowly, “so as to only create a tiny ripple back.” Situated, as we were, on the
bank of a huge river, the metaphor suggested the prison was a big body of water and we were all in it together. Create too big a wave, and we would swamp ourselves.

The atmosphere inside the prison was apparently stressful at present. Five inmates had committed suicide within the past five months. An inmate-grievance system had been instituted after the Attica riot; Sing Sing inmates typically filed about twenty-five grievances a week against the administration, but recently that number had gone as high as seventy-five. Two months ago, the entire facility had been locked down in Code Green emergency status, meaning that an area (B-block) had gone out of control. Still, said the first deputy superintendent for security, Sing Sing was “no more out of control than anywhere else.” Yes, he conceded, there had been “lots of cutting lately.” But, he added, “That’s true everywhere.”

On Tuesday, our second day, we learned more about emergencies. Many of us, depending on our post, would be furnished with radios equipped with special “emergency pins.” In case of attack by an inmate—or any violent situation we could not control—we were to pull the pin out of the top of our radio by tugging on the lanyard. This sent a signal to the arsenal, where an operator would identify the radio’s location and broadcast a special message to all the other radios. The “red dots,” specially designated officers on standby for an emergency, would then run there to offer aid. Other free officers in the area would join them. The response was immediate, we were told, and usually impressive.

If things got so wild that the local red dots couldn’t handle it, red dots from down the hill at Tappan (or up the hill at Sing Sing, if it was Tappan that had the emergency) would be summoned. If they couldn’t control things either, the Code Green would be called and supervisors were to send all available officers to the trouble spot. A milder state of emergency, Code Blue, called for ceasing all inmate movement and locking down the whole jail. A Code Blue would be called if, for example, the count came up an inmate short and finding him was the top priority. No officers would be allowed to leave the building; wall-tower officers were to step out onto their catwalks with rifles in hand. Everything would be frozen until it was certain that no one had escaped.

Later that day, we were shown a movie produced by the Department, called
Games Inmates Play
. The film, starring state COs, was a primer on how not to let inmates manipulate you for
their own ends and make a fool or a criminal out of you. It dramatized three situations that, we were told, had actually occurred in the past two years. In one, an inmate “porter” (trusty, in more common parlance) sweeping the floor around the officer’s desk became privy to his football pool and collected evidence from his wastebasket; when the CO wouldn’t help the porter set up his own pool, the porter threatened to turn him in to his supervisors; the CO did the right thing and fessed up to his sergeant and lieutenant. A second CO didn’t come clean soon enough, though. After working near one congenial-seeming inmate for a long time, he’d become so comfortable talking to him that he’d confided to the inmate about some problems at home and a shortness of cash. The inmate offered to help him out by paying him a hundred dollars just to bring in a package from his brother. After hemming and hawing for a while (inmates are forbidden to possess cash, which is almost always connected to drug traffic), the officer finally agreed. The final scene of the vignette showed him pulling into his driveway that night and being arrested in front of his disbelieving wife and kids.

Finally, there was the tale of the civilian teacher who allowed an eager inmate to help her grade papers and confided in him when her boyfriend dumped her. He asked if he could take her out when he was paroled in six months. Yes, she indicated, but then he told her he couldn’t wait; they were caught by an officer having sex in a storeroom, and she was fired.

The moral was: Don’t confide in an inmate about your personal life. And don’t be tempted by bribery or other offers. The moment an inmate gets anything on you, he’ll have power over you and is certain, eventually, to sell you out.

After all these warnings, a training officer finished our second day with one more. “By the way,” he said, “we’ve had a problem lately with brown recluse spiders in the facility.” Three COs had been bitten by the venomous spiders, he said; one officer got so sick that he required chemotherapy. “So just make sure to shake out your jackets if they’ve been hanging up, or look around a desk before you sit down.”

Spiders—on top of everything else.

It had been driving me crazy to be right next to Sing Sing but unable to go inside. On Wednesday that changed.

As our tour group walked the perimeter fence to the main gate, I noticed that we looked slightly different. No longer was everyone so obsessively concerned with his uniform. Sing Sing, it was clear from watching the training officers, did not care much about the polish on your shoes or the crease in your shirt or the length of your hair. Instead of everyone wearing the long-sleeved gray shirts prescribed by the Academy, some had slipped into the short-sleeved version, despite the still-cool spring weather. Other officers now spurned their black oxfords for more casual boots, especially the lightweight Bates and Hi-Tec brands, which were popular among police. And our belts, newly laden with batons, had begun to spring key clips and latex-glove holders, though no one had told us to put them on yet. A new groove had been set, and officers were sliding into it.

We passed through the front gate and several more as we made our way up the hill. Our group felt very white to me compared to the on-duty officers we passed—and particularly compared to the inmates we saw. But the real revelation came in one tight corridor when our group passed an inmate group of nearly equivalent size. As we tried to squeeze into half the hallway, arms and shoulders didn’t just brush, they rubbed. This wasn’t like the small group of subservient workers we’d known at the Academy or the double-file inmates from the roomier halls of Coxsackie. This was something with mass and energy, something … unnerving. I was thinking how easy it would be for someone with a knife to do some damage to us—and get away with it. Ahead of me, one of the Antonelli brothers suddenly turned around and gestured to us, trying to subtly point out one of the inmates—a transsexual, complete with breasts: nothing you wouldn’t see on any given day in Greenwich Village or on the city subways, but decidedly exotic if you were from rural New York. Bella and Chavez seemed more at home with the mix. As we turned the corner, Bella commented, with some satisfaction, “It’s just like the city!”

Ahead of us, a Plexiglas sign hanging from the ceiling announced
HOUSING UNIT A
. Underneath, there was a barred gate with a solid-metal door behind it. Our guide pushed a doorbell and we heard ringing on the other side. Finally, an officer inside pulled open the door to admit us to A-block and our first glimpse of the great cavern, so drab and yet so stunning. We stood slack-jawed, trying to make sense of the railings, the fences, the bars, and the spaces, both tiny and immense. Our training officer commented
on the fame of the building, how corrections officials from around the world came to visit it. It was hard to hear him, due to the din. Heavy gates were being slammed; shouts echoed. We moved closer. When he stopped talking, we followed him up the center stairs and walked a long gallery or two, attracting a couple of epithets—someone called out, “Clarence Thomas!” to Dimmie (meaning Uncle Tom), and we heard a few cries of “Newjack!” But it was nothing like our experience at Coxsackie: Even these hardened inmates, who so outnumbered us, were intimidated by a large detachment of officers.

A-block had a big gym but no adjacent yard. In another quirk of Sing Sing, the yard was way down the hill and across the tracks, next to Tappan. Before heading that way, we visited 7-Building, the “honor block,” with space for eighty-six inmates who had gone several years without being cited for disciplinary infractions. And then we went to 7-Building’s opposite, the Special Housing Unit, a two-story structure that housed sixty inmates; it was larger and grimmer than the one at Coxsackie. While 7-Building’s yard contained a running path, benches, vegetable gardens, and a great view of the Hudson River, the SHU had a bare blacktop courtyard divided in two by a chain-link fence. Down a dogleg corridor from the SHU was the State Shop, where inmates on their way in or out of the prison were processed and given clothes and bedding. On the first floor of the State Shop building were a fourteen-chair barbershop and a shower room (rows of individual stalls without curtains, and lookout points for supervising officers).