Newjack

Most people know it's easier to get into prison than it is to get out. But for a journalist, just getting into Sing Sing, New York's notorious maximum-security prison, isn't easy. In fact, Ted Conover was so stymied by official channels that he took the only way in--other than crime--and became a New York State corrections officer: "I wanted to hear the voices one truly never hears, the voices of guards--those on the front lines of our prison policies, the society's proxies". Newjack is Conover's account of nearly a year at ground zero of the criminal justice system. What it reveals is a mix of the obvious and the absurd, with hypocrisies not unexpected considering that the land of the free shares with Russia the distinction of having the world's largest prison population. As of December 1999, it was projected that the number of people incarcerated in the United States would reach 2 million in 2000.

This is the world Conover enters when he, along with other new recruits, undergoes seven weeks of pseudomilitary preparation at the Albany Training Academy. Then it's off to Sing Sing for the daily grind of prison life. Conover correctly and vividly captures the essence of that life, its tedium interspersed with the adrenaline rush of an "incident" and the edge of fear that accompanies every action. He also details how the guards experience their own feelings of confinement, often at the hands of the inmates:

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 too nicely.

And not taking to it nicely often involves violence. Indeed, the constant potential for violence on any scale makes even humdrum assignments dangerous. It's astonishing that more doesn't happen, given that the majority of the 1,800 inmates have been convicted of violent felonies: murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, and arson. But beneath the simmering rage rests an unexpected sensitivity that Conover captures brilliantly. After encountering a Hispanic inmate with a tattoo of a heartbreaking passage from The Diary of Anne Frank on his back, he writes: "It was easier to stay incurious as an officer. Under the inmates' surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad. "Ultimately, the emphasis of Conover's work is on the toll prison exacts--most immediately on the jailed and their jailers, but also on a society that puts both there in increasing numbers.--Gwen Bloomsburg

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A depressing, fascinating and very important book. - Rated
The job as prison guard is about care, custody and control. The gray uniforms are the good guys, and the green uniforms are the bad guys. And in twentyfive years you will have a pension.

This is the core message journalist Ted Conover and his class mates receive when they enter the prison guards' boot camp in New York. Most of the recruits have applied for a job to gain job security, while Ted Conover has found this line of approach the only way he can do research on life in prison in New York State. It is fortunate for the rest of us that the Department of Correctional Services tried to get in Ted Conover' way, because his experience as prison guard - sorry; correctional officer - gives us a much broader view of life in prison than any book by an inmate.

This thorough and extraordinary book is full of ironies and cases of Orwellian newspeak, but what is most fascinating is Ted Connor's critical view of himself, his reactions and his fast dehumanization in Sing Sing, together with his description of the complex prison sociology. When you have read his detailed and vivid descriptions of his working days in Sing Sing you will find it easy to understand how even the most idealistic COs get fed up with inmates in general, lose their initiative and start to focus on how to survive each work day rather than on resocializing inmates.

This book is a must for anybody who takes an interest in prevention of crime or in hierarchial subcultures. It is a great pity that it is already hard to come by.