Newjack (18 page)

Two days after my time with Smith was Conversion Day, when we became regular officers. We had to don our dress-blue uniforms again for the occasion. I talked with Arno outside the QWL building. He’d finally abandoned his efforts to wear long hair and had cut it all off—he was clean-shaven, right down to his skull. He looked good but tired: He’d worked the three-to-eleven shift the night before and had only had a few hours’ sleep. But, he said, it had been an interesting shift. He’d been working the first floor of the Hospital Building when an officer in B-block was struck on the head with a broom handle by an inmate. Officers had brought the prisoner down to the Hospital Building, which also housed the disciplinary offices and the watch commander’s office, where most of the white-shirts hung out. There, from a room near the ER, Arno said, he and many others, including inmate porters, had heard a white-shirt shout, “You think it’s
funny
to hurt an officer?” and the guy responded with prolonged cries of pain. Arno said this went on for about twenty minutes. A month earlier, I would have reacted negatively to a story like that. But now, seeing how outnumbered officers were and feeling more like prey than predator, I found in the tale a grain of comfort.

The superintendent was coming down to speak with us, but first they wanted to show us a video the Department had made of our training class in Albany. It all seemed so long ago, and so transparent now too, as I watched us getting yelled at in the Academy halls and on the floor of the gym—the breaking us down in order to build us back up. And though military boot camp had been the model, it was arresting this time around to see how much it really was like prison.

There we were, in only a slightly more upscale way, doing all the things that inmates had to do: receiving our uniform allowance,
waiting in endless lines for chow, getting counted, wearing numbers on our T-shirts during rec, getting sprayed in the face with chemical agents, enduring a nearly single-sex environment and constant supervision, and living by a zillion mindless rules. There was DiPaola marching in the funny mincing step we learned just for graduation—I remembered the day we discovered the note from Sergeant Bloom, penalizing our room for a tuft of fuzz left at the bottom of the trash can. “If he comes by here now,” Deep suggested, “let’s shit him down.”

Now, however, we were at the ceremonial crossroads between our infantilization and our investiture with life-and-death powers. Soon we’d be holding the keys. Lieutenant Wilkin conducted a brainstorming session with us in which he wrote on a big art pad our suggestions for improving CO training. To my surprise, maybe a third of my classmates thought the training should be longer (training for the state police lasted something like five months, we learned). No doubt the prospect of real work around the corner—many, like me, had to return at 6:45
A.M.
Sunday morning—led to some sentimentalizing of our Academy days. Others suggested that a longer Academy would not be necessary if short classes weren’t booked into long class periods, leaving us to practice pool shots in the lounge for a couple of hours each day.

Our trainers got in the last word, telling the older women in our class that they’d better get used to being called Grandma and the black officers that they should become accustomed to hearing “You been workin’ in the white man’s house; you a house nigger.”

“Good luck” or “Godspeed” were what you might expect to hear at the conclusion of on-the-job training for some other kind of work. Here, our bon voyage had a definite CO flavor:

“You’re the zookeeper now,” said Officer Luther. “Go run the zoo.”

S
ing Sing was a world of adrenaline and aggression to us new officers. It was an experience of living with fear—fear of inmates, as individuals and as a mob, and fear of our own capacity to fuck up. We were sandwiched between two groups: Make a mistake around the white-shirts and you would get in trouble; make a mistake around the inmates and you might get hurt.

At the Academy, prison had been likened to a village—a self-contained
world with its own school, workshops, hospital, and so forth. But what they didn’t say was that prison was also a microcosm of a totalitarian society, a nearly pure example of the police state. The military provided the model for the chain of command; enlisted men and women were marshaled daily by their superior officers into a battle of wills with the mass of angry and resentful prisoners. We who were in uniform controlled nearly every aspect of their lives. And prison, more than any place I’d ever been, was about rules.

The Academy had taught us about rules the way a fundamentalist teaches the Bible in church, taking literally the injunctions about moneylenders and Armageddon and wives who existed to serve husbands. And then the congregation went out into the world, where most Christians were flexible about such strictures but still considered themselves devout, and justifiably so. A good cop, after all, wasn’t the one who ticketed you for doing thirty-three miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. A good cop enforced selectively, using his judgment.

I was intrigued by a Latino officer I’d seen in the lineup room. He was posted to a gallery in A-block. Like the rest of us, he kept his little yellow
Standards of Inmate Behavior, All Institutions
booklet in his breast pocket, but unlike us, he had written FUCK NO in block letters along the top edge of the booklet—the part that peeked out of the pocket. It was his personal message to inmates and, actually, a pretty good summary of the booklet itself. It made me think he was probably a good officer, funny but tough, an enforcer of the rules. Later, a classmate who would spend a week working with that officer told me how every morning an inmate would fix him his coffee, passing the mug out through the bars of his cell. That made me reconsider. There was no rule against it, but what favors was the officer passing back in the inmate’s direction? How could you ever trust an inmate enough to drink his coffee?

This fuzziness surrounding the rules was a strange counterpoint to the solidity of Sing Sing’s walls, the seeming immutability of the prison. During that long summer, from mid-May to late September, I thought about it as I walked the tunnels and corridors from the lineup room to various buildings up the hill. My classmates and I had been placed in the resource pool and worked all over the prison. Eyes cast downward toward the floor, I’d watch the yellow traffic lines painted down the middle of most hallways to keep opposing traffic on its proper side. There were broad perpendicular
lines at gates, where inmates were supposed to stop and wait for permission to proceed. Of course, they hardly ever did. Had they ever? The lines struck me as wistful suggestions of a stricter time, of rules now observed in the breach, a memory fading like the strict lessons of the Academy.

Many times during those first months I was assigned to A-block. The mammoth cellblock required more officers to run it than any other building—around thirty-five during the day shift—but the senior officers there seemed particularly unfriendly to new officers, offering little encouragement and lots of criticism. The best way to fend off their comments, I decided, would be to try and enforce the rules as strictly as I could.

But, assigned to one of the vast eighty-eight-cell galleries for the first time, I found it hard to know where to begin. With the sheets hanging from the bars like curtains? The clothes drying on the handrails? The music blaring from several cells? I decided to start with the annoyance closest at hand: an inmate’s illegal radio antenna.

Inmates were allowed to have music. Each cell had two jacks in the wall for the headphones its occupant was issued upon arrival. Through one jack was transmitted a Spanish-language radio station; through the other, a rhythm-and-blues station, except during sporting events, when the games were transmitted instead. Inmates could have their own radios, too, but the big steel cellblock made reception very difficult. Telescoping antennas were forbidden, because they might be turned into “zip guns.” By inserting a bullet into the base of an extended antenna and then quickly compressing it, an inmate could fire the inaccurate but still potentially deadly gun. The approved wire dipole antennas were supposed to be placed within a two-by-four-foot area on the wall—where, apparently, they did no good at all.

To improve their chances of tuning in to a good station, inmates draped wires over their bars and across the gallery floor. Some even tied objects to the end of a bare strand of copper wire and flung it toward the outside wall, hoping that it would snag on a window and that they would win the reception jackpot. (When you looked up from the flats on a sunny day, you could sometimes
see ten or twenty thin wires spanning the space between the gallery and the exterior wall, like the glimmering work of giant spiders.)

Antennas strewn across the gallery floor could cause someone to trip, and if they seemed likely to do so, I’d have the inmates pull them in. But the inmate in question on my first day as a regular officer in A-block—a short, white-haired man in his sixties—had gotten his off the floor by threading wire through a cardboard tube, the kind you find inside wrapping paper. One end of the tube was wedged between his bars at stomach level, and the other protruded halfway into the narrow gallery space between cell bars and fence, like a miniature bazooka.

“You’re gonna have to take this down,” I advised him the first time I brushed against it.

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s in my space.”

“But I can’t hear if it’s in my cell.”

“Sorry. Try stringing it up higher on your bars.”

“Sorry? You ain’t sorry. Why say you sorry if you ain’t sorry? And where’d you get to be an authority on antennas? They teach you that in the Academy?”

“Look, you know the rule. No antenna at all outside the cell. I could just take it if I wanted. I’m not taking it. I’m just telling you to bring it in.”

“You didn’t tell that guy down there to bring his in, did you? The white guy?”

I looked in the direction he indicated. There were no other antennas in tubes, and I said so.

“You’re just picking on the black man, aren’t you? Well, have a good time at your Klan meeting tonight,” he spat out. “Have a pleasant afternoon. You’ve ruined mine.”

All this over an antenna. Or, rather, all brought into focus by an antenna. In prison, unlike in the outside world, power and authority were at stake in nearly every transaction.

The high stakes behind petty conflict became clear for me on the night during my first month when Colton and I were assigned to work M-Rec, one of the kinds of recreation that Sing Sing relied upon heavily in order to give the prisoners something to do. After dinner, instead of the gym or the yard, inmates could gather at the gray-metal picnic-style tables bolted to the floor along M-gallery, on the flats, to play cards or chess or dominoes, or watch the television sets mounted high on the walls.

“The rule is that they can’t be leaning against the bars of the cells,” the regular officer said to us, “and the cell gates are supposed to be closed.” You could tell from his “supposed” that this rule was not strictly enforced. Still, Colton, a lieutenant’s son, seemed strangely zealous. I think he couldn’t stand the laxity around us. As we walked along the dimly lit gallery, he challenged one inmate after another. I decided that to keep his respect, I had better do the same. At varying volumes, they objected. “What is this, newjack rec?” asked one older man in a kufi who was sitting right outside his own open cell. I gestured toward the door. He told me that he was
always
allowed to leave the cell door open during M-Rec. Well, not tonight, I said. He yelled and screamed. I closed the gate. He walked right up to me, stood less than a foot from my face, and, radiating fury, said, “You’re going to learn, CO, that some things they taught you in the Academy can get you killed.”