Newjack (2 page)

My second month, I found one old lock that was so flimsy I could almost twist it off with my hands, but not quite. I brought in a small tire iron and it came off easily. Inside were plastic cups, magazine pictures of women in bikinis, and newspapers from 1983. I’ve since heard of a locker coming available in the Administration Building, but I’m not pursuing it. I’ve come to prefer it down here. The feel of neglect is somehow truer to the spirit of Sing Sing.

It’s barely fifteen minutes till lineup. I throw on my gray polyester uniform, making sure I’ve got all the things I need on my belt: radio holder, latex-glove packet, two key-ring clips, baton ring. I put pen and pad, inmate rulebook, and blue union diary in my breast pockets, slide my baton through the ring, lock the padlock, and slam the locker door. I walk past a pile of old office desks and, by necessity, into the men’s room. It smells like an outhouse. I sit
down, for the second time this morning. Every morning is like this, and it is for the other new guys, too: Your stomach lets you know, just before the shift starts, what it thinks of this job.

A decrepit footbridge takes me over the tracks of the Metro North railroad—Sing Sing may be the only prison anywhere with a commuter railroad running through it—and other officers start to appear. My climb continues, up a wooden staircase that’s been built atop a crumbling concrete one.

Here is the Administration Building parking lot, and the main entrance to the prison. Parked in the middle is the “roach coach,” purveyor of coffee and rolls. To the right is the entrance to the Visit Room, not yet open. To the left, officers are lined up, waiting to deposit their handguns at the outside window of the Arsenal. For reasons lost to time, New York State correction officers are allowed to own and carry concealed weapons, and most seem to enjoy doing so. However, they can’t bring the guns inside with them (nobody is allowed to carry inside)—and few of us have any doubt that prison is the safer for it. I take the last steps to the main gate and flash the badge and I.D. card I carry in a special wallet that I picked up at the Academy. The officer takes a cursory peek inside my lunch bag—the contraband check. I punch my time card and proceed to the morning’s worst moment, getting my assignment.

The desk of Sergeant Ed Holmes is the focal point of the lineup room. It’s on a raised platform, in front of a window. From up there, Holmes can see everybody in the room and most of those ascending the front steps. His eyes are constantly scanning, never settling on any person or object for more than an instant, moving from an officer to the printout in front of him and back again. The printout tells him what jobs he’ll need to fill—who’s on his day off, who’s got vacation, who’s out sick, who’s on suspension. He checks off old-timers as he sees them—they’ve chosen their jobs and know where they’re going. It’s the new guys, like me, who are at his mercy.

Holmes is one of the tough black officers who have been here forever, a big man who seems to enjoy his distance from the rank and file. Several of his fellow white-shirts spoke to us during orientation, mostly about how the institution runs. Holmes was different. He came only to warn: Don’t fuck with me, he said, glancing at the back wall of the room. I’m gonna give you your job assignment, and if you complain, I’ll give you a worse one tomorrow. I have no patience. I’m not nice. Don’t fuck with me. A few
days later, a longtime officer advised me never to show Holmes I was scared—of him or anything else. “Holmes feeds on weakness,” she said.

And now the line has moved and I’m next, a small, new officer before the mighty sergeant. I place my time card in front of him—he initials all the cards, to prevent us from punching in for friends—and then he is uncharacteristically silent: Holmes hasn’t decided what to do with me. Or maybe he’s not thinking of me at all; maybe his mind has wandered to his car or his electric bill or the movie he watched on TV last night. He riffles through his printout. Usually I’m sent to A-block or B-block. These are massive human warehouses, two of the largest prison housing units in the world, containing over a thousand inmates between them. I live for the exceptions: an easy day in the wall tower, the barbershop, or the hospital. That’s the root of my dread—the hope for something else.

“Two fifty-four B-block,” says Holmes finally, glancing to my left. Holmes could tell us the job instead of just the number, but if it’s in the blocks, he won’t. He wants to leave us guessing, as if we’re still at the Academy. I turn and walk back among the eighty-odd officers milling around the crowded room, looking for someone who might know what job 254 is. I ask Miller; he shrugs. I ask Eaves; he thinks it’s an escort job. That would be good. Escort officers spend a while in the mess hall and then get to leave the block for chunks of the day, taking groups of inmates to other buildings in the prison. Eaves has written down all the jobs in his union diary but hasn’t yet found the number when a different sergeant shouts: “On the lineup!” As we assemble in rows, I pray it’s true that it’s an escort job and not a gallery job. Gallery officers run the galleries, the floors on which inmates live. Galleries are understaffed, and the officers on them, surrounded by inmates all day, are put at risk and run ragged. It’s an awful job. I often get it.

We form into six or seven files, facing the white-shirts, most of whom are sergeants. As we’re called to attention, it’s interesting to watch the heavy ones try to squeeze between our narrow rows as they make a cursory check for violations of uniform—missing collar brass, whiskers, an earring inadvertently left in. Then a lieutenant, often the watch commander, speaks, telling us what has gone on in the prison since we left the day before. Today it’s Lieutenant Goewey.

“Okay, it’s been pretty quiet. They had one guy cut in the leg, in the tunnel from A-block yard. No weapon, no perp, the usual. Then we found three shanks buried in the dirt there in B-block yard, two of ’em metal, that we found with metal detectors. You think they’re just sitting around out there, but these crooks are always conniving.” In other words: one inmate stabbed, assailant unknown, knife not found; three homemade knives found; no officers hurt. A fairly typical day. Then a new sergeant steps forward: “Remember, there’s no double clothing allowed during rec, for the obvious reasons. Inmates with two shirts on or two sets of pants should be sent back to their cells and not allowed in the yard or gym.” Double clothing is understood to be both a defense against getting “stuck” and a way of quickly changing your appearance if you stick someone else.

Often we’ll hear a moral message at lineup, too: a warning that we’re not stepping up to the inmates enough or a caution that we need to watch one another’s backs better and know the names of the people we’re working with or a reminder that our job is “to get out of here in one piece at three
P.M.
”—as if that needed saying. No such message today. There’s the schedule of driver’s-ed courses, for anyone interested, and a reminder of next week’s blood drive, and the announcements are over.

“Officers,
a-ten-shun!”
yells a sergeant. Everyone is quiet. “Posts!” And we’re off, not exactly at a run, through the long, rough corridors and up the hill to begin the day.

Sing Sing sprawls over fifty-five acres, most of it rocky hillside. It’s flat down where I parked, near the river—the old cellblock and the railroad tracks. The former Death House, site of the electric chair that killed 614 inmates between 1891 and 1963, is down there too. (It’s now a vocational-training building.) And so is Tappan, the medium-security unit of Sing Sing, with some 550 inmates housed in three 1970s-vintage shoe box—shaped buildings.

But most of Sing Sing is on the hill, and from the lineup room, we climb there. Getting to B-block is the longest walk; it’s the remotest part of the “max” jail. There are a couple of ways to go; both involve a lot of stairs. Officers sip from coffee cups and grip lunch bags as we make the slow march up to work. We are black and white and Latino, male and female. Members of the skeleton night crew pass us in the hall and wave wanly; most have that gray night-shift look. They trade normal diurnal rhythms for the perk
of having very little inmate contact—at night, all the inmates are locked in their cells. If I didn’t have a family, I might put in for night duty.

The corridors and stairways are old, often in disrepair. When it rains, we skirt puddles from leaking roofs. When it’s cold, we have reason to remember that these passages are unheated. The tunnels snake around Sing Sing, joining the various buildings, and at the beginning and end of each—sometimes even in the middle—there is a locked gate. Most of the officers posted to these gates have big, thick keys, but at one gate the guard pushes buttons instead, as they do in modern prisons. By the time I pass through the heavy front door of B-block, there are ten locked gates between me and freedom.

A-block and B-block are the most impressive buildings in Sing Sing, and in a totally negative sense. A large cathedral will inspire awe; a large cellblock, in my experience, will mainly horrify.

The size of the buildings catches the first-time visitor by surprise, and that’s largely because there’s no preamble. Instead of approaching them from a wide staircase or through an arched gate, you pass from an enclosed corridor through a pair of solid-metal doors, neither one much bigger than your front door at home. And enter into a stupefying vastness. A-block, probably the largest freestanding cellblock in the world, is 588 feet long, twelve feet shy of the length of two football fields. It houses some 684 inmates, more than the entire population of many prisons. You can hear them—an encompassing, overwhelming cacophony of radios, of heavy gates slamming, of shouts and whistles and running footsteps—but, oddly, at first you can’t see a single incarcerated soul. All you see are the bars that form the narrow fronts of their cells, extending four stories up and so far into the distance on the left and right that they melt into an illusion of solidity. And when you start walking down the gallery, eighty-eight cells long, and begin to make eye contact with inmates, one after another after another, some glaring, some dozing, some sitting bored on the toilet, a sense grows of the human dimensions of this colony. Ahead of you may be a half-dozen small mirrors held through the bars by dark arms; these retract as you draw even, and you and the inmate get a brief but direct look at each other.

A-block and B-block are aligned with each other, end to end, and span the top of Sing Sing; between them sits the mess-hall building. Both were completed in 1929, and they’re very similar in
structure, except B-block is twenty cells shorter (sixty-eight), and one story taller (five). Though few civilians have seen anything like them, there is nothing architecturally innovative about the design. It plainly derives from the 1826 cellblock, based on Auburn’s “new” north wing, which was the prototype for most American cell-house construction: tiny cells back to back on five tiers, with a stairway at either end and one at the center of the very long range.

From the ground floor, which in both buildings is known as the flats, you can look up and see how each structure is made up of two almost separate components. One is the all-metal interior, containing the inmates; it’s painted gray and looks as though it could have been welded in a shipyard. The other is comprised of the exterior walls and roof, a brick-and-concrete shell that fits over the cells like a dish over a stick of butter. One does not touch the other: Should an inmate somehow escape from his cell, he’s still trapped inside the building. A series of tall, barred windows runs down either side of the shell. They would let in twice as much light if they were washed. As it is, they let pass a diffuse, smog-colored glow, which crosses about fifteen feet of open space on each side before it reaches the metal, which it does not warm. There is a flat, leaky roof, which does not touch the top of the metal cellblock but leaves a gap of maybe ten feet. If the whole structure were radically shrunk, the uninitiated might perceive a vaguely agricultural purpose; the cages might be thought to contain chickens, or mink.

The blocks are loud because they are hard. There is nothing inside them to absorb sound except the inmates’ thin mattresses and their bodies. Every other surface is of metal or concrete or brick.

A crowd of officers is milling around a cell near the front gate of B-block when I get there; this cell is the office of the officer in charge, or OIC. Rooms for staff were not included in B-block’s plan, so a few cells near the front gate have been converted for that purpose. Next to the OIC’s office, an identical, tiny cell houses the sergeants; two of them are squeezed in there. Next to that is the coat room, which contains a barely functioning microwave oven and a refrigerator that won’t stay closed. There’s an office for paperwork and filling out forms, and one for a toilet—the only staff toilet on these five floors.

For many years, the day-shift OIC has been Hattie “Mama” Cradle, a fifty-something woman five feet tall and just about as big around. She’s got a clipboard in her hand and horn-rimmed reading specs on a chain around her neck. Officers give her their
names and job numbers; she tells them where they’re posted. I hang back a little, but then there’s no more stalling: “Conover, two fifty-four,” I say. She gets the spelling off the tag on my shirt, then, already poised to jot down the next name, says, “R-and-W.”

My heart sinks. It’s as bad as it could be. I am the first officer on the second-floor galleries, known by the letters
R
and
W
. I’ve worked there a few times before, including my very first—horrifying—day of on-the-job training, when I accompanied a novice officer, or “newjack,” who barely knew what he was doing. Today I’m that newjack, going it alone.

I crowd into Cradle’s office and look for my keys—four separate rings of the big, heavy “bit” keys, which work cell doors, with center-gate, end-gate, and fire-alarm keys thrown on for good measure. I attach these to my belt, and feel the weight. My heart is pounding, but there’s nothing for it. I find a fresh battery for the floor’s portable communications radio and grab a sheaf of forms that I have to fill out during my shift. Last is the list of “keep-locks.” I copy mine from Cradle’s bulletin board, noting that there are two new ones in the past twenty-four hours. Keeplocks are inmates on disciplinary restriction. In the old days there were few such inmates, and often they would be sent to solitary confinement, known as the Special Housing Unit or the Box. But now their numbers overwhelm the Box, so they stay put, mixed in with the general population—except they can’t come out of their cells. One of our main responsibilities as gallery officers is to keep the keeplocks locked up. Because we’re always in a hurry and often don’t know the inmates, this is harder than it sounds. It’s easy to unlock the wrong door.