Newjack (39 page)

“Gallery officers, send down your Early Meds. Early Meds at this time.”

This announcement over the PA always signaled the first inmate release of the day, and it was a small and easy one. Early Meds were a handful of diabetics and others, usually old or weak, who had to visit the emergency room for medication before breakfast. They were seldom any trouble, and usually numbered only two or three per gallery. If you were new to the gallery and didn’t know who they were, you just looked down the cells for a waving hand. Having let out my three guys, I closed the brakes, took the cells off deadlock one at a time, and sat in the office to await the call for morning chow, the first mass release of the day.

Holmes had assigned me several days in a row to R-and-W gallery, dispelling any thought I had entertained that he was starting to like me. The night officer I’d taken over from was Sims, who had once said to me of the inmates, “I don’t care, I don’t like them, they’re not my friends.” She was always leaving signs around the office like
PLEASE CLEAN UP YOUR MESS. THE ROACHES LIKE IT BUT I DON’T
. I would have sympathized (I tied my lunch sack shut to keep the roaches out, having seen what happened if you didn’t) except that she herself usually left the desktop littered with crumbs and half-finished cans of soda. As I was straightening up, I opened the top drawer of the battered old desk, the only one that would open, and found a bar of state soap with a two-inch heart shape carved out of its center.

Soap carving was a time-honored jailhouse art. I’d known about carved pistols from the movies, but inside Sing Sing I had also seen carved mini-radios and animal sculptures. I even had an idea who had made this heart. He probably made it for Sims, as a stand-in for chocolates or a date to the movies. In their deprivation, inmates would grasp at anything. The mystery to me was how it had made its way into the office. Despite her professed antipathy, Sims must have accepted it. But significantly, the heart hadn’t made it from the office to Sims’s home. Leaving it here was some sort of middle path, and I thought I understood that middle path, because I was coming to understand the paths on either side: Completely tune the inmates out, as Sims professed to do, or else let them in, at your peril. What, I wondered, if she didn’t have anybody
at home? What if he had told her he loved her? What might she be tempted to do?

“R-gallery, on the chow!”

I walked from the office and pulled the brake on the north side, then the brake on the south side. Many cell doors opened immediately; inmates had been leaning on them. There followed percussive thumping as they stepped out and swung the doors shut. I stood next to the big garbage can in the center of the gallery, blocking the short passage to the W side—this would ensure that the inmates walked to the chow hall, not over to W-gallery to visit their pals.

“Morning, CO,” said a few, and a couple nodded and said, “Conover.” Most passed without acknowledgment.

These were the guys, the source of my pain, the source of their own pain; the source of their victims’ and of their families’ pain. My first few days, they had seemed like one big green-clad undifferentiated mass. Now, of course, they all had faces to me. Of the sixty-odd men on each side of the floor, I knew maybe half by name—sometimes their real last name or sometimes just a nickname I’d picked up.

There went Jones. There was Itchy. There was Twin, and Cameron. Moultrie, McClain, and Savarese. Stuckey and Buddy. Not that I really knew them. But I recognized them, and was getting to know those who would let themselves be known.

What officers understood about inmates varied widely. The ghetto-reared officers from New York City surely knew the most. The typical north-country kid knew very little. With my experiences, I was probably somewhere in between, but I was also caught between two warring impulses: the incuriosity that made the job easier and an anthropologist or social worker’s fascination with the twists of life that created a criminal and led him to such a place.

The Department gave conflicting messages about how much we should know. The main feeling was that inmates were like a contagion—and the more you kept a professional distance, the better off you’d be. It wasn’t good to know inmates’ crimes, because then you might treat them unequally. It wasn’t good to know their personal lives, because they might try to drag you into them, which would compromise security. On the other hand, it helped security to be aware of their alliances, of gang unrest, and so forth.

In practice, this was nearly impossible. Information about gangs was never casually revealed to officers. It was generally known among us that the Latin Kings, a Puerto Rican gang originally from Chicago, was the most powerful group in B-block and that the rival Bloods, originally from Los Angeles, were in disarray. The Ñeta gang, born of Puerto Rican jails, was the only one to include members from outside a single ethnic group; some Asians were tied to the BTK (Born to Kill) gang. White supremacists weren’t much of a factor in B-block. Black Muslims came in many stripes, from mainline Nation of Islam to the splinter Five Percenters. This hard-line faction, born of New York prisons and ghettos, believed that 85 percent of black people were like ignorant cattle, 10 percent were bloodsuckers (politicians, preachers, and others who profited from the labor and ignorance of the docile 85 percent), and an anointed 5 percent were the poor, righteous teachers of freedom, justice, and equality. R-and-W had its Five Percenters, I knew, and plenty of the others. But as inmates swirled past on their way off the gallery, they looked to me, in terms of their gang allegiances, as undifferentiated as a great school of fish.

In another area, however, I had a bit more insight, and that was mental illness. The psychologist at the Academy had spoken about the high number of mentally ill inmates mixed in with the “normal” ones: psychotics with poor hygiene (“You smell ’em before you see ’em”) or odd associations (Bill Clinton, they’d believe, was in charge of the Clinton Correctional Facility); hallucinators who thought that football players in the huddle were talking about them or that the state had implanted microchips in their brains. R-and-W had all of these, and the worst cases were loners, shunned by the mass of inmates.

The psychologist had conceded that the single largest group of unwell inmates—those suffering from so-called antisocial personality—was harder to pick out of the crowd. People with this syndrome, he said, were exasperating individuals who were “hard to cure through therapy.” Their calling card was “a history in which the rights of others were violated.” They couldn’t sustain relationships. Their parents had been irresponsible. These inmates didn’t obey rules and laws. They failed to honor obligations. They had no sense of loyalty or guilt. They were incapable of love—“others have no more value to them than a car or a pen.” They had a low frustration level; they didn’t plan, and when they broke the law, they got caught.

Maybe a quarter of all inmates had antisocial personality, the psychologist at the Academy had said, and I was ready to believe it. But then he admitted that there was uncertainty on this point; the number could be as low as 15 percent or as high as 80 percent.
Antisocial personality
, though it described plenty of guys on R-and-W, seemed also to serve as a catchall for problem inmates who couldn’t otherwise be categorized. That was disheartening, just another suggestion that psychology, admittedly far from curing inmates, even had trouble describing what was wrong with them.

Psychotics, schizophrenics, and people with antisocial personality—I tried to sort them out, but to most officers, they were all just bugs. We were more likely to classify them as murderers, drug dealers, or child molesters. But since the system actively discouraged us from thinking in those terms, prison work was an exercise in the massive erosion of distinctions, the lumping together of disparate kinds, the suppression of the mind’s ability to perceive difference.

All you could see for sure was that Sing Sing was the ending, at least for a while, to 2,300 sad stories. It was staggering to contemplate the accrued tales of dysfunction, pain, and violence that had preceded these prison terms—and, frankly, easier not to. The past seemed like so much noise when you were trying to deal with the difficult present.

That morning in August was not so different from many others. When the inmates returned from chow around eight-thirty, I saw several more I was familiar with. Marshall was thirty years old, sentenced to 150 years to life for taking part in a robbery of a Brooklyn bodega in which his partner had killed the owner. The case was somewhat famous, because the partner had been a New York City policeman. Marshall, normally quiet, had told me that the guards respected him because he hadn’t testified against the cop to save his own skin. Six feet tall and two hundred pounds, Marshall had permission to take extra “medical” showers because, he explained, he was bothered by a bullet lodged near his shoulder.

Less physically imposing and more approachable was Astacio, one of my porters, known to everyone as Buddy. Buddy couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds, and I worried that he had AIDS. But he was energetic. As one of a small number
of inmates—maybe three in the block—who drew custom-made greeting cards for other inmates, he spent many hours in his cell using a vast collection of felt-tipped pens to create cards with intricate designs and a personalized message (“Thinking of you this Christmas, love you forever, Curtis”). Other inmates paid up to five packs of cigarettes for one of these little works of art.

“What are you in for, anyway?” I’d asked Buddy one day, after he showed me a few cards.

“Murder,” he said, forming his hand into the shape of a pistol and pulling off a few rounds. “Three counts.” I must have looked skeptical; he didn’t seem the type. “Gang stuff,” he explained.

I went home and looked him up on the Web. There was a new site sponsored by a New York victims’ rights group, and DOCS had passed to them an entire inmate database of names, crimes, and parole dates. The website said he wasn’t a murderer at all, that he was doing twenty-four-to-life for two counts of burglary and a grand larceny. (And he had prior felonies.) Everyone, I suppose, wanted to be known as a murderer in prison.

Including Van Essen. Initially, I was sympathetic toward this mouselike, fifty-five-year-old white man. He was always friendly but never imposed on me, and I could tell he had it tough in here. Guys hit him up for his commissary, he admitted to me, and he was stressed by all the noise. I could picture him hunched over ledgers. He brushed off the question when I asked what he was in for—an argument, a misunderstanding, he muttered. Then I checked the Web: sodomy first degree, sexual abuse first degree, sentence of eleven to thirty years. According to statute, someone convicted of the sodomy charge has engaged in “deviate sexual intercourse with another person: 1. By forcible compulsion; or 2. Who is incapable of consent by reason of being physically helpless; or 3. Who is less than eleven years old.” I wished, then, that I hadn’t checked, because, thinking of my own kids, I couldn’t talk to Van Essen after that.

I assigned a nickname to another of my inmates. He had been engrossed in a book entitled
Cartel: Historia de la Droga
one day when I walked by. Saenz was Colombian, I knew, so I nicknamed him Medellín, after the original cocaine cartel, and he seemed to like it. Medellín was always trying to get me to do illicit favors for him—take a message to someone he knew on the outside, buy him some gloves (for the cold weather? he wouldn’t explain), get him a new watch battery (he wore a Rolex).

“CO, you got change?” he asked me one day, pulling out his wallet, then laughing when I pretended to reach for mine. This was an old inmate joke, as they were forbidden to have cash.

“How come you keep trying to turn me, Medellín?” I asked him. “How many times do I have to tell you, I—”

“CO, because you can do better than this!” he said, gesturing at the block. “You can make big money. You want a girl? I can get you a girl—pretty one, man, what do you say?”