Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
I like books where the author immerses him or herself in a situation and then writes from his or her own experience. Barbara Ehrenreich has done this for several of her books. After my mother was sentenced to jail for civil disobedience, she has a much better understanding of who is in our jails and why. This was knowledge that she might have been able to get from reading a book, but having the experience was so much more powerful. Ted Conover writes as an outsider who chose to spend some time as an insider. The results are fascinating, I think.Ted Conover wanted to research a story about being a prison guard. He claims they would rather be called corrections officers. But they wouldn’t let him have direct access. So he took the civil service exam and got a job as a corrections officer. He did that for a year. He took a lot of notes. He wrote this book. It is not just about his time at Sing Sing but a lot about the history of the place that has been a prison since 1826. I am very interested in the issue about how prisoners should be treated. We hear that they are not nice people and that seems to excuse us from treating them with much consideration. Newjack is about how those who are in charge of the daily operation of prison system, the guards, are trained and learn to treat the prisoners. The author admits that some forms of treatment that he would have considered inappropriate when he started come to seem necessary after he had been there a while. What kind of people do guards start out being and what do they become over time as they experience prison life as the keeper?My own experience being a welfare worker at several times in my work life colors my view of this hardening process. People who are “just doing their job” can treat their fellow human beings quite badly. Take a “normal” person and make him a welfare worker or a prison guard and what do you wind up with? The peer pressure of coworkers in these dehumanizing institutions to treat clients badly is great. In my last welfare job we were told to treat clients as customers! But we were not told that the customer is always right. Is a convicted felon a customer of the penal system? What kind of service do they deserve, both morally and legally? Given the high number of people I was expected to handle as a welfare caseworker, I found it impossible to consistently treat people with human concern and understanding. It was impossible for me not to treat some people badly in the welfare system. Like the corrections officer, my job was to say No quite often. You didn’t have to be flaying an inmate’s back with a cat-o’-nine-tails to be wounded by the job. That was simply it’s nature, a feature of prison work as enduring as Sing Sing’s cell block design. “In its application the familiarity it causes with suffering destroys in the breast of the officer all sympathetic feeling.”To do this job well you had to be fearless, know how to talk to people, have thick skin and a high tolerance for stress. Ted Conover had a degree in anthropology. What he did was apply the anthropological research method of participant observation. What did he discover? At Attica and Clinton, he said, inmates didn’t even talk to female officers. It was flat-out forbidden.“And if they do?” I asked, knowing that every jailhouse rule was eventually violated. Gaines paused and smiled. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-tempered man. “They get the fucking shit beat out of them,” he said.The possibility no longer bothered me as it once had. That's what happened to him. It "no longer bothered me as it once had." A deadened conscience and morality.There is the mere shade of difference between the guards and the guarded. The point was that anyone could end up inside. The black officers I knew, especially, seemed to feel this – that the difference between straight life and prison life was a very thin one and that sometimes the decision about which side you were on was not yours to make. Because of my own experience as a good guy doing bad things, Newjack did not shock me. Why do people become correction officers? For most, the answer is simple: to earn a living when other options do not exist. I first became a welfare worker as a young idealist thinking that I could change the system from within. And I think in several situations I did that. But the system always scoured away any temporary change. This is a four star book in the style of the muckraking books like The Jungle. Ted Conover was able to shine a little light on the penal system from the point of view of the guards. But he always knew that he was going to escape at the end of a year. It was still oppressive but it is much easier to describe the system than to change it. And he had other choices of what to do with his life. This was just a short side trip.
An excellent book that I had been looking forward to reading. It was worth it. He spends a year as a prison guard…er…correctional officer, going though the academy, on-the-job training, and then a year becoming an experienced correctional officer (CO). In the middle he gets historical and writes a bit about Sing Sing prison, the history of prisons in terms of punishment versus reformation, and capital punishment methods.Conover may not answer all the questions one wants but he certainly raises them. Are we just warehousing prisoners with no attempt to reform? Definitely, although he cites past attempts reform prisoners. Does he let the prisoners off the hook for being in a system that is dehumanizing, racist, and violent? No, not really. Because he is a CO, he has to carry out the job. There are times when he is frustrated, angry, scared and one can see that if he doesn’t quite take it out on the prisoners, the attitudes he expresses at the time puts him on the guards’ side of “us versus them.” He even broaches the issue of whether a CO and prisoner can ever be friends (as opposed to friendly). He sort of befriends one prisoner who he has intellectual discussions with. The prisoner holds some conspiratorial views but Conover enjoys talking to him and sometimes seeks him out. But one never gets a sense that it could ever be a friendship given the roles they are in.Conover does not shy away from topics: prison sex (he claims forcible sex is less than believed); the gross things inmates do to COs and others to maintain that they have some control; the violence between gangs and the constant threat of violence and mob behavior in uncontrolled situations; and the psychological problems of inmates who should probably be receiving care rather than prison,The fraternity of the COs is also depicted and the tensions between COs that are lenient and those that are tough. The lenient ones see this as the best way to get prisoner cooperation without having to resort to violence, although some come across as just wanting to get through the day. The tough ones want to be in control so that prisoners know not to mess with them, but some are also just cruel. When the two types of officers have to work together, tensions can rise. The important point Conover raises is that the prisoners, while ultimately out classed in terms of potential violence, outnumber the COs in almost all situations and could in a given space, take control. This structural factor, combined with the fact that these prisoners have a violent history (many are convicted of violent crimes), leads to many potential tense situations. Conover does a great job of making the reader concerned through simple narrative of the violence that could erupt at any moment.
What do You think about Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (2001)?
I got this book out of the library after hearing what must have been an old interview on Fresh Air with Ted Conover (the book was published in 2000). Some disapproved of his methods. He wanted to learn about being a prison guard, but no one in the DOCS system would let him shadow a new recruit. So he signed up himself and did all the testing and training and then worked as a CO at Sing Sing for a year. The result is a really good book. No huge revelations, but a good thorough interesting if rather small-scale look at the work of guards in a prison. He ends the book with some of the usual pleas that seem to come from nearly every human being who takes a look at our Prison Idustrial Complex - stop putting drug offenders in with violent offenders, get rid of mandatory sentences for drug offences, make more of an effort to educate prisoners (and guards), etc.Glad I read it. Still depressed about the prison economy.
—Aaron
This book is about a journalist who becomes a corrections officer (commonly referred to as prison guard)at Sing Sing Prison to discover what it is really like to be a guard, especially as compared to common representations of them in popular media such as movies and television shows. While the book covers some history of American prisons and punitive operations it largely deals with his day to day struggle to be a good officer in the face of a lot of stress in a difficult job. While Conover is clearly liberal in his political leanings, referring to the disparities of prison sentences for people of color, and the amount of money invested into prisons (as opposed to say schools), his struggles point to the fact that when faced with men made aggressive and even abusive by being stuck in prisons, it becomes difficult in some cases to feel sympathy for them.Conover also points out that prisons have changed relatively little in recent history and the high recidivism rate points to the suggestion that prisons do relatively little to actually reform prisoners. This would be a good book for those interested in the prison system from a corrections officer's point of view (which is really hard to come by).
—Bernadette
The premise of this book is that the author Ted Conover got a job as a ‘corrections officer’ in Sing Sing to see what it was like to be a prison guard. Seeing as how he looks ‘not tough’ and was used to hanging out with the high society of New York (not the magazine), he comes off pretty whiny sometimes, but it is clear that it is a pretty terrible job, in part due to the stress and psychological requirements necessary to telling people what to do all the time and, in turn, being resented for it. As we all should know by now, prisons do not do what they were created to do (reform people to act a certain way in society). From the book, one gets the impression that most prison guards (‘corrections officers’) in some way recognize this, but have to act within the rules to maintain their authority or suffer the possibility of violent repercussions (from the people who they are talking down to all day) or being fired. Conover describes this task as one of running a micro-totalitarian state (which includes not letting people shower just any time, not letting people have too many waffles on waffle day, not letting people make elaborate antennas to pick up radio signals, dehumanization, etc.). The sum of this micro-management is alienation of both guards and prisoners. In this book, and another that I have been reading that is a collection called ‘20th century prison writings’, there is discussion of a reform in the 1910s that took place under T.M. Osborne, who took on this alienation from self-determination. As warden, Osborne spent a week as a prisoner to see what that life was like and from there decided the way to get prisoners to learn to make desirable decisions was not to stop them from making any decisions, but by granting them responsibilities and access to decision-making structures. The movement was somewhat successful, but, of course, looked down upon by ‘tough on crime’ statesmen of the day as being too lax. In the end, the alternative system’s power fell into the hands of gangs and prisoner power brokers, and it was dismantled. The idea was taken up again, however, by a later warden who was a former CO. He critiqued Osborne’s ideas as giving too much responsibility too fast. I guess it was a bit naïve to expect a population, the majority of whom had been told what to do 24 hours a day for many years and were conditioned to get what they wanted through anti-social behavior and alternative political networks (gangs) would be able to transition into a democratic system of power without first becoming subjects of direct democracy. The idea of this conditioning could be similarly applied to non-prison society (learning to defer one’s authority to overseers in school and at work).All-in-all, the book is really good for people like me who have trouble imagining how and why corrections officers can do their job, or how even some liberal from NYC who believes prisons don’t work and generally walks a middle ground between empathizing with prisoners and sympathizing with guards becomes blood-thirsty in some situations and at times gains sadistic pleasure through the power of micro-management, which is important if we want to speak seriously about prison reform and abolition.
—Zane
