Newjack (26 page)

“Oh, I know that guy,” I told Birch. “I wrote him up once for disobeying a direct order. But when I handed him the ticket, he told me I was wasting my time. He went and dug up a whole pile of tickets he’d gotten, which he said were always thrown out because he was crazy.”

“There’s a lot of guys in here like that,” Birch said. “And no, you can’t write ’em up. Keeplocking ’em just makes ’em worse. Can’t write ’em up.” He shook his head.

“Guy like you in here yesterday told me he’d written five tickets so far in his first five weeks. Five! That’s more than I probably wrote in my whole career. I’m part of the old school—we took care of things without all the paperwork then. Inmates knew that if they misbehaved, we were gonna fuck them up.” That, I should have realized right away, was how the PSU worked.

At midmorning, Officer Birch told me it was time for the lock-down inmates’ interviews with the mental-health staff, and he handed me a ring of keys. One at a time, I was to escort the inmates into a conference room where the staff was gathered, make sure they were seated, and then remain standing behind them ready to protect the staff in case of any outburst. This was a nerve-racking assignment, as I’d had no experience with any of the patients. And it was complicated by the fact that the interviews—
with a psychiatrist, social worker, nurse, and two other staff members—were interesting to listen to.

First—carefully, so as not to get wet—I tried Colon. “Will you talk to the committee now?” I asked.

“Fuck, no! Fuck them!” he cried. Birch had told me that this was how he’d reacted for the past several days and that I could skip him if he did that. He’d calm down later.

The next inmate, a tall skittish man, went along without a problem. He described to the psychiatrist how two demon COs were using secret symbols to communicate with space beings who landed on the roof of A-block. The COs intended to jinx him with voodoo. Glancing up at me with a hint of a smile, the psychiatrist suggested to the inmate that he consider taking Haldol (an antipsychotic medication). The man shook his head. “Once you start takin’ that shit …” he muttered.

The psychiatrist then proposed a drug that was milder, and the others at the big table nodded. Still the man demurred. But then the doctor laid it on: “Wouldn’t you take antibiotics for a cold or if you had a small infection?” he asked.

The inmate said he would.

“Well, this is like an infection in your head,” said the shrink. The inmate finally agreed to the daily medication.

I had already guarded the next inmate that morning, during a one-on-one interview with a caseworker in her office. He was a heavyset black man who had seemed calm during the meeting. As soon as he left the office, though, he’d begun to speak loudly and incomprehensibly about Mike Tyson. Now, he was calm during his meeting with the committee.

The psychiatrist, reading from a folder in front of him, said he would pretend to do a cross-examination. Was that all right? Sure, said the inmate.

“It says here you sometimes scream when you’re all by yourself. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“That you have an entirely new personality lately?”

“Yes.”

“That you often feel very angry, and go around yelling at everyone?”

“Yes.”

“That you think you’re the fifth Beatle?”

“No! That’s not true!”

The psychiatrist smiled. “I might have made that one up,” he said. Others on the committee chuckled.

“That you break things in your cell.”

“True.”

The inmate agreed to a new course of medication, much to the committee’s satisfaction. This was their main purpose, it appeared: to find a way to manage the inmates such that, with daily meds, they could return to the general population. Guard slang for these meds was
bug juice
or
the cure
, but everyone knew it was not a cure. (Many inmates believed that taking them would addle your brain permanently.) The PSU was a holding tank, not a place where people improved. No one, as far as I could see, improved in prison. It took weeks for an inmate in the general population to get an appointment with a therapist, and the wait between appointments, once a relationship had been established, also seemed to be weeks.

His interview concluded, the inmate left the room. The minute I closed the meeting room door, just as before, he resumed his rant: “Mike Tyson fucked ’em up, and now they’ll pay him, they’ll turn it around,” he bellowed. I was relieved to get him back in his cell.

The next two trips to the conference room passed without incident, but the interviews continued to enlighten me. One inmate, a Latino, seemed candid when describing the drugs he’d done in prison: marijuana, crack, powder heroin, Valium. I was surprised at the variety, but the committee wasn’t. And he knew the lines to use to impress them. (“But I know it’s important to stop drugs so that I can get my life together and, if I’m fortunate enough to earn parole, be a good provider to my kids.”) The next inmate, who was white, seemed more lost. He rambled on about the people who wanted to get him and a threatening letter he’d received. The committee seemed to know all about it. Abruptly changing the subject, a counselor said, “And you know what to stay away from, right?”

“Homosexuals, drugs, dice …” he began.

“Gangs, gambling, gays, and drugs,” she said.

“Right.”

Gays? I wondered. It sounded more like a political point of view than a therapeutic strategy. But I couldn’t ask. My radio squawked, as it often did, and the inmate glanced back at me nervously.

“Could you ask him to leave the room?” he said to the committee members. The psychiatrist nodded and gestured for me to leave.

And so the inmates went in and out, doing kind of a shuffle, perhaps a by-product of medication, perhaps because we had confiscated their shoelaces so they couldn’t hang themselves. Regardless, they seemed authentically sick to me.

They saved the worst inmate for last. Massey was a medium-size, twenty-something black man who was zoned out, like a zombie. Arriving at his chair, he wouldn’t take his seat. “Sit down now!” commanded the psychiatrist strictly and, very slowly, the man did. “Stand right behind him,” a female therapist whispered to me. “He might get up.” I don’t remember much about his interview because I was too busy worrying about what I would do if Massey did get up. I placed one of my hands on the end of my baton. There were general questions about the voices Massey heard, about why he wouldn’t take the medication. “That’s all for now,” said the psychiatrist.

Massey didn’t budge.

“I said we’re done now. You should leave the room,” the psychiatrist directed firmly. I removed my baton from its ring and walked into view of Massey. Slowly he stood. I held open the door. Slowly he moved through it. He seemed unresponsive to normal stimuli, sealed off in his own world. The way to his cell was straight ahead, but he turned right, toward the center gate, which led to the civilian offices. Birch was sitting beyond the gate. “Hey!” I yelled.

Massey bent for a drink at a fountain, then stood up and continued his walk. The center gate wasn’t closed as it was supposed to be.

“Stop right there!” I shouted, but Massey plodded on. Birch rose to his feet and stretched his arms across the open gate.
“Go back to your cell!”
he ordered. Massey walked on in slow motion, right into Birch, trying to push him out of the way.

In a split second, Birch had a hand around Massey’s throat, and I found myself joining him in pushing the inmate against the wall. Birch punched him in the stomach, yelled angrily, then punched him again. I twisted one of his hands into an ordinarily painful aikido grip, but Massey was oblivious. He stared blankly and struggled to get loose. With difficulty, we began moving him back toward his cell. Just then, a huge keeplock officer from B-block
named Phelan appeared—in the nick of time, as far as I was concerned, for Massey was surprisingly powerful. With Phelan, we moved him to the door of his cell, but there progress ceased, for Massey grabbed the bars and held on like a crab. It took ten or fifteen seconds for the three of us to pry him loose, during which Birch’s gold watch clattered to the floor. Even after we placed him on his cot, Massey got up and resumed a somnambulant march toward the door.

Phelan lifted him into the air and slammed him against the cell’s metal wall.

“Stop all this bug-game shit!” he yelled.

The inmate seemed insensate. No emotion passed across his face, no sign of fear or pain.
Bam!
Phelan slammed him up against the wall again. This time Massey looked more discouraged and didn’t try to stand. We locked him in and dusted ourselves off.

“Massey playin’ a bug game,” said Birch. He’d been in and out much of the past two months, he said, but he wasn’t usually this bad.

It was my first use-of-force incident, and the experience was heady. I paused to gather my thoughts. Department policy on this was quite strict. I was in charge of the PSU logbook, so I went to make an entry.

“What’re you doing?” asked Birch.

“Logging it.”

“Don’t log it. That’s a waste of time. Won’t no punishment come out of it for him, ’cause he’s a bug. It’s just a lot of paperwork we’d all three have to do. And Phelan’s gone now. Forget it.”

I held the pen poised above the paper for a moment, then put it down. I didn’t want to alienate Birch. What he said was like a lot of things about prison: brutal, but reasonable under the circumstances.

Sitting in chairs alongside the six psych-unit cells most days, twenty-four hours a day, were the officers assigned to two kinds of special watch: suicide watch and drug watch. Suicide watch was clear enough. Inmates thought to be on the verge of killing themselves had to be closely observed until they were deemed out of danger. Drug watch was similar but less glamorous. Any inmate who was thought to have swallowed some drug in a packet—in hopes of not getting caught with it—was placed for seventy-two
hours in a cell with the taps and toilet water turned off. He was allowed no underwear, only a paper gown. The observing officer was provided with latex gloves and a tongue depressor. In case of an inmate bowel movement that yielded some “prize,” he was to call a sergeant.

I spent two shifts and some overtime watching an inmate from Tappan who an officer had seen swallowing something white during a routine pat-frisk. In trying to stop him, the officer had broken his dental plate, the inmate complained; and all he’d been trying to swallow anyway, he said, was a written note. He’d been in there almost two days when I began, and had completed almost three when I finished, and still no action. His defeat of the system, after seventy-two hours, had much to do with the fact that he wouldn’t eat anything from the food trays that were brought to him three times a day. He did, however, drink water, and the area reeked of urine stagnating in the toilet bowl. The job was killingly dull, and I would have been likely to drift off to sleep if not for one fellow officer’s warning that an inmate he had once watched had had a movement, all right, but had then quickly reswallowed the packet of contraband before the officer could open up the cell.

Much more often, I was assigned to suicide watch, euphemistically known in the Department as special watch. When you arrived, you received no specific information about the inmate under observation—just the special-watch logbook, the only reading material the officer was allowed to have. One summer day, strung out from the blocks, I settled with relief into the special-watch chair and peered into the cell. My inmate, Morales, was fast asleep. My sole duty was to make an entry, every fifteen minutes, describing what Morales was up to. “Morales asleep,” I wrote several times.

The logbook went back two years. I decided to read the whole thing. The majority of entries described inmates snoring, lying on their sides, and turning over. But there were also some startling entries. One officer had accompanied a suicidal inmate to nearby St. Agnes Hospital:

Another series of entries was from the cell next to the one I was watching: