Newjack (24 page)

“Now, if an inmate takes his hand off the wall—if he even looks back at you—you grab him like
this,”
he said, standing behind me and lifting one leg by the shin, “and push him ahead like
this.”
He squished me against the wall like a linebacker, my leg in hog-tied position. It hurt, and Perlstein knew it hurt.

He also reviewed the best places to strike with a baton: the exposed bones of the lower body. As I stood toward the wall, he ran his baton down the front of my shin.

“Ow.”

“Imagine if it was more than a little tap,” Perlstein said with satisfaction.

Perlstein gave me a lighter and sent me down to the north-facing gallery by myself, with instructions to light inmates’ cigarettes. (Like other inmates, they could smoke in their cells, but they were not allowed to have matches.) This was unexpectedly frightening. All I knew about Box inmates was that they were very, very bad. I thought of Agent Clarice Starling approaching Hannibal Lecter’s cell in
The Silence of the Lambs
. Downstairs at the Box was the lowest level of hell. The guy who had attacked Sergeant Bloom at Coxsackie had until recently resided here. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer, was in the Box at Sullivan for nine years. The Box at Elmira held Lemuel Smith, who had picked up an unsupervised phone and tricked a young newjack, Donna Payant, into meeting him in a chaplain’s empty office at Green Haven Correctional Facility, where he raped and strangled her (and, according to Nigro, at the Academy, chewed off her nipples) in 1981—the last CO murdered on the job in New York State. He was insane, the devil incarnate, as bad as it got. But others here were no doubt almost as bad.

I assumed a confident pose as I passed through the gallery gate and slid it closed behind me. Unlike the Box at Coxsackie, which had seemed a true solitary confinement, with inmates hard-pressed to communicate with each other through solid-steel doors with Lexan windows, the cells here were barred. Some of the inmates had been leaning against their bars, talking; they stopped when I came into view. I held the lighter at arm’s length for two who had rolled their own, ready to spring back at any second. Both seemed
to watch me closely. I tried not to meet their eyes. I pretended my face was made of granite.

Perlstein had a fair complexion; his pal, Proctor, was similarly proportioned, seemingly more human, and dark-haired. We ate lunch—our own, and sandwiches left over from the inmates’ feeding (this was against the rules)—near the exercise yard, and Proctor found it incomprehensible that I had once lived in Colorado. “And you left? I’d die to get out of here.” McDonough, as tall as the others but with a potbelly, was, like Perlstein and Proctor, in his late twenties or early thirties. I thought of him as the most arrogant of the crew. One day, in the corridor, when I was working a gate, he had snatched my radio off my belt to make some urgent call. Box officers always acted as though their business was urgent. But McDonough was also funny. One day, as we were leaving for home, he had called out to the chart sergeant at his desk,
“Salaam aleikum!”
—the phrase with which Black Muslims were always greeting each other solemnly.

A fourth officer, Gotham, showed me around another day when I worked the upper floor of the Box. Both floors had cages, or bubbles, in which one officer sat and operated the gates and cell doors by means of an ancient system of brass-handled levers that protruded from the wall. That officer wasn’t allowed to leave the bubble before a relief officer came in. (It made going to the bathroom difficult. A friend of mine explained that the downstairs officers sometimes solved the problem by resorting to a door that led from the bubble to the utility space between the cells—there was water in the floor area, and you could add to it.) Most other procedures had to be followed to the letter, many of them having to do with not opening more than one gate at a time, to ensure the strictest control over inmate movement.

Gotham was shorter than the other SHU guys and wore glasses, but he was quick to tell me that he wouldn’t hesitate to take down a recalcitrant inmate and that the inmates hated him; “In three years, I’ve had a hundred fifty use-of-forces,” he said. That was an average of about one per week. I wondered whether he was exaggerating or whether working the Box was just that tough. Gotham had been punched, too, he said. The year before, an inmate had broken a bone in his face and he’d needed six stitches.

Gotham maintained to me that if there was any trouble, pulling the radio’s emergency pin would be the wrong response, because “we take care of matters by ourselves here.” But he apparently forgot
to tell the guys working downstairs. At just past 1
P.M.
that day, there was a red-dot alarm called from the exercise yard. Three inmates were fighting; at least one had a weapon. The heavy front door was opened and I pulled wide the gate to the downstairs, standing to the side as some twenty-five to thirty officers responded. That was a lot of meat, and probably several times the number that would be required to subdue two or three inmates (which they promptly did). But emergencies in the Box got everyone’s attention.

The environment of the Box produced stunning acts of insanity and barbarism. During our OJT, Officer Luther had told us of a Box inmate nicknamed Mr. Slurpee, who would project a spray of urine and feces at officers—from his
mouth
. One day at lineup, a sergeant held up for display an interesting-looking noose about three feet long. “We think we take everything away that they could hurt themselves with,” he said. “And then we find this—made out of toilet paper.” He left it out for display after lineup. An inmate had rolled endless yards of toilet paper into tight cords before weaving the cords together into the noose. It was dingy from all the handling and, to judge by my tugging, seemed as tough as a real rope. Impressive, I thought. But, on another level: all this resourcefulness and the end result a
noose?

One day, on my way out of the building at shift’s end, Chavez asked if I’d heard what had happened during the executive team’s inspection of the Box that day. No, I said, I hadn’t.

“The superintendent found a guy who hung himself up. He even cut him down.”

“The
superintendent
found him? Was the guy dead?”

“I don’t think so, not quite.”

The toilet-paper noose didn’t have anything to do with an officer’s laxity. Most SHU incidents did. One morning in August, a lieutenant told us during lineup that an SHU inmate had gotten out of the shower stall due to an improperly closed door, grabbed and broken a mop handle, and then smashed fifty-eight windows. (Because the building was old, the large windows were made of many small panes.) When he was finally overcome, a long glass shard with cloth wrapped around it for a handle was found in his waistband. I listened to this raptly, amazed by what it suggested about the man’s mental state. But the lieutenant had no interest in the inmate’s mental state. He was telling us about the
incident in order to reemphasize the importance of strictly following procedures.

At the next day’s lineup, there was more: The day after the window-breaking incident, the officer working the downstairs bubble had had a container of urine chucked at him after a colleague failed to close the gallery gate. Then—this was starting to get embarrassing—a sergeant responding to the incident failed to secure a gate and had liquid of an unknown nature thrown in
his
face. It sounded like the Box was out of control.

“See me after this,” Sergeant Holmes had said to me and five others, including my friend Feliciano, shortly before that lineup. We waited, the more senior officers speculating about what was up. A different sergeant pointed us into a separate room. The administration, he told us, had ordered a second complete search of the downstairs of the Box for contraband, particularly shards of glass, in the wake of the recent incidents. This would be done one cell at a time and one inmate at a time. Some inmates—particularly because it would involve a second strip-search—were expected to resist. We were off to conduct a Nuts and Butts, in other words, with the possible need for a Hats and Bats.

We were each issued handcuffs and a flashlight, and loaded up with Cell Search/Contraband and Misbehavior Forms, as well as three big bags of “cell-extraction”/Hats and Bats gear: helmets with Plexiglas visors, stab-proof vests, knee and elbow pads, and heavy gloves. Box officers joined us, and then two sergeants. A dozen of us marched purposefully downstairs to the Box. There was action ahead, and I felt suddenly excited to have been included. Despite the ominous tone, and my better instincts, I’d countenanced enough inmate misbehavior and disrespect to feel invigorated by the thought that this is where it all stops.
This is where we draw the line
. We were going to follow the rules, and we were going to have our way.

By the time we’d descended to the first floor, the inmates had become very quiet. They could hear us, no doubt, but couldn’t yet see us. One of my training officers, Konoval, the first to walk into their view, set up a video camera on a tripod to record the proceedings; I had noticed that the Department often took this precaution when a use-of-force was anticipated, probably to protect itself from lawsuits. We all donned latex gloves and then, en masse, poured into the gallery.

Feliciano and I were a team, and there were three other pairs like us. Each team had been assigned a cell. I did the talking to our inmate, a Latino in his twenties. “Good morning,” I said through the bars. “We’re going to strip-frisk you, then you’re going to come out and we’re going to frisk your cell.”

The man had been through this drill two or three days before, and assented. He didn’t look angry or demented, just sort of discombobulated. He handed us his shirt, his pants, his socks, and his underwear, and then he turned, bent over, and spread his cheeks.

“Fine,” I said as he dressed. “Now, turn around and we’ll cuff you.” As the inmate put his hands behind him and through an opening in the door, Feliciano cuffed him.

“Open 105!” I called out to the officer in the bubble. The cell door opened and the inmate stepped out backward, wearing socks but no shoes. Feliciano held his handcuff chain and walked the man toward the opposite wall, where the windows had been broken by the inmate with the mop handle. Feliciano told this inmate not to turn around, then drew his baton and held it in ready position across his torso, what was called port-arms position.

I frisked the cell. It was a pigsty, with roaches crawling over the bunched-up sheets and garbage on the floor. I flipped through his notebooks; the handwriting was unexpectedly lovely. The inmate wrote in Spanish. He had also made a chess set, using toothpaste caps and squares of paper as pieces. (I had seen these games in action. Another inmate had to have a board, too, and they made moves by voice, since neither could see the other’s board.) There was a lot of pencil-written gang graffiti on the walls, but no contraband.

The frisk of our second cell, which belonged to a skinny, middle-aged man, was also uneventful. Feliciano turned up only an extra state-issued pillow, which we confiscated. Before this search was over, however, we were distracted by a commotion at the entrance to the gallery. The Box officers, Perlstein, Proctor, and McDonough, had donned full cell-extraction gear. I had seen video of the Hats and Bats outfit at the Academy; it was much more intimidating seen up close. The team was preparing to go in after an inmate named Duncan, who had refused to cooperate.

I recognized Duncan from B-block—a short black man with dreads who apparently was a perpetrator in a recent fracas in the B-block yard in which officers had been injured. Cameras had shown him throwing things at officers and egging on other inmates. He
seemed to hate COs. The cell-extraction officers stood one in front of the other, the second and third holding on to the officer in front of him and the lead officer carrying a see-through riot shield. On a signal, they started moving forward in step, like a locomotive gaining speed. “Open 101!” someone shouted. Another officer pulled open the cell door and they went in on one another’s heels, the shield used to force Duncan into the back corner of the cell. It was hopeless for him, I knew—like going into battle with a rhino. Three minutes and many thuds later, the team emerged with the inmate in handcuffs and leg restraints. He somehow managed to raise a fist in defiance as they carried him upstairs to do a forcible strip search.

That was when things started getting raucous. Inmates up and down the gallery began to yell. We were “bitch-ass faggot motherfuckers.” We were getting off on looking at them naked. This whole search was just retaliation. They would file lawsuits, because we were not following directive 4910 (which said that sergeants had to be in constant supervision of a strip-frisk). One inmate began pleading to see one of the sergeants but then, when she refused to talk to him, he started berating her and Sing Sing’s two black captains as “house niggers.”

“Kill all house niggers, kill all house niggers,” he chanted, for more than fifteen minutes.

The air of pandemonium made me feel less certain that everything was under control. Somehow, this felt like the first wave of an attack. Feliciano and I were given a third cell, that of a young, thin black man, Lincoln George. I repeated the line about the strip-frisk and asked him to hand us his clothes.

“I’m not going to show you my asshole,” he stated without affect as he started to remove his shirt.

“You’ve got to,” I said.

He stopped taking the shirt off.

“I won’t do it,” he repeated.

I tried to reason with him, in a low voice. “Look, man, you see what they’re doing. They’ll do it to you. It’s not worth it. We’ll be done in like five seconds. Let’s just get it done.”

He shook his head, and said, “According to directive 4910, you could use a hand scanner instead of doing a body-cavity search.”

“This is not a body-cavity search,” I said. “Nobody’s going inside. We’re just looking from the outside.”

He shook his head. Why on earth, I wondered, would anyone choose cell extraction?