Newjack (7 page)

All this was due to our status as state “peace officers.” New York had sixty-three different kinds of peace-officer agencies, ranging from park police to state-university police to local police—but DOCS, with a budget that was one quarter of the state’s General Fund—was by far the largest. “The Department doesn’t want you to enforce the law—it doesn’t train you to do that,” Voltraw said. “There are liability issues, and actually, they’re unhappy that we can make arrests. But legally we can do almost as much as police officers.”

A couple of days later, Tom Testo, the director of the Department’s Bureau of Labor Relations, warned us against abusing these powers. His office revoked officers’ firearms permission several times a week, he said, for infractions such as being caught drinking while wearing a gun, menacing somebody with it, or having it stolen. Currently, the Department was being sued by a stockbroker who had been pulled over and then chewed out by a correction officer for speeding, Testo told us, sounding tired. Then there were guys who glued numbers under their badges so that they would resemble those of New York City Police Department detectives, and undertook their own “investigations.” Doing these things would get you fired, Testo said; and one in ten of us would receive a notice of discipline from his office sometime during his career. Not that the pressures weren’t understandable to Testo; he knew, he said, that inmates were “the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. And we have to be with them every day.” But that didn’t excuse our abusing our authority.

On that first night at the Academy, Sergeant Bloom had asserted, unexpectedly, that “the most important thing you can learn here is how to communicate” with inmates. In the two or three weeks that followed, I had started to understand what he meant.
Corrections was, albeit in a rarefied macho way, a “people-skills” profession. Much of our success and well-being as officers would depend upon how we carried ourselves and interacted with inmates.

But the Department’s idea of how to develop these skills was given to us in a short series of classes, Interpersonal Communication (IPC), taught by a would-be comedian. He had actually done stand-up comedy in clubs, Officer Speros told us, and for the first day we were less his class than his audience. Speros’s extemporaneous opening act was to decide which figures from popular culture we looked like: DiPaola was Bart Simpson, Chavez was Zorro, Dimmie was a soul singer from the 1970s. Somebody complained afterward to Sergeant Bloom about the racial overtones of Speros’s jokes, and Bloom, another trainer told us gravely, chewed him out for it. The next day the communications instructor, acting hurt, was all business.

By communicating effectively with inmates, Speros began, we could keep problems from escalating, build relationships with inmates, manage them better. In addition, he said with a wink, listening carefully would enable us to get information out of inmates, get them to tell us things “when they don’t even know it!”

Speros used graphs and charts and handouts to detail the cutely named stages and progressions (The Basics, The Add-Ons, Taking Charge)—the fashions of business-management training had spread to corrections. But what everyone left with was a funny method that we watched in a film and that Speros made us try. He called it Responding to Content. We called it What You’re Saying Is … The point was to show an inmate that you were listening to him by keeping quiet until he was through, then rephrasing his point so that he knew you had heard him—even if you then disagreed or were not persuaded. It was a good technique, I suppose, but it made for hilarious exchanges at dinner that evening (“So what you’re saying is, you want more Salisbury steak?”) and in days to follow, when we imagined how it would sound in a place like Coxsackie: “So what you’re saying is, I’m a skinny white motherfucker and you wish I were dead—is that it?”

Strangely enough, in view of this class, we had been told never to communicate with the handful of inmates who worked in the Academy. Some were there every day, ladling out our food in the mess-hall line; we grew to recognize their faces. Others came as
work crews from Coxsackie to vacuum and dust the lounges or clean up the filthy rest rooms. These crews—always, in my experience, made up of young black men—were watched over by tough-looking armed COs wearing wide-brimmed hats and leather boots, their pants tucked in at the top. They looked like something out of a southern-chain-gang movie. The inmates kept their eyes down as they did the scut work, emptying ashtrays and wiping the urine from toilets. Never talk to them, we were ordered. Do not engage them in any way. So we recruits ignored these inmates, tried to treat them as if they didn’t exist. It was an odd way to begin a job that supposedly depended upon communication techniques. When, at training’s end, I suggested in a feedback session that some inmates be brought in to talk to us, maybe to participate in IPC workshops, everybody looked at me as if I were nuts.

Every few days we were subjected to a surprise inspection by Sergeant Bloom, who would march us out of the classroom and into a corridor and then review us—first from behind and then from the front—while we stood at strict attention. He was particularly interested in the shine of our shoes, but he could find something wrong with just about anything else: a name tag infinitesimally askew, hair touching the ears, a spot missed while shaving, an inadequate crease. If enough recruits disappointed him, he’d make us all do twenty or forty push-ups, right there in the hall. If we continued to disappoint him, he warned us, we’d be put on restriction and forbidden to leave the Academy at night.

Similarly, Bloom trolled the halls of the dorm floor every morning looking for anything out of place. My room was written up one day because there was still a scrap of paper at the bottom of the trash can after it had been emptied; another time, we had left on the tiny light over the sink. Records of these transgressions, Bloom warned us grimly, went straight into our personnel folders.

Therefore it was always a relief, every afternoon, to march out the Academy’s back door and across a dirt parking lot to the gym for Physical Training. Those who had trouble completing the unimaginative, unvaried course of calisthenics did not always agree, but I was ready for any break from the tedium of the classroom. And after calisthenics, there was always a run of a mile or
two, consisting of laps around the Academy. As we ran, some of the instructors would chant military songs adapted to corrections, and we would call back every line:

Or

Just to make sure there was an easy way to get in trouble during Physical Training, too, the authorities had forbidden us to wear watches. In our haste to change out of our uniforms and into exercise gear and get over to the gym by the specified time, it was easy to forget this rule. Usually, roommates noticed and warned each other; one day I caught my own watch transgression as we marched into the gym. There being no other place to hide it, I dropped it into my briefs. I said a prayer of thanks when, at afternoon’s end, I found it still there.

Felix Chavez was not so lucky. Chavez, the former assistant building superintendent, was one of my favorite classmates. He lived with his wife and kids in the nongentrified part of Park Slope, Brooklyn. There was something dashing about Chavez, with his small mustache; he said he hadn’t been bothered at all when Speros nicknamed him Zorro. He was very upbeat, optimistic, and excited about being there, and he wanted to do a good job. But he could never remember to take off his watch. The first time they noticed it, the PT instructors gave him a warning—wear it again and not only will you suffer; your whole session will suffer. We stopped the forgetful Chavez a couple of times after that on the threshold of the gym. But one day during an unusual PT morning session, nobody noticed. The instructor—an especially humorless, muscle-bound type—stopped all 128 of us mid-jumping jack when he spotted Chavez’s watch. Instead of chewing us all out right there, he told our session he’d see us later.

It was after lunch when the instructor showed up at our classroom door. “Uh-oh,” mumbled Bella. We were sent to a hallway upstairs and told to line up. There, as we stood at attention, the muscle-bound instructor told us he could put us on restriction for
what had happened, then commanded, “Down on the floor.” We put our hands down and got into push-up position. “Give me fifty, all together,” he ordered. This was out of the range of most of the group. He counted, sometimes repeating a number or even backing up if he thought somebody hadn’t done a good job. At around twenty, recruits started dropping in exhaustion. He ignored his threat to begin at zero if anyone did that and made do with berating them. Then he kept counting. Trembling, those of us who were able to go on did so, until our arms could no longer lift us. After that, we lay on the floor in our pressed uniforms. He told us to stand up.

“No, not you,” he said to Chavez. Chavez lay back down.

“Give me twenty more.”

I’d never heard Chavez complain about anything at the Academy, with the exception of the pain that push-ups caused his one bad elbow. This must have been killing him. Sweat poured off his face onto the floor. His uniform was soaked. He started shaking so badly I couldn’t bear to look. “Eight!” screamed the instructor. Tears now mixed with sweat on the floor under Chavez’s face, which seemed to delight his tormentor.

“You think inmates are gonna care if you cry? Inmates ain’t gonna care.” What inmates had to do with this, I had no idea. Maybe the instructor was just saying he didn’t care either. Maybe he was saying that forgetfulness and shows of weakness or emotion wouldn’t fly in prison. Maybe he simply believed, along with a number of his colleagues, that abuse was a perfect preparation for prison work.

When it was clear that Chavez had no more push-ups to give, the instructor told him to stand up and then dismissed us.

“Ah, so you were studying CPR, eh?” asked the instructor as he arrived in the room after lunch, looked at the chalkboard, and noticed what we’d been taught in the morning. “So who here can tell me how to do inmate CPR?” We were quizzed so frequently that everyone thought the question was serious. “Nobody? She didn’t teach you that? Then I’ll show you.”

The instructor placed his boot on the chest of an imaginary prone inmate, pumped five times, then straightened up, looked down, and blew five times loudly toward the floor. He repeated it—to titters, then laughter.

Other sessions had taken Chemical Agents before us; we’d see them in the mess hall at lunch with gas masks around their waists and apprehension in their eyes. Or we’d talk to them at night in the lounge after they’d been to the range, hearing tales of how they’d been exposed. (“We had to hold hands.” “This cloud of smoke rose up from the ground.” “I was crying so hard my shirt was soaked.” “He had this huge booger hanging out of his nose.”) Then it was our turn.

Chemical agents (call it
tear gas
and you had to do ten pushups) were an important part of most prison arsenals and came in many different kinds of containers. We learned about them in a class. First were the handheld aerosols, beefed-up versions of the little canisters found in women’s purses. This “irritant dust” was most likely to be used in small situations with one or two recalcitrant inmates. For larger groups, there was a variety of handheld grenades, and many prison mess halls had a special kind of cartridge installed in the ceiling, for quick remote activation in case of disturbance. All-out riots called for cartridges shot out of a gas gun, which looked a bit like a sawed-off shotgun. The instructors passed around spent cartridges that smelled slightly of citrus; one had enough residue left inside that my nose started to run after I sniffed it and the skin on my forehead burned slightly.