Newjack (41 page)

“And we’re friends, right, Conover?”

“You tell me, Larson.”

He sat silently. His question went right to the heart of the matter and left us at … an impasse. But I had a feeling he wouldn’t mock me again, and he didn’t.

It may be that I was a bit paranoid, given my secret mission, but paranoia was nothing foreign to B-block. Even the seemingly steady Larson suffered from this prisoner’s disease. The fear that if you agitated too much you might disappear on a transfer to another prison or suddenly come down with AIDS was common
among black nationalists, he told me. And I soon realized that he himself suspected that the system could probably just do away with you if it wanted to.

“What about relatives reporting you missing?” I asked.

“You ever hear about the new gym at Clinton?” he responded. I said I hadn’t. “When they were digging the foundation, they found the bodies of a lot of old inmates.”

“You mean, like an old prisoners’ graveyard? I think Sing Sing used to have one of those, long ago, up by Wallpost fifteen.”

“No, not skeletons—
bodies,”
he said.

I let that sit for a moment. “Hmm. For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen or heard anything that makes me think that could happen.”

Larson nodded knowingly, as if now convinced of my naïveté. He told me I must not have met the backwoods clans of guards who run Attica, Clinton, or Comstock—“people who could do anything and hide anything.”

But conspiracies weren’t his main interest—redemption was. Race and color were his great obsession. He wanted to learn the true meaning of blackness and thereby conquer the stigma; anthropology intrigued him as the study of where humankind began. But his mind was also full of pseudoscience.

Black, he said, was the color of carbon, the element that was present in all life. Therefore, we were all inherently black. Black, also, was the color of fairness; why else were the robes of judges black? He told me about an article he had read, by a white researcher who couldn’t deny the truth, about the amazing properties of melanin, the source of pigment in the skin. Japanese bullet trains actually ran on it, he’d read. Early hominids with an abundance of melanin in their skin could absorb energy from the glare of the sun or the sound of the wind and convert it into calories if they ran short of food. And they lived longer because of it—up to 150 or 200 years, in bygone days. Again I told him I doubted it, but I felt somehow honored to hear the off-kilter theories of this isolated autodidact, because I knew he wouldn’t tell just anyone, especially not COs.

“Do you think I’m inferior?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Because you’re black? Of course not.”

“But don’t you think other COs do?”

That one I didn’t want to answer, so I tried to make a joke. “Maybe a few of them, but not the black ones.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Larson replied. He thought that even successful black men were insecure. “Look how they go and marry white women, want to hang out with white people. They’re trying to prove something to themselves.”

“Not you, though,” I said.

Larson pointed through his bars, across the gallery walkway, through the chain-link fence, and down to a cluster of white OJTs chatting on the flats. “Nope. Not to one of those
peasants
.”

Though deprivation had warped Larson’s vision in a couple of areas, it seemed crystal-clear in another: new prison construction. He passed me a couple of dog-eared photocopies from radical journals that decried the huge social resources being devoted to imprisonment—$35 billion a year in the United States and growing, despite the drop in violent crime. By the time I was writing this book, a cover story in
The Atlantic Monthly
had made the same points in greater detail. Though the rate of violent crime in the country is down 20 percent since 1991, the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. California, with the Western world’s biggest prison system (40 percent larger than the federal Bureau of Prisons), predicts that at the current rate of expansion, “It will run out of room eighteen months from now [December 1998]. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.”

Is it possible that violent crime has decreased
because
so many people are being locked up? Apparently not. Studies have shown that most of the new inmates swelling the system are nonviolent drug offenders subject to mandatory sentencing laws. Though nobody knows for sure, experts think that the real reasons behind the decrease in violent crime are, most likely, the expanding economy, which offers potential criminals more chances for a job, and demographic trends—the number of young men in the United States has been declining since 1980, due to the tapering off of the baby boom.

Even so, prison construction in the United States seems to have developed an unstoppable momentum. One element of the growth is the rise of for-profit prisons. We don’t have them yet in New York—the unions have kept them out—but many states have been tempted by the prison companies’ promises of cost savings. Larson
asked whether I didn’t think it was wrong when companies had something to gain by seeing people sentenced to prison—in other words, when they had a stake in their failure. Cast in that light, it did seem wrong, I answered.

You could feel the rush of prison growth even in the forgotten backwater of Sing Sing, where the superintendent had said that getting money to build new and bigger vocational shops was his number-one priority.

“I’d die to stop that,” Larson said, to my surprise.

“You don’t want to see this place improve?”

“No. The money should all be put back into the poor neighborhoods, back into education for children, to change the things that send people here.” He held out the articles he had loaned me. “You read these, right?”

I nodded.

“Then tell me, Conover, if I understand correctly. It says here in this article that the government is planning right now for the new prisons they’re going to need in ten or twelve years. I got that right?”

Again I nodded.

“That’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong about planning ahead?”

“Because, dig this. Anyone planning a prison they’re not going to build for ten or fifteen years is planning for a child, planning prison for somebody who’s a child right now. So you see? They’ve already given up on that child! They already
expect
that child to fail. You heard? Now why, if you could keep that from happening, if you could send that child to a good school and help his family stay together—if you could do that, why are you spending that money to put him in jail?”

I had no answer for Larson. He had made me feel dumb in my uniform, like a bozo carrying out someone else’s ill-conceived plan. But he didn’t act as if I were to blame.

“Hey,” he said by way of good-bye. “Next time you’re back, bring me a couple of theories to talk about.”

Around 10:30 that morning, inmates began returning to the block in escorted groups from their morning programs—mostly chapel, yard, and gym on a Sunday, but also school, library, commissary, package room, and hospital on weekdays. After glimpsing them
on the flats, I pulled open the brakes to release the cell doors and then waited till they made their way up the end stairs to the gallery. They were supposed to go directly to their cells and lock in for the 11
A.M.
count, but many stopped to talk with friends, to trade magazines (including pornography, known universally as “short eyes”), or to distribute items they’d bought at the commissary. Many also stopped to talk to me, as it was one of the few times during the shift when they had unfettered access.

A consequence of putting men in cells and controlling their movements is that they can do almost nothing for themselves. For their various needs they are dependent on one person, their gallery officer. Instead of feeling like a big, tough guard, the gallery officer at the end of the day often feels like a waiter serving a hundred tables or like the mother of a nightmarishly large brood of sullen, dangerous, and demanding children. When grown men are infantilized, most don’t take to it nicely.

That morning, I decided to count the number of times I said no before lunch.

“CO, you give me a shower? I ain’t goin’ to lunch. I got a visit coming, today or tomorrow.” The request was from Rodriguez, a Puerto Rican with striking green eyes who could have been a fashion model if he hadn’t gone into robbery and murder.

“Well, which is it, today or tomorrow?”

“I don’t know, Papi. Just let me have a shower this once.”

“As I recall, you didn’t lock in around this time yesterday when I asked you to lock in, isn’t that right?”

“Yesterday? Oh, man, that’s ancient history. I won’t cause you no more trouble, Conover, you do this for me.”

“Not today. Try me another time.”

His friend, standing at the periphery, had been listening and now asked me the same thing. “How about it, Conover. One for me, too?”

“No!” I said impatiently, turning away.

The next fifteen were:

Not all of these were improper requests; but the others were mainly favors, to be done when I had spare time, which was seldom. You had to get good at saying no, and learn a couple of rules about it. One was to never say, “Sorry, but …” That was pure self-defense. It kept the aggrieved inmate from responding, “You ain’t sorry, CO—don’t give me that bullshit,” or, “Yeah, you
are
sorry—you a sorry-ass excuse for an officer, you know that, CO?” Another was not to get angry, even if it was the one thousandth annoying request, because sometimes they were just baiting you, hoping to make you mad. There were, of course, times it was important to say yes.

Inmates were always messing with their toilets, and early on I tried to find out what they might have done to cause the problem. Some inmates, for example, would try to flush something huge, like a bedsheet, in hopes it might foul up the entire block’s plumbing
or allow them to flood the gallery. But I seldom asked anymore; there wasn’t time.

“What cell?”

“W-forty-two.”

“I’ll try to get a plumber this afternoon.”

“Thanks, CO.”

A keeplock was waving his mirror at me from inside his cell, so I stepped down the gallery to talk to him.

“Officer Conover, did you check that out, what I told you?”

This inmate had transferred a couple of weeks before to R-gallery from the Box, but they had not yet returned his personal property. All he wanted was his watch back. The shaved-headed man, of Indian or Pakistani descent, had been unfailingly courteous to me, which was the only reason I was trying to help him with this problem. Box time probably meant he’d assaulted an officer, and the Box was so full that he might technically still be serving Box time even though he was now on a gallery and therefore might still not be entitled to have his personal property back. Trying to get his watch could have turned into a wild-goose chase, in which I’d spend a long time on the phone with obscure clerks, only to learn that the inmate couldn’t have his watch yet, anyway. Finally, in the event, after two phone conversations, I learned that he
was
supposed to have his watch by now; somebody had fucked up.