Newjack (49 page)

Violence and the potential for violence were a stress on inmates and officers, but not on all of them, and not all the time. There were moments when, due to the constant tension of prison life and the general lack of catharsis, violence and the potential for violence became a thrill. It had been a long, hot summer in B-block—a long, low wave of attacks and reprisals, and then lockdowns to let everything cool off. Following almost every series of incidents, officers would search the yard, the gym, and other places inmates congregated and prepared for battle, looking for weapons. Usually, we would find scores of them—in trash cans, under rocks, on ledges, or just beneath the dirt. Sometimes our efforts seemed to forestall the next wave, sometimes not.

I remembered the day I’d been standing outside the commissary, waiting to escort my inmates back to B-block, when the gate officer told me there’d be a delay—some kind of fight had broken out in the block. Frustrated that I’d missed it, I paced the floor, locked my inmates behind another gate, and waited for some news. Then, up the tunnel from B-block, a long succession of officers and handcuffed inmates came into view. The first three inmates were bleeding badly around the head; the officers wore latex gloves. The inmates I was in charge of shouted out encouragement and support.

“Did you get the motherfucker?”

“Yo, Smiley!”

“Ernest, my man!”

The handcuffed, injured inmates looked not despondent but electrified. Regardless of their wounds, they looked utterly thrilled by what had just happened.

Finally we got to return to the block, which by now was locked down. I helped make sure my group of escorted inmates got locked into their cells, then went down to the flats. My friend Scarff was working Movement and Control, next to the OIC’s office. A group of us asked him to tell us what had happened.

Apparently, three or four inmates had chased and beaten two
others as they were leaving the gym. The pursued inmates headed toward the OIC’s office, where officers were congregated. When the officers realized what was happening, several of them, including Scarff, chased the attackers back down toward the gym. There had been pileups of officers and inmates; Scarff had recovered a shank. One of the assailants, as his victim was marched by in handcuffs, his shirt bloodied, had gleefully taunted him, “I got you! I got you!”

Scarff wasn’t a newbie like many of us others; he had worked corrections in Maryland before coming here. But he now seemed as excited as the inmates had been.

“It was the first time in five years that I’ve been involved in a major incident,” he said. “And I loved it! I wanted to hit somebody!” It seemed that Scarff had experienced some of the same intoxicating rush that the inmates had felt. It made all kinds of sense. There were so many unresolved angry exchanges in Sing Sing, so much that never got settled. How many times had I heard an inmate or an officer say, semi-facetiously, “I’m gonna set it off!” Light a fuse! Start a little chaos! In some warped and exaggerated form, it seemed like the same kind of impulse as getting wild on a Saturday night, letting off steam after a week of tension or boredom.

Our sweep was done, the shift nearly over. I walked down to the time clock with everyone else, then noticed on the chalkboard that a meeting of the union local was to begin in about half an hour. Officers had been injured in a melee in the B-block yard the week before, and it seemed likely the matter would come up. As much as I preferred to go home, I thought it would be a good thing to attend.

Sportiello, head of the local, thought maybe he should have advertised the fact that the union meeting would have free food. The twelve of us that showed up had been able to put away only two or three feet of the pair of six-foot-long grinders wrapped in blue cellophane. The remainder just sat there, reminding everyone how far short we had fallen of the 10 percent of the membership—about seventy people—required for a quorum. There was talk of amending the constitution to take this apathy into account. There was fond remembrance of the meeting a few years back when hundreds had attended because the state was proposing to end COs’ traditional privilege of carrying concealed firearms off the job. (The state had backed down.)

After an hour of two of endless-seeming discussions of how to elect delegates to the big state union meeting in Albany, of why the disability insurer had been changed, and of whether the local should support a Little League team, I began to see why no one came. Then, as though it had been planned, the door to the room swung open slowly and a young officer hobbled in. He had one arm in a cast, one leg bandaged and held off the floor, and bruises on his face, including a black eye. Discussion stopped and hands came together in applause. The wiry man in his late twenties was Harper, an evening-shift officer who had been injured by inmates in the yard during an incident the week before.

Though few had seen it, the incident was well known to most officers at Sing Sing. It had led to the lockdown of B-block for three days, a small article in
The New York Times
, promises of change by the administration, and the rounds of recriminations and second-guessing that were so common in corrections when things went seriously wrong. Harper, who worked in the B-block yard, was the main victim by most accounts, but other versions of the incident made him out to be a hapless error-maker.

It had started when Harper and other officers were doing random pat-frisks of inmates headed out the yard door. One inmate, in the middle of being frisked, took his hands off the wall and dashed out the door. Harper and the other officers took off after him.

The B-block yard was as long as the block, with twelve-foot-high chain-link fence on two sides, B-block itself on a third, and the mess-hall building and storehouse on the fourth. Most of it was a sandy wasteland, but on its northern edge, along the mess-hall building, there were crumbling concrete terraces that inmates liked to sit on, a horseshoe pit, a boccie ball court, a couple of televisions under plywood roofs, an open-air toilet, and a bank of cold-water showers. It looked like a decrepit, overused park in someplace like Haiti. Into this area, which generally had the greatest concentration of inmates, ran the inmate fleeing the pat-frisk.

At the time, I was told, there were some three hundred inmates in the yard and four officers. Worried about losing their man, Harper and the others pursued him to the area of the terraces and Harper tackled him. But their troubles were just beginning, because the yard is, in many ways, like the mess hall: a place where many inmates come together, and passions are easily inflamed. The rules for pursuing inmates there are not hard and fast, but the conventional
wisdom says that it’s smarter to wait for the pursued to leave. Handcuffing the man who fled was not a straightforward matter, and apparently, as the officers worked to subdue him, inmates gathered around to complain that the officers were being too rough. Following the shouts came projectiles: rocks (of which there are many in the yard), horseshoes, and boccie balls. Harper was knocked out when a horseshoe hit him in the back of the head. Another cracked his elbow. The three other officers were wounded, too. Harper was carried out on a stretcher.

As Harper no doubt knew, Sing Sing’s Monday morning quarterbacks had decided that he should never have pursued the inmate into the crowded yard. But when the union meeting’s agenda finally reached new business, he stood up and made it clear matters were a bit more complicated than they at first appeared. Why hadn’t the officer in Wallpost 17 stepped outside and fired a shot or two into the air? he wanted to know. Why, several days after the incident, hadn’t the administration removed the boccie balls and horseshoes from yards other than B-block’s? Why didn’t yard officers on his shift have more than one radio among them?

The union leadership seemed nervous about getting too squarely behind Harper. For one thing, the wallpost matter was also complicated, and criticizing that officer was something they weren’t sure they wanted to do. The problem was that the incident took place probably 250 to 300 yards away from the post. This, again, was a quirk and shortcoming of Sing Sing. There was a second wallpost closer, but it was situated in such a way that the terrace area was in a blind spot. The Department authorized use of the AR-15 rifle only up to a distance of about a hundred yards, because accuracy deteriorated so much with the additional distance. At most other facilities these questions would never arise; the wall-posts would be situated where they would do the most good.

It was even worse in the A-block yard, where certain areas were invisible to
any
tower. Construction of a new tower there had long ago been okayed, the union president explained, but no funds were available to build it. Harper bitterly asked why a new parking lot was being built up the hill if “no funds were available,” then again brought himself angrily to his feet, or foot.

“There’s still stones out there bigger than my hand!” he protested. “The yard still has blind zones, like the one we were in. How many of us will have to get hit in the head with a horseshoe before this changes?”

The council ground its wheels. A resolution was finally passed urging the administration to address the pressing security problems in the yards.

I often drove between home and work with Officer Rob Saline. Visually, Saline and I were a study in contrasts. At more than three hundred pounds and well over six feet tall, he was easily twice my size, probably the largest person in B-block. Bronx-bred, he kept his head shaved and wore designer tortoiseshell glasses. He had played football for the Air Force and, briefly, for the New York Jets. His feet hurt a lot—I suppose because they carried such a massive burden.

Saline and I had met on a transportation detail, escorting inmates to appearances at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains. Sergeant Holmes had sent us together, possibly as some sort of joke. The transportation sergeant had greeted Saline with delight: “Now, that’s a correction officer!” I recall him saying when Saline lumbered into the room. The sergeant ignored me completely. As Saline and I sat around the courthouse, we realized that his girlfriend lived and worked not too far from my home. He didn’t have a car, he told me, due to financial problems, and was spending a lot of time in my neck of the Bronx. Would I ever be willing to give him a lift?

So Saline pitched in for gas, and at 6
A.M.
many mornings and 3:15
P.M.
many afternoons, he squeezed himself into the front seat of my Toyota. The car’s driving dynamics totally changed with Saline aboard. Aragon, in fact, complained that Saline had ruined his shocks in the days when they carpooled, but to me it was worth it for the window into the big man’s world.

He was about my age and had daughters in “Carolina.” He moonlighted as a security guard for a jewelry company. Often after work I’d drop him off at an intersection near the Cross County Mall, where he’d visit his girlfriend at work in the Fashion Bug store. He was rather touchy, and rubbed many people the wrong way. A few guys, I knew, refused to give him a ride anymore. (Sergeant Wickersham was among those with whom he maintained an avoidance relationship.) He carried an alphanumeric beeper and consulted it often; his plans were subject to constant change. Our rendezvous might be set up at 11
P.M.
the night before or 5:15
A.M.
the morning of. Once, when I’d been away a
few days on a vacation I hadn’t told him about, he left this message on my machine, like a rap: “Yo, Teddy Ted, this is Rob. I just calling ’cause I thought you was dyin’. I didn’t see you at the job so I hope you feelin’ better. Tell your lady and your kids I said hi, and I hope you feelin’ well, man. If you need me call me, man, you know, if you need me to do somethin’ for you. Ciao.”

We talked mostly about the circumstances and personalities at work—often I got gossip from Saline sooner than from anyone else. And one morning, late in September, he shared some breaking news, additional details of which were passed quietly around B-block for the next few days.