Newjack (37 page)

But in their hearts, I think the officers wish it weren’t so. I think they’d rather chat with an inmate and reinforce his connection to the outside world than dodge missiles of shit and piss. I think the statue of Thomas Mott Osborne in the foyer of the training academy is there because, somehow, Elam Lynds won’t do. Osborne, the inmates’ friend, chains in one hand and book in the other, is the only hero corrections can possibly have. He is perhaps best known for this quote: “We will turn this prison from a scrap heap into a repair shop.” The presence of his statue, I think, speaks to an idealism that is never openly discussed by guards, the hope that
prisons might do some good for the people in them, that human lives can be fixed instead of thrown away, that there’s more to be done than locking doors and knocking heads, that the “care” in
care, custody, and control
might amount to something beyond calling the ER when an inmate is bleeding from a shank wound.

Instead, the most recent trend in corrections is the advent of the “supermax” prison, of which there are now roughly three dozen in the United States, including New York’s newest facility. A supermax is like a huge SHU, with 100 percent segregation cells. The inmates in them have minimal contact with each other and practically no relationship at all with their guards. “If you ask me, that’s a recipe for a junkyard dog,” an Academy instructor opined to us. I think she was right. And the odd thing is, the idea for a supermax is not new. Solitary confinement around the clock, with idleness during the day: Elam Lynds, before he hit on the congregate system, tried it back in 1821.

“T
ake your shirt off, please. Show me your hands, both sides. Now, arms away from your body. Turn around. Okay.”

A nod when we’re finished, and we move on to the next cell. He’s heard us coming and wants to know why.

“You can probably guess. Just do it, please.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“The sergeant will come, and they’ll write you up.” The man sighs, shrugs, pulls his T-shirt over his head, does the dance. We move on to the next cell.

B-block is locked down, and we’re looking for knife cuts. It is May. For the third day in a row, the Latin Kings have been attacking the Bloods, and vice versa. Not en masse—just stealth encounters, stabbings without warning. One incident provokes the next; we’re told that the cycles of retaliation began at Rikers Island earlier this month. Each time we let the inmates back out, someone else is attacked, violence flaring up like one of those trick birthday candles.

The sergeant wouldn’t say why we were conducting these “upper-body frisks,” but it doesn’t take a genius: The white-shirts think that at least one participant in the latest cutting exchange, though wounded, escaped undetected. So we’re looking for blood, skin that needs stitching, a gash from a homemade blade.

At the next cell, the inmate is lying on his bunk. “R-63, take off your shirt, please.” He sits up bleary-eyed, then stands, removes the shirt. Like many inmates, he’s in excellent shape from weight lifting. And like many inmates, he has scars: three inches long on his waist below the ribs, about one inch long on his arm, penny-size circles that look like two bullet wounds on a shoulder blade.

“Nothing fresh,” says the officer I’m with, more to himself than in dismissal. He’s an old-timer who doubts we’ll find anything and acts like he’s seen it all before. I’m not so world-weary. The huge number of scars surprises me. Half the inmates seem to have been stabbed or shot at some point in their lives. Often, the scars are on their face: a pale, thick line across the back of the skull where no hair grows, a sliced nostril imperfectly healed, a gash along a cheek that ended when the blade passed through a lip. The most ghastly wound is on a man who looks about nineteen: a ragged cicatrix that winds from one corner of his mouth to beneath his left ear, then all the way around his head, under the right ear, and back to the other corner of the mouth, as though the assailant intended to peel off the top: a sadist’s trophy.

We continue down the line. Gash after gash after gash. But nothing fresh.

There are drawbacks, but overall lockdowns are a pleasure. When the inmates are all locked in their cells, most of what is stressful in the life of a block officer goes away. The galleries are clear, at least
until trash begins to accumulate. The gates stay closed. The PA system stays quiet, because there is nothing the inmates need to be told.

Lockdowns follow what are officially known as unusual incidents. Besides gang-related violence, that can mean attacks on guards, problems with the count (an inmate missing from his cell), or even the discovery of especially scary contraband, like the stash of bullets, zip gun, and bags of marijuana that were found in the basement of the mess hall later that year, all inside Styrofoam boxes sealed with clear tape. The commissioner of corrections has to approve all lockdowns, because they are stressful to inmates, essentially turning them all into keeplocks.

I was surprised to hear B-block was still locked down when I came to work the next day, but not upset about it. I walked over to Mama Cradle, the B-block OIC, with my old classmate Bella.

Bella had distinguished himself in our training class by being the only person to flunk the first-aid course, a requirement for graduation. It wasn’t for lack of trying. A thirty-something father of two, he badly wanted this job, but he had barely passed his other exams, and first aid had stumped him. Of course Nigro had let him take the test again; I and a couple of others helped him study before he did, because he was a nice guy, hapless but good-natured. Everyone applauded when Nigro announced that Bella had finally passed.

We became friendly after that. Bella told me he’d had problems at a New Jersey detention facility for minors, where he’d been a counselor/guard—some of the kids had escaped during his watch. He was exonerated, because two other employees who were supposed to be supervising the kids with him had not turned up for work. Bella had grown up in the Bronx and attended a tough high school near where I lived; his brother was a cop. He missed his kids a lot during our weeks at the Academy, as I missed mine, and we talked about that. He had an application in for a New Jersey road-maintenance job, but nothing had come of it yet.

Mama Cradle told us there was nothing for us to do just then, but we shouldn’t stray far—and should not venture out onto the flats. This was because, to relieve their boredom and express their contempt, inmates were occasionally tossing items out of their cells in hopes they might hit one of us. Alcantara, in fact, had been drenched with what appeared to be water and was sent off to change his uniform. So we hung near Cradle’s office, where there was a ledge over our heads, then migrated to the gym and used
some of the inmates’ exercise equipment until Cradle called us back to her office.

“I want you guys to do the feed-up,” she directed a group of us new officers. “Then later you’ll pick up the trays.” She pointed us to a pile of large garbage bags.

That was the downside of lockdowns: having to do the inmates’ scut work. But Bella never seemed to complain, and with him as my partner, I didn’t mind, either. We joined other new officers in the mess hall, where I held a tray and Bella stacked it high with Styrofoam “clamshells” full of beef stew and rice. Maneuvering with this load took skill. I descended a narrow staircase from the mess hall to R-gallery very carefully, because with the trays stacked high, I couldn’t see in front of me. It got worse on R, where no one had swept or picked up in many hours. The floor of the narrow gallery was an obstacle course—littered with chicken bones from dinner the night before, toast from breakfast, jam packets and scrambled eggs, spilled coffee and juice, covered by a layer of Styrofoam cups and clamshells. I waded slowly, blindly, determined not to fall and entertain the inmates. Bella handed out meals, amazingly upbeat. Something about this assignment cheered him.

“He-e-e-re’s lunch!” he announced at cell after cell, undaunted by silence and surliness. “Why don’t they send up some chicks instead of you ugly motherfuckers?” was the nicest thing we heard. “The beer’s coming,” Bella would say in return, or simply, “Have a nice day!” I took little steps forward.

We made a second round, passing out juice and coffee, and then killed time on the south-end staircase. He’d put in for a transfer to Bedford Hills, Bella said. I didn’t have to ask why he was transferring to a prison farther from home, but did so anyway. “For the calmness,” he answered. “And because of some of the officers here.” More than the inmates, Bella was put off by the way the more senior officers treated us. They issued orders, neglected to explain procedures, were eager to lay blame, and tried to humiliate us.

We gave the inmates twenty minutes or so to finish their meals, then set back down the gallery wearing latex gloves and bearing huge trash bags. A dismal assignment, I thought: garbagemen to the inmates. Bella was unfazed and, in fact, began to sing the theme from
Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood:

He sang it again and again, smiling when the inmates stared at him as if he were crazy and smiling when I stared at him in admiration. Forget his test scores: Bella knew a secret way to handle all the crap, and I envied him.

Part of maturing into a regular officer at Sing Sing was deciding whether you were an A-block person or a B-block person. Somehow, Sergeant Holmes formed an idea of where you belonged and then tended to send you there. This was not always accomplished through intuition. Some guards would start out at A-block, then lock horns with Sergeant Wickersham, and thereafter be sentenced by mutual agreement to B-block. Others would begin at B-block, get turned off by the greater chaos factor—the younger, more transient inmates or the higher incidence of gang violence—and head back to A-block. The deciding difference for some officers appeared to be architecture. Though the two buildings were quite similar, some felt—as I did—that A-block’s longer galleries (eighty-eight cells long) were that much more unmanageable than B-block’s (sixty-eight cells long). Others preferred A-block’s modernized though undependable electronic locking system to B-block’s ancient, manually operated brakes and levers. There tended to be more white officers bidding A-block and more officers of color bidding B-block, but there were many exceptions. Though I spent more time in A-block early on, I turned into a committed B-block person and eventually bid it myself. And I would have to say the main factor behind that for me was Mama Cradle.