Newjack (19 page)

I would hear inmates utter these exact words several times more in the upcoming months at Sing Sing, a threat disguised as advice. (The phrasing had the advantage of ambiguity, and thus could steer the speaker clear of rule 102.10: “Inmates shall not, under any circumstances, make any threat.”) But I hadn’t heard those words spoken to me before, and that, in combination with the man’s standing so close, set my heart racing. I tried staring back at him as hard as he was staring at me, and didn’t move until he had stepped back first.

Some of the conflict we saw, of course, wasn’t only a fixed feature of prison life; it had roots in Sing Sing’s frequent changes of officers. New officers, as we’d already learned, irritated inmates in much the same way that substitute teachers irritate schoolchildren. To try to lessen these effects, the chart office would often “pencil in” a resource officer to the post of a senior officer who was sick or on vacation. That way, there wouldn’t be a different substitute every day.

One day in A-block, however, I was assigned to run the gallery temporarily assigned to one of my classmates, Michaels, whom I knew to be particularly lax. It was Michaels’s day off, which made me the substitute for a substitute. I knew before I even arrived that things would be chaotic.

My first problem came at count time, 11
A.M.
Inmates generally began to return to their cells from programs and rec at around 10:40 or 10:45
A.M.
The officers would encourage them to move promptly to their cells. By 11, anyone not in his cell and ready to
be counted was technically guilty of delaying the count and could be issued a misbehavior report. Few galleries, therefore, had inmates at large after 11
A.M
.

But on this day, Michaels’s gallery had a dozen still out. Michaels had grown up in Brooklyn and, more than most officers from the city, considered the inmates to be basically decent guys, his “homies.” He wanted them to like him. Once penciled in to this post, he had quickly learned all their names. I had helped him at count time once before, and when I complained about two inmates who were slow to lock in, Michaels replied that they were good guys. Though I had seen sergeants chew him out for looseness, he had told me privately that the sergeants could “suck my dick in Macy’s window” for all he cared.

I liked Michaels for acknowledging the inmates’ humanity. He had told me how much he hated A-block’s usual OIC, a big, pugnacious slob I’ll call Rufino, who told jokes such as “How do you know when an inmate is lying? When you see him open his mouth.” But I didn’t appreciate Michaels’s legacy of chaos that morning.

A group of three or four senior officers strolled by, to my relief—I was sure they’d been sent to help me usher in the stragglers. But they had no such plan. A couple of them glanced disapprovingly at their watches and then at me. They didn’t have to help, so they weren’t going to. Thanks, guys, I muttered to myself.

About an hour later, a couple of keeplocks returned from disciplinary hearings. The block’s keeplock officer, instead of borrowing my keys and ushering the inmates to their cells, called, “They’re back,” when he came through the gate and then disappeared. One of the keeplocks returned to his cell without trouble, but the second had other plans. It was Tuesday, he told me, and Michaels always let him take a shower on Tuesdays.

“Keeplock showers are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays,” I said. “And Michaels isn’t here today.”

“C’mon, CO, don’t play tough. I’ll be out in a second.”

“No,” I said. He acted as though he hadn’t heard, grabbed a towel from his cell, and strode quickly down the gallery to the shower stall. I wasn’t overly concerned: I always kept the showers locked, just in case something like this came up, and felt confident that once I reminded him he would miss keeplock rec today if he didn’t go back, he’d turn around. Then I remembered. On this gallery, the lock mechanism was missing from the shower cell
door. The shower was always open. Sing Sing. The inmate was a good foot taller than me and well muscled. I yelled through the bars into the shower that he’d lost his rec. He said, “Fuck rec.” I put the incident into the logbook, then wrote up a Misbehavior Report and had his copy waiting in the cell when he got back. He shrugged it off.

“I don’t give a fuck, CO,” he explained. “I got thirty years to life, right? And I got two years’ keeplock. Plus today, I got another three months. When they see this lame-ass ticket, they’re gonna tell you to shove it up your ass.”

The frustration was, he was probably right. Of all the inmates on a gallery, keeplocks were the hardest to deal with. There were no carrots left to tempt them with, and few sticks—especially for the long-termers. And now it was time for keeplock rec. I tried to match faces with cells as they headed out to the yard on that hot June day—it could help me when it came time to lock them back in. I was in the middle of letting them out when the keeplock officer reappeared. He gestured in the direction I was walking.

“Forty-three cell?” he said. “Hawkins? No rec today.”

“No rec for forty-three? Why’s that?”

“He doesn’t get it today,” he said, and disappeared.

I knew there could be several reasons for the inmate not receiving rec. He might have committed an infraction within the past twenty-four hours. Or he might have a deprivation order pending against him; in cases of outrageous misbehavior, a keeplock who was a “threat to security” could have his rec taken away for a day by a sergeant. Or—what I worried about in this situation—he might have pissed off the officer but
not
had a deprivation order pending. In that case, another officer was asking me to burn the keeplock’s rec as an act of solidarity. I hoped it wasn’t the last possibility and went on down the gallery, passing up forty-three cell.

The inmate called out to me shortly after I went by.

“Hey, CO! Aren’t you going to open my cell?” I ignored him until I was on my way back. He stood up from his bed as I approached.

“Open my cell, CO! I’m going outside.”

“Not today,” I said.

“What? Why not today?”

“No rec today.”

“Why not?”

“That’s what they told me.”

“Who told you that?”

I didn’t answer him, but I immediately felt I’d done something wrong. I returned to the office and tried to get the keeplock officer on the phone. I was going to insist on knowing his reason. What was up with this guy? The phone rang and rang. I called the office of the OIC and asked for him. He was outside now; couldn’t be reached, Rufino said. But Rufino was always unhelpful. I called the yard. He’d had to go somewhere, wasn’t there now. Shit, I thought.

Meanwhile, three keeplocks on their way out to the yard stopped separately to advise me that “forty-three cell needs to come out, CO.” I looked down the gallery. He was waving his arm madly through the bars, trying to get my attention. I walked down to talk to him.

“You’re not letting me out?”

I shook my head.

“Who said so?” He was angry now.

“I don’t know his name,” I lied.

“Well, what did he look like?” I declined to help out. “Then what’s your name? I’m writing up a grievance.” I told him my name. When I passed by the cell again an hour later, he had a page-long letter written out.

Instead of the classic newjack mistake of enforcing a rule that nobody really cared about, I had just enforced a rule that wasn’t a rule, for my “brother in gray.” I knew that many police admired that kind of thing. But it made me feel crummy. And with the grievance coming, I was going to have to answer for it.

I thought about how the senior officers hadn’t helped me during the count, how the keeplock officer hadn’t helped me when the two inmates came back, and how the same keeplock officer hadn’t explained to me the deal with forty-three, even when I asked. More than once at the Academy, I’d heard the abbreviation CYA—cover your ass. I knew how to do it, though I also knew there could be consequences. In the logbook, I made note of the time and wrote, “No rec for K/L Hawkins, per CO X”—the keeplock officer. And then I waited.

The chicken came home to roost about a month later. I knew it when I arrived at work and approached the time clock. Officer X, instead of ignoring me as usual, gave me a cold, hard stare. His partner, Officer Y, stopped me and asked if I was Conover. Yes, I
said, and he gave me the same stare and walked away. It was because inmate Hawkins in cell 43 had slugged Officer Y the day before (as I’d since learned) that Officer X had wanted to send him a message that day.

A sergeant who was unaware of all of this approached me with a copy of the inmate’s grievance letter in the mess hall at lunchtime that same day. “Do you remember this incident?” he asked. I said yes. “You’ll just need to respond with a To/From,” he said, using department slang for a memo. “Do you remember why you didn’t let him out? Probably forgot, right?”

“Well, no, the keeplock officer told me not to.”

The sergeant wrinkled his brow. “Well, probably best just to say you forgot,” he said cheerily, and turned away.

“Sarge,” I said. “It’s in the logbook. I wrote in the logbook that he told me.”

“You’re kidding,” he said. “Why’d you do that?”

I shrugged. “I was new.”

“I’ll get back to you,” he said.

I wrote the memo the sergeant had asked for, told the truth, and felt conflicted. Days went by. Another sergeant called me in and told to me to see a lieutenant in the Administration Building. My memo was on the lieutenant’s desk, and he was poring over it. “So you say you logged this part about Officer X, right?” he asked. I nodded, expecting to receive a stern, quiet lecture on how not to fuck my fellow officer. But the lieutenant just nodded, cogitated a bit, and then picked up the phone.

I heard him greet a sergeant in A-block. “So Officer X remembers saying that to Conover now, is that right? And he’s going to write a new To/From? And you’ll take care of the deprivation order? Okay, fine.” And hung up.

He passed my memo to me over the desk. “Just write this up again, but leave out the name of Officer X,” he told me.

“And then we’re set?”

“All taken care of.”

I was relieved. Officer X was off the hook, which meant that maybe he wouldn’t hate me more than he already did. Apparently, a deprivation order would be backdated to cover
his
ass. And I had learned an important lesson: If you were going to survive in jail, the goody-goody stuff had to go. Any day in there, I might find myself in a situation where I’d need Officer X to watch my
back, to pry a homicidal inmate off of me, at his peril. The logic of the gray wall of silence was instantly clear, as clear as the glare of hate that Officer X had sent my way when he heard what I’d done.

The single most interesting word, when it came to the bending and ignoring of rules, was
contraband
. To judge by the long list of what constituted contraband, its meaning was clear. In practice, however, contraband was anything but.

The first strange thing about contraband was that its most obvious forms—weapons, drugs, and alcohol—could all be found fairly readily inside prison. Some of the drugs probably slipped in through the Visit Room, but most, it seemed, were helped into prison by officers who were paid off. The Department had a special unit, the Inspector General’s Office, which followed up on snitches’ tips and tried to catch officers in the act; the union rep had even warned us about the “IG” at the Academy. A couple of times a year, I would come to find, a Sing Sing officer was hauled off in handcuffs by the state police.

But even in its lesser forms, contraband had many interesting subtleties. As officers, we were not allowed to bring through the front gate glass containers, chewing gum, pocket knives with blades longer than two inches, newspapers, magazines, beepers, cell phones, or, obviously, our own pistols or other weapons. A glass container, such as a bottle of juice, might be salvaged from the trash by an inmate and turned into shards for weapons. The chewing gum could be stuffed into a lock hole to jam the mechanism. The beepers, newspapers, and magazines were distractions—we weren’t supposed to be occupied with any of that while on the job. Nor could we make or receive phone calls, for the same reason. Apart from inmates smoking in their cells, smoking was generally forbidden indoors.

And yet plenty of officers smoked indoors. Many chewed gum. The trash cans of wall towers were stuffed with newspapers and magazines.

A much longer list of contraband items applied to inmates. As at Coxsackie, they couldn’t possess clothing in any of the colors reserved for officers: gray, black, blue, and orange. They couldn’t possess cash, cassette players with a record function, toiletries containing alcohol, sneakers worth more than fifty dollars, or more than fourteen newspapers. The list was very long—so long, in fact,
that the authors of
Standards of Inmate Behavior
found it easier to define what
was
permitted than what wasn’t. Contraband was simply “any article that is not authorized by the Superintendent or [his] designee.”

You looked for contraband during pat-frisks of inmates and during random cell searches. One day in A-block, I found my first example: an electric heating element, maybe eight inches wide, such as you’d find on the surface of a kitchen range. Wires were connected to the ends of the coil, and a plug was connected to the wires. The inmate, I knew, could plug it into the outlet in his cell, place a pan on it, and do some home cooking. I supposed it was contraband because of the ease with which it could start a fire, trip the cell’s circuit breaker, burn the inmate, or burn someone the inmate didn’t like. And it must have been stolen from a stove somewhere inside the prison.