Newjack (55 page)

It’s now three years since I last walked out of Sing Sing, and seven months since
Newjack
came out in hardcover. Many readers have asked me what happened since I quit: How did the state respond to my book? What were the reactions of my fellow officers? How did the experience change my life? And many people want to know what we should do about what can fairly be called our prison problem.

Predictably, the New York Department of Correctional Services (DOCS) was not happy about
Newjack
. By getting hired as a CO I effectively circumvented their prohibition on visiting the training academy and the prisons. A couple of months before publication, I called Charles Greiner, who was still the superintendent of Sing Sing, and told him about my project. I thought he might already have heard—I’d started telling officer friends—and I expected stony silence. But he appeared to know nothing of it, and listened long and carefully with what seemed to me great interest. He asked only whether I thought I’d gotten everything right, and I told him I’d done my best. There was no anger in his response; he said he looked forward to reading it.

But, by the time
The New Yorker
called DOCS to fact check a story I adapted for them from
Newjack
, word had spread. “He didn’t ask us for help with his book and so we’re not going to help him check his facts,” a spokesman snapped at the researcher, perhaps unaware that I
had
asked for help back in 1994, but was turned down. That attitude was a sign of things to come. Soon after
Newjack
was published, I learned that it had been declared contraband: New York State officers were not allowed to bring it into prisons, and inmates who received copies in the mail or through visit rooms had them confiscated. An acquaintance of mine who went to Sing Sing on an official visit had to leave his copy at the gate.

Thinking maybe Albany was unnecessarily equating me with the devil, I sent a signed copy to the commissioner of corrections, which he acknowledged with a curt note; I never heard from him again. An official from another state would later tell me he was
with the commissioner at a corrections conference and sat next to him as he read it near the swimming pool, moaning. A spokesman for DOCS, however, insisted later that neither he nor the commissioner would bother to read the book. “Who cares?” he said to a reporter for the
Albany Times Union
. “Why would I be interested in the view of a newjack?”

Three months after the book came out, DOCS decided that inmates
could
see
Newjack
after all—after their copies had been censored. In other words, any inmate who received
Newjack
had to surrender it immediately, on penalty of receiving a ticket for contraband. The prison would then forward the book to Albany, where somebody would physically tear out six pages that, according to officials, were “a potential source of injury or conflict among violent and predatory offenders within our system.” The press release wouldn’t say exactly which pages they were, but said they had to do with “issues of deployment of chemical agents, use of pressure points and holds taught to Officers to control inmates, control of emergency equipment in the event of a potential staff hostage situation, descriptions of Officer actions and duties during a mass incident, escape procedures, the effective range and use of certain firearms, and the local issue of descriptions of security issues in Sing Sing yards.” Mainly Academy stuff, in other words, along with what to do during a red dot emergency and the ways in which officers were made vulnerable by the antiquated configurations of Sing Sing’s exercise yards.
*

Were these legitimate security concerns? I don’t believe so. Riots have almost always been the result of poor prison administration or operation, not inmate knowledge of our top secret aikido grips. I had thought carefully about whether anything in
Newjack
could conceivably endanger my fellow officers before I included it in the book, and no officer has yet complained to me about those revelations. Indeed, when this was all playing out in the summer of 2000,
The New York Times
quoted an official of the correction officers’ union as saying, “We have no problem with the book. What he did was admirable.” No other prison system I know of limits inmate access to
Newjack
.

The atmosphere of controversy did give me some trepidation about a reading I was scheduled to give at the Ossining Public Library
in June of 2000. Of the half dozen officers whom I had told about the book prior to publication, none had seemed angry or concerned, but I knew that
Newjack
wouldn’t please everybody. I worried that an appearance in Ossining might present some malcontent with an opportunity to come after me.

The library is about a mile from Sing Sing, and twenty minutes before the reading, the room was already packed. One hundred and twenty folding chairs were taken, and the forty or so people standing near the entrance were told to move near the podium and sit on the floor. I squeezed through the mob, noting the crew from C-SPAN’s
Book TV
and then the fact that the front rows of chairs were filled mainly with gray uniforms. As she clipped on my microphone, the head librarian told me that some of the officers had arrived two hours early. She added that the local policemen had been invited simply as a precaution.

“What local policemen?”

“You didn’t see them? They’re out front.” Somebody from Sing Sing had called the week before, she explained, and “frightened our reference librarian” by telling her that “some people” at the prison were angry about the book and “might cause trouble” at the event. I had a sense of foreboding much like the one that had suffused so many of my days at Sing Sing—a feeling of imminent confrontation, of badness just ahead. But if there was one thing I had learned inside prison, it was how to repress fear. I clipped on a microphone and stepped to the lectern.

I’ve never enjoyed giving formal speeches, and so I spoke without notes about why I did the book: how prisons have gotten too numerous to ignore, how officers are so stunningly stereotyped, how the state has unfairly reserved the right to keep prison operation away from public scrutiny, how there’s no substitute for understanding a life like living it yourself, and how secrecy is a last resort for researching a story, but how once in a while, circumstances demand it. As I spoke I tried to read the faces of the officers and others in the room, scanning them for sympathy or anger or derangement. I saw glimpses of many reactions, but could draw no conclusions.

The range of questions asked after my talk was similarly inconclusive: there was the anti-prison activist who launched into a speech that I had to cut short, the tall bureaucrat (I guessed) who gruffly asked whether I’d announced my intentions to my coworkers, the woman interested in how my family handled the
experience, the black man who wanted to know about white supremacists in the system (I took him to be asking about inmates, but it turned out he wanted to know about officers).

Disconcertingly, people were seated all around me, and some of the questions came from behind; a television sound man waded carefully among those on the floor. The overcrowding lent a sense of chaos and volatility. I took a last question, received applause, and prepared to sign books at a table to my left. My wife, Margot, who knew nothing about the threat received by the librarian, stopped me as I was about to sit down. “I don’t like the feel of this,” she said, clearly rattled.

In the absence of an open space to form a line, people pressed in on me all around the bookseller’s table. At one point I stopped looking up to see where the book in front of me had come from; I simply said to the arm that put it there, “Would you like me to sign this to you?”

“Sign it to Perlstein,” a deep voice growled.

“Uh, Perlstein,” I said absently. “How do you spell that?”

“You should know,” came the reply. I looked up, followed the arm to the bicep and then finally to the face of … “Perlstein,” the huge white man who worked in the Special Housing Unit, or the Box, with Sing Sing’s worst inmates. He had raked his baton down my shin during my training there to demonstrate its power to inflict pain. In
Newjack
I had given him that pseudonym and described him as a “shaved-headed monster.”

Which still fit. Perlstein looked, if anything, even larger than I remembered him; his skull was shinier, his eyes smaller. But here, in a library and in his civvies, he wasn’t so frightening, was somehow … denatured. And then as the crowd shifted I noticed that
in his other arm he held a little girl
. Perlstein was a parent! I couldn’t think of a thing to say, except, “So, uh, did you like the book?”

“It was all right.”

Officers I didn’t know asked me to sign their books, too. A couple of them referred to the menacing sergeant whom I had also given a pseudonym. “Hey, Sergeant Wickersham is waiting for you outside,” said one. “He’s greasin’ his baton. He’s gonna drop a quarter, then tell you to bend over and pick it up.”

CO humor.

Nurses from the prison’s emergency room came by, as well as the prison’s “recreation director” and a bevy of sweet older ladies
from town. Half an hour later, the only people left were my wife and I—and about a dozen officers.

Three of them took out cameras. They wanted their pictures taken with me. They wanted their pictures taken with Margot. I knew a few of them: Aragon, Loachamin, McCall… . I was finally daring to believe that this was a good thing, that danger did not lurk. As she folded up chairs, the librarian said she’d heard the town policemen had enjoyed my presentation.

“Security? What’d they need security for?” CO McCall asked ingenuously. He gestured at the gathered officers. “They got all the security they need right here!”

Aragon had both a Polaroid and a regular camera, and he gave me a print of us shaking hands. I had portrayed him on the first page of
Newjack
as a guy who was a bit lock-obsessed: he put The Club on his car even though it was parked right beneath a wall tower and had affixed a tiny hasp on his lunch box to keep out pilfering officers.

“So you’re not sore at me?” I asked him.

“Naaa.” If anything, he seemed apologetic. “I have a different lunch box now that doesn’t have a lock on it.”

For all the time I spent in an officer’s uniform, one poignant reality of the life had only begun to sink in, and that was the depth of the stigma they felt, the pain of society’s disregard. The antidote was recognition and an appreciation of the job’s unique difficulties. This
Newjack
seemed to provide—“I saw you on TV, you told it like it is, man!” said an officer I’d never met—and in light of that recognition, it appeared that many things could be forgiven.

This was the first book I’ve written since the advent of e-mail, and more than 300 officers and their family members have sent me feedback in these eight months since publication, almost all of it enthusiastic. Among them were Vinny Nigro, my jolly trainer, who wrote, “Thanx for my 15 minutes and the history.” A fellow new-jack who bought
Newjack
the week it came out wrote, “It’s about time the public finds out about us. You tell the true story. Reading your book was like reading about myself.” Mendola, Goldman, Scarff, DiPaola, Smith, Saline, and others have all been in touch; I even had a spirited exchange with a writer who finally admitted to being Sergeant Wickersham’s sister and felt I’d been unfair to him. The biggest surprise has been the number of responses from officers’ spouses, many of whom say things like, “I didn’t really know
what my husband did at work until I read your book.” The occasional dissenter accuses me of betraying my fellow officers and being a rat, asserting that “what goes on in corrections should stay in corrections.” Since I hope
Newjack
constitutes an argument against that sort of thinking, I don’t imagine I’ll ever win those people over.

The response from inmates is coming in more slowly. Almost none of the ones I described in detail are still at Sing Sing. Larson wrote me that he’s doing a long term in the Box at a prison upstate; he hasn’t written back since I mailed him the book, which probably means the state is taking its time tearing the pages out. Delacruz was transferred to a new prison soon after I mailed him a copy, and I have no idea when it will catch up to him. Sadly, I was told that Elliot Markowitz, whose poetry I quote in
Chapter 7
, is now in the state mental hospital in Marcy, New York, and not allowed to receive books. A woman who is involved with a Sing Sing inmate got an early copy to him through the visit room and told me it was being passed around enthusiastically. When people ask me if DOCS has changed anything as a result of my book, I share the tidbit that he told her: soon after publication, the inmate said, the filthy windows in B-block were washed for the first time in memory.

Maybe that’s DOCS’ idea of reform.