Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

Author:Ted Conover [Conover, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Penology
ISBN: 9781400033096
Google: hXq106NS4wAC
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7103143
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1999-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

UTILITY 1

Occasionally from a wallpost you would see a decrepit Sing Sing van stop somewhere on the road encircling the prison, and out would pile one officer with a chair and five or six inmates with lawn mowers and Weed Eaters. This was Utility 1, a crew of medium-security inmates whose job it was to mow and clean in the area just outside the walls.

One day I had the job of supervising Utility 1, and though it was supposedly a plum, I found it completely nerve-racking: I was terrified that one of these trusted inmates would run off, leaving me to blame for an escape.

This had actually happened recently to Konoval, the training officer, who had taken a different work crew out mowing near a highway in the Bronx. One of the inmates disappeared when Konoval wasn’t looking, only to be recaptured a few hours later at his mother’s apartment in Queens—luckily for Konoval. Those inmates were supposedly even more trustworthy than mine, and Konoval was supposedly a supremely experienced officer. Thinking of him, I actually felt it was likely that it would happen to me.

The inmates and I got into a fight over this anxiety of mine. Apparently, when they mowed the relatively short stretch alongside the south wall of the prison, the regular officer didn’t object if those in the lead went ahead and kept on mowing around the corner. But around the corner was out of sight, and I panicked when they disappeared. Two of them told me they would refuse to work if I made them stay back. “What’s wrong, CO, you scared? We ain’t goin’ nowhere—the towers watch us all the way.”

“Stay in sight,” I said. “If you refuse, I’m writing you up. Or maybe you don’t care about your job.” This was false bravado—I doubt I could have gotten them fired—but it seemed enough to inspire some hatred of me, if not fear.

We had to go back to a storage shed to swap malfunctioning equipment for barely working equipment. To show the inmates I wasn’t a bad guy, I agreed to their request not to take the steep, curvy route that hugged the north side of the facility but to drive a route that was almost as fast, through downtown Ossining. The inmates were mad to see women—any women—and this route was more likely to gratify.

Like several old Hudson River downtowns in the region, from Peekskill to Poughkeepsie, the neighborhood has seen better days. Parts are a ghetto now, with broken-down stoops, prostitutes at night, and guys playing dice against the curb. There was one corner I had always noticed when I passed on previous occasions. It had a large number of fairly well dressed young men hanging around out front, not drinking or gambling, not visibly occupied with anything except paying close attention to passing cars. The inmates waved at them, and they waved back.

“Looks like a crack house,” I commented.

“Of course it’s a crack house,” said the inmate in the passenger seat next to me.

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