Newjack (3 page)

I pass through two more gates on my way upstairs and relieve the night officer on R-and-W. Since the galleries are all locked down at night, mainly her job is to check, every hour or so, that every inmate is still breathing. It’s not a bad job, and if an inmate does die, it’s no problem—unless he’s found with rigor mortis. In that case, she will lose her job, because of the cold, hard proof that she wasn’t really checking. The night officer hands me the radio and some other keys. Does she know what the new keeplocks are in for? I ask.

“I don’t know, I don’t care, they’re not my friends, and I don’t like them,” she says with a suddenness and finality that I find kind of funny. She hands me the radio, which I attach to my belt. She’s left some wrappers and tissues around the desktop, but I don’t
mention it; she looks tired. I envy her as she puts on her coat: She’s going home and doesn’t have to deal with the inmates any longer. “The cells are all deadlocked,” she adds before leaving, which means that not only is the huge bar, or “brake,” in place which locks them all at once but the cells are locked individually. Inmates are not at large at night, swarming around you on their way to chow, arguing with you when it’s time to “lock in,” calling you names, stressing you out. Pandora’s box is closed. My first job of the day, with breakfast less than an hour away, will be to open it.

W
hen the appointment letter from the Department of Correctional Services arrived, Arno had been managing a Burger King in Syracuse. Chavez was working the floor buffer machine in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building. Davis was pounding fenders at his upstate body shop. Allen and Dimmie were supervising teenage boys in youth detention centers in Westchester. Brown was a plumber in Keeseville, near the Canadian border. Charlebois worked distribution for Wal-Mart in midstate. Others hadn’t had jobs for a while. I had been working for several months on a story for
The New York Times Magazine
. The letter gave each of us two weeks or less to drop these jobs and report to the Albany Training Academy, where we would enter state service as correction-officer recruits.

I tried to quickly wrap up my work and prepare for the seven weeks away from home—and possibly much more, if I decided to stick with the job and work in a prison. Then, on a rainy Sunday evening in March 1997, I drove from New York City to the Academy. I’d been there twice before, for psychological testing. The three-story brick structure had a white statue in the bell tower and looked like a suburban Catholic high school. Later I would learn
that it had once been a seminary. From seminary to corrections academy: a sign of the times. In the foyer, two uniformed officers sitting at a table asked for identification, took my letter, and nodded toward a mountain of luggage nearby.

“Dump your bags there and get in line.”

The line of male recruits in suits (and a handful of women in dresses) stretched way down a long hallway and around the corner, out of sight. All stood at rigid attention. As I made my way to the end, carefully skirting an officer chewing out a guy with a badly knotted tie, it dawned on me that I had reported to boot camp.

“You call that wearing a tie?” the officer demanded of the young man. “Button the collar. No. I’ve changed my mind. Take it off and start over.” The man got started but, without a mirror, apparently didn’t make much progress. A second officer, assigned to dog the recruits, walked up and laughed at him.

The officers were like sharks, sniffing for blood. This first lesson of the Academy was immediately clear: Don’t stand out. I had a sense of foreboding about the recruit who stood three people ahead of me. Blond hair spilled over his shirt collar, and he had an earring. Of course, others stood out, too, like the guy who had chosen to wear army boots along with his coat and tie. But long hair made a different kind of statement.

The first officer stopped and gaped at the man in a stagy way. “What did you think you were coming to, a club?” he demanded. The guy with the hair mumbled something. “
What?
” said the officer, stepping right up into his face. “Did you think you were going out to a nightclub? Were you dressing up for a nightclub? He was dressing up for a club!” he told the other officer, who laughed some more.

My hair was only slightly shorter, but I passed the first inspection. The line advanced slowly. I tried to take in my surroundings with my peripheral vision. On the walls were a succession of old black-and-white photos of New York State prisons and two big display cases. The first case I passed contained objects with hidden compartments in which inmates had stashed things—a false-bottomed Coke can, a hollow-heeled shoe, and a hollow-handled hairbrush. The next one displayed inmate weapons: a sharpened piece of Plexiglas, a filed-down serving spoon, a metal spike. They were riveting; it was hard to keep my eyes forward.

“What do you think this is, a museum?” barked an officer from
the hallway behind me. At first I thought I’d been caught, but as the officer yammered on, I realized it was someone behind me who’d been spotted looking at the shank display. “Eyes directly ahead! That’s the meaning of
attention!”

The officer walked by and stopped again in front of the recruit with the tie. The officer gestured at it angrily. “Are you
intentionally
disrespecting me?” he demanded. A few minutes later, perhaps thinking he was over the worst of it, the same man was caught leaning slightly against the wall: a born target. “Excuse me! Does the wall need holding up? Do you think I’m an idiot? Give me twenty push-ups.”

“Umm … right here?” the recruit stammered.

“Of course right here! You think we’re going to the gym?”

The man bent down and awkwardly got started.

“Five! Six! Seven! Eight!” counted the officer impatiently.

I closed my eyes for a moment. That night I’d been scheduled to give a slide-show lecture about Alaska at a club in my neighborhood. My dad and I had been in the north country recently, retracing a 1915 wilderness journey taken by my grandfather. The organizers had graciously rescheduled when I told them something had come up, but I pictured myself there now, finishing my after-dinner talk and glass of wine, waiting for coffee to be served, hands on the white tablecloth. It was a sudden but long-awaited assignment, I’d explained—a trip that couldn’t be postponed. That was the first of the thousand dodges and sorry-I-can’t-talk-about-its I’d have to make over the next thirty or so months as my life split into two parts, neither of which could know about the other.

The slow shuffle forward continued for nearly an hour. Finally, I was in the foyer again, receiving a bunk-room assignment and some bedding, both of which, it occurred to me, could have been quickly given out upon our arrival. But then no one would have had a chance to yell at us. I retrieved my bags and headed upstairs.

There was no time to unpack or meet my three roommates; we were due back downstairs immediately. The “auditorium” was a former chapel, with marble floors and tall stained-glass windows, dark now at 9:30
P.M.
In the back, behind where a priest would have stood to lead vespers, was strung a banner.
TOTAL QUALITY
, it said,
A D.O.C.S. COMMITMENT.
A passable slogan for a factory but an odd concept, it seemed to me, for junior prison guards. In any
event, I never heard it again. I was just taking a seat in a row of stackable chairs among my 127 classmates when a loud “Ten-
hut!”
brought us all to our feet.

A short, fit, florid-faced man strode in, looking unhappy. This was Sergeant Rusty Bloom, who ran the Academy. He surveyed us silently for a moment through thick glasses. From this night onward we were correction-officer trainees of the state of New York, he began, making $23,824 a year. “And notice I said ‘correction officers,’ not prison guards. It doesn’t take much to become a prison guard. There is no academy for prison guards. You are here to become professionals.” We would be joining more than 26,000 other state COs, he said, working for a department with an annual budget of $1.6 billion. More than 18,000 people had taken the civil service exam we took two years before; we were among the first classes to be drawn from the list of those who had passed, because our scores were high. Even so, he said, we didn’t look like much. Over the next seven weeks, he and his staff would try to change that.

Like every new class, we were restricted to the grounds for the first week, Bloom explained, though we could return home on the weekends, dressed in our coats and ties, when he excused us Friday afternoon. If we didn’t think we could follow the rules that guided life at the Academy, we should leave right now. Personal housekeeping, for example. The guidelines governing display of uniforms and toiletries were very clear; if one guy’s stuff was out of compliance, the whole room would be written up for it. That applied on a larger scale, too. Our class of 128 would be divided into four “sessions.” If anyone in a session messed up—was late or sloppy or disobeyed any order—the rest of the session would pay. Generally this meant being restricted to the grounds, as we were now, like any new class in its first week. And lest we forget what the job was about, Sergeant Bloom told us, “The easiest way to mess up is to leave a lock open.” We had brought padlocks, as instructed, for the lockers in our rooms. “And I’ll tell you right now, if I find anyone’s lock open—and I promise you I will—that session’s going to be held accountable.”

Bloom told us to look on either side of us—one of the two people we saw would no longer be in the Department in twelve months’ time. It was not an easy job; it was not for everybody. That sounded kind of ominous. But the next thing Bloom said
broke his own scary spell. “And if you decide to quit during the Academy—I can guarantee you some will—please, please, let me know you’re leaving. Don’t just walk out.”

Hearing the sergeant implore us was sort of funny, and a relief. Bloom wasn’t just a terrorizing demon; he was also a bureaucrat at the mercy of paperwork. I suspected that recruits left the Academy without saying good-bye fairly often, and the thought of it cheered me considerably.

The job, he said in conclusion, was about
care, custody
, and
control
. “The gray uniforms are the good guys, and the green uniforms are the bad guys. That’s what it’s all about.” And in twenty-five years, we’d have a pension.

We were given notebooks, a training manual, and a tall stack of forms to fill out. One officer got angry when recruits started asking him for pens—few people had brought them, because we hadn’t been told to. “Well, what did you think you were going to be doing here tonight?” he demanded inanely. Everything was delayed while he went to look for pens. When he returned, he discovered he hadn’t brought enough. He tossed the last handfuls of them angrily into the air above our heads. I would later find that of the several assholes on the Academy’s training staff, this officer actually wasn’t one of them; it was just his act for opening night.

Next stop was the quartermaster’s room, where we were issued an armload of uniforms and insignia, and then, at 11
P.M.
, it was up to our room on the second floor to hem trousers and sew on American flags. “Did anybody bring scissors?” “Can I borrow your Magic Hem?” “Where’d that iron go?”

I had a feeling of dread—born of fatigue and aversion to military discipline—that I tried to disguise. But at least one of my three roommates seemed completely charged up by the experience. He was Russell Dieter, an ex—Marine aircraft mechanic who had been working as a production welder and, since his divorce, living on the family farm, midstate. I would grow to dislike Dieter, and he would grow to hate me, but we were, for the duration, bunk-mates—I, unfortunately, in the bed above him. Since this was the first night, a sort of cordiality reigned. Dieter had been through several boot camps and was no stranger to abuse. His hair was already shaved to the skull. His small brown mustache was closely trimmed. And he was prepared in other ways: Though nobody had told us to, he had brought along an iron and ironing board, even spray starch. I watched as he bent over his new gray shirts, pushing
his glasses up on his nose while applying a precise military crease to the middle of each breast pocket.

Also in the room were Chris Charlebois, the former Wal-Mart employee, and Gary Davis, an Air Force vet in his fifties, who had barely been making ends meet at his body shop in Ticonderoga, New York. Like me, they had taken a civil service test nearly two years before and then not heard a word until January 1997, when we’d all been summoned to Albany for physical and psychological testing. Charlebois had been given only three days’ notice to report to the Academy. He’d even taken a cut in pay, he said, but he felt it was worth it in the long term for the pension, the health and dental insurance, and the paid leave—basically, a month per year.