Newjack (5 page)

Our session gathered the next morning in a classroom in the basement, near a lounge and the mess hall. The Academy’s instructors were all correction officers with a training credential. Ours, luckily, was Vincent Nigro (“NY-gro,” he was careful to tell us), a CO from a downstate maximum-security prison called Eastern Correctional Facility. A jolly round man with a buzz cut, Nigro said that inmates had nicknamed him Abbott, after the partner of Costello. One of his training specialties was chemical agents, he said, explaining with a wink that “chemical agents make you fat.” He seated us alphabetically around the room—our session contained people with surnames from
A
to
F—
and then gave us a mock quiz. “What’s the first three things you get when you become a CO?” he asked. We waited. “A car. A gun. A divorce.”

Thus began our education in the ways of the Academy. Our days would start before he arrived in this, our “homeroom,” Nigro said. Having left our dorm rooms spotless, we would gather in the classroom and check one another’s uniforms: collar brass had to be straight, name tag placed just so, a single pen in our breast pocket, wallet pocket buttoned, shoes perfectly shined. Then we’d proceed, silently and in single file, to the mess-hall queue. There was a prescribed way to turn corners: You had to
pivot on the ball of your inside foot, not interrupting your stride. Breakfast was to be eaten in silence. We’d regroup in the classroom at around seven forty-five and he’d be there by eight. Then, every day, two different officers would count the class, as if we were inmates, and present the completed count slip, along with a fire and safety report, to Sergeant Bloom. Nigro acknowledged that Bloom was a little scary and said he’d try to help us steer clear of him.

Each instructor had a specialty, and Nigro explained that each would lecture us before we were through. The subjects would range from report writing to the use of force, from penal law to “standards of inmate behavior,” from tool and key control to drug awareness. There would be tests every Friday, on which we’d have to score 70 percent or better; if we didn’t, we could take the test only two more times. That, along with first aid and CPR, was the academic stuff. In addition, we’d have two hours of physical training—PT—every afternoon, and we’d have to pass a physical performance test in our last week. We’d learn how to use a baton and how to fight hand to hand in a course called Defensive Tactics. We’d have to qualify on a shooting range. Finally, we’d be exposed to tear gas (“CS gas” or “chemical agents,” they insisted on calling it) and learn how to fire gas guns.

Among the things we could get fired for, Nigro advised, were arriving at the Academy late or drunk—once we were allowed to go out, that is—or, oddly enough, sleeping in class. I had thought one of the advantages of corrections work was the chance for a bit of shut-eye now and then. But Nigro said that if we felt ourselves falling asleep, we were to stand up and walk to the back of the class. In future days, the number of recruits trying to remain conscious against the back wall would be an accurate indicator of the deadly dullness of a given lecture.

Nigro questioned the class, in roughly alphabetical order, about what we had done before coming to the Academy. The Antonelli brothers, handsome identical twins from the Buffalo area who were into bodybuilding, ran a landscaping business, which they had temporarily entrusted to their brother. Don Allen, one of three black men in the group, had worked in detention centers for the state’s Division for Youth (DFY). Tall and thin Aisha Foster, one of four black women, had been a guard at Rikers Island. Her Academy roommate, bubbly Tawana Ellerbe, had worked a clerical job for the New York City Police Department. Dave Arno, though he had a four-year-college degree and part of a master’s, had managed a
Burger King, unable to find any other job in the Syracuse area. Cleve Dobbins was a scatterbrained former Army M.P. in his forties. Carlos Bella had been a guard/counselor for New Jersey’s juvenile detention services department. Felix Chavez, a courtly Puerto Rican from Brooklyn, had worked as assistant to a building’s super. I too had managed an apartment complex, I could answer truthfully, and had also driven a cab. Peter DiPaola had worked as an accountant for a vending machine company. Matt Di Carlo, a Navy veteran and CO’s son, had run a gas station and, for the present, was still doing so on weekends. Diandre Dimmie was another former DFY guard; judging by his sharp suits, it made sense that he had also worked in a men’s clothing shop. Brian Eno was an intelligent, pear-shaped former emergency medical technician. Diminutive Anthony Falcone had recently finished his hitch with the Army.

To see if any of us were going to have trouble with the physical-performance test, Nigro hung a whistle around his neck after lunch and marched us, four abreast, across the Academy parking lot to the gym. The gym was set up for a run-through of the test, and the first thing I noticed when we came in was the heavy gray dummy dangling limply from the high ceiling by a noose around its neck. He was going to be part of the test. Another dummy lay next to him on the floor. Nearby stood a large track-and-field timer sign and a lot of other equipment.

Nigro explained that there were ten stops on the circuit, and we had to complete all of them within two minutes and fifteen seconds. Every task simulated an actual situation we might have to deal with as correction officers. Nigro said we’d better clap and cheer as our classmates ran through the course. A dozen preceded me; suddenly I was next. Nigro blew the whistle.

I grabbed a big silver fire extinguisher and, awkwardly, sprinted about thirty-five yards with it (to put out a fire set by an inmate, of course). Turning, I pushed with all my might against a movable wall (simulating an inmate barricade) and then climbed up and down a ladder attached to the side of the gym (simulating a wall tower). The 160-pound dummy—a stand-in for a suicidal inmate—was next: I wrapped my arms around his middle and lifted him up to relieve the pressure around the neck. Presumably, during the time I was holding him, another officer would be cutting him down. A whistle blew after I’d held him there for ten seconds, so I let him down gently (“Don’t break his neck!” Nigro shouted) and quickly went to the lying-down dummy. This, apparently, was the
dummy who didn’t make it. The job here was to drag him about fifty feet.

I was breathing hard when that was done, but right in front of me lay an eighty-pound barbell to raise from floor to standing position and hold for several seconds more—here I was carrying my end of a stretcher. The next stop was a gymnastics horse to vault (just to show we were not too out of shape); to my dismay, I wiped out on the far side. But my classmates cheered anyway, and in a flash, I had staggered to my feet and was threading my way around three quarters of the gym through a red-cone slalom course and then running up a staircase to the gym’s second floor and back down. Finally, to simulate pulling together the arms of a struggling inmate in order to handcuff him behind his back, I squeezed together a pair of calipers representing fifty pounds of resistance. And was through.

As I stood aside panting, the next recruit took off. Several more of them fell while coming over the horse, and two of the women had trouble squeezing the calipers. But everyone made it around in time, and Nigro, who might have had trouble negotiating the course himself, looked relieved.

New York’s seventy-one prisons are scattered across the state. Among them are famous maximum-security prisons—Sing Sing, Attica (in western New York, near Buffalo), Auburn (midstate), and Clinton (in the northern Adirondacks, near Canada)—as well as a variety of mediums and minimums, and work-release and mental-health facilities. (State prisons hold people with sentences of a year or more. Inmates awaiting trial or those serving shorter terms stay in local jails, such as New York City’s giant Rikers Island complex, near La Guardia Airport. Federal prisons generally house criminals convicted of federal crimes—often, drug dealers.)

Fifty of the state’s seventy-one prisons were built in the last twenty-five years, a period in which the number of inmates has increased nearly sixfold, from 12,500 to over 70,000, due mostly to mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenses. The majority of these inmates are young men of color from New York City. Because the state government is based in Albany, however, and the state senate is dominated by politicians from rural precincts, nearly all the prison construction has been outside of and
away from New York City, where job-hungry communities clamor for it.

A state salary goes far in small-town New York—correction officers, after eight years, make nearly $40,000 and enjoy numerous job benefits. Reflecting the demographic makeup of the state’s small towns, the officer corps is overwhelmingly white. As inmates are overwhelmingly minority, the racial hierarchy at most facilities resembles that of South Africa under apartheid.

Both inmates and younger officers tend to be on the move. Inmates are often shifted, with little notice, between facilities, according to obscure agendas of the Department. Officer recruits leave home to go to the Academy, then typically spend the next few years trying to get back: often, their first posting is Sing Sing, which always needs staff because of its chaotic reputation and location in pricey Westchester County. (Because of the prison’s proximity to New York City, the regular staff of Sing Sing is predominantly minority—an exception to the statewide rule.) The more desirable prisons have seniority-based waiting lists of up to several years. Until they get where they really want to be, most correction officers will hit the road for home at the beginning of two days off, even if it means a six- or seven-hour drive. And they’ll play hopscotch, transferring upstate from one “jump jail” to the next, until they can finally live at home again. Thus most of my classmates, starting with their seven weeks at the Academy, were becoming a kind of migrant worker.

Sergeant Bloom hoped to weed out the unsatisfactory recruits as soon as possible. With that goal in mind, he explained to us later, he sent our section on a field trip the second day, to a real prison called Coxsackie.

It was about a forty-minute drive from the Academy. We didn’t know another thing about it until the driver of our state school-bus, CO Popish, pulled up to the old complex of brick buildings ringed with tall fences and swirls of razor wire and shut off the engine. There were a few bare trees around, and some snow gusting over dead brown grass. Popish swung around in his seat. He was chubby and pale, and the other instructors didn’t seem to respect him much; driving the bus was, apparently, a chump job. But when Popish began to speak, our nervous chatter quickly stopped. Coxsackie, he said, was “a prison for youthful offenders.” Things had
been rough here lately; there had been attacks on guards, he added. With that the bus grew completely silent. It rocked slightly in the wind. Two officers had been slashed in the head, Popish said; one was now on disability. Two years ago, the Box was attacked, and the guy in the control booth held hostage. Popish described having seen the baton of a CO who came face-to-face with a shank-wielding inmate; the baton had a large slice cut out of it.

Our guide here, Popish said, would be McCorkle—one of the officers who had harassed us on the night of our arrival at the Academy. When he wasn’t training officers, he worked as a CO at Coxsackie, which he called “Gladiator School,” or “the Whack.” All I associated with
Coxsackie
was the respiratory virus that had first been discovered in the town, and named for it.

Once McCorkle’s bus arrived, we circled around the facility to the “sally port,” or vehicle gate. Normally a prison of this vintage would have a wall around it, not a fence, I was thinking; later I read in a DOCS newsletter from 1949 that Coxsackie had begun life in 1935 as a state “vocational institution” that aspired to “reformation rather than punishment” of youth through “care, supervision, and training.” (In the newsletter photo, there appeared to be no fence at all.) But those goals seemed to have slipped a bit. We were told to get out of the bus so that guards could search it, and then we were all scanned with metal detectors. It began to rain. We slogged through mud to a rear entrance, showed our I.D.’s, passed through another metal detector, and then marched down a long gray corridor.