43 pages • 1 hour read
Ted ConoverNewjack: Guarding Sing Sing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Inside Passage”
Ted Conover introduces the reader to Sing Sing prison through a description of his morning routine as a correction officer. The text opens with a brief snapshot of the earliest days of prison construction: in 1826, the first block of Sing Sing prison is built by prisoners who have been transferred from Auburn, New York. An officer originally tells Conover that the prisoners quarried marble from the opposite bank of Sing Sing to build the first cell block; much later, Conover learns that the officer was mistaken, and that Sing Sing’s site was picked because marble and other stone already existed underfoot. The 1826 cell block is still standing today, and when present-day inmates complain to Conover about their cell conditions, he tells them about “how it used to be: two men sharing a three-and-a-half-by-seven-foot cell, one of them probably with TB, no central heating or plumbing, open sewer channels inside, little light” (1).
Conover describes a fellow officer, Aragon, who comes from the Bronx and always places the anti-theft device known as The Club on his steering wheel. Conover finds this interesting because he considers the prison parking area to be one of the most secure places in the country; however, Conover thinks it is reasonable for a person to be “a little lock-crazy” (1). Conover writes that “Between the Bronx and prison, a person could grow a bit lock-obsessed” (1).
Throughout the chapter, Conover maps out the broad landscape of Sing Sing. The prison is decaying and dilapidated in many areas. The phone system is chronically broken. The men’s locker room for the guards is nearly abandoned and in disarray, but correction officers—and especially those from the southern part of the state—prefer to leave their uniforms in lockers rather than advertising their jobs in the neighborhoods that they live in. The lockers are mostly unused but tied up in prison bureaucracy. During his second month, Conover finally finds a locker with an old, flimsy lock; he is able to break it open and claim the locker for himself.
The men’s room smells like an outhouse; Conover’s “stomach lets [him] know before the shift starts what it thinks about the job” (5). A commuter railroad runs through Sing Sing, and Conover walks up a wooden staircase built atop a staircase made of crumbling concrete towards the Administration Building parking lot and the prison’s main entrance. New York State correction officers are allowed to own and carry concealed weapons but must deposit their handguns before entering the prison. Conover passes through several additional checkpoints to receive his first assignment.
Sergeant Ed Holmes’s desk is the focal point of the lineup room. Holmes’s “eyes are constantly scanning, never settling” (5). Conover describes Holmes as a black, tough officer; Conover has been advised by the white-shirts during orientation to never show Holmes that he is afraid of him, or show him anything else.
Sing Sing is fifty-five acres, with a former death house on-site that once contained an electric chair. The prison is patrolled by male and female officers of all races. A-block and B-block are considered the most impressive and are aligned end to end, with the mess hall in-between. Conover, as a new officer, is usually sent to A-block or B-block, which are massive prison “warehouses.” Once Conover has reached the front door of B-block, there are ten locked gates between him and the outside. The uninformed observer, Conover writes, might from the outside assume that the purpose of the prison blocks was agricultural, rather than carceral.
As a gallery officer, one's job is to run the galleries, where one is always surrounded by inmates. The confines are cramped, crowded, and have nothing to absorb the sound: A-block contains 684 inmates in an 88-cell-long gallery. One can hear the echo of their shouts, whistles, and running footsteps.
Hattie Mama Cradle, the day-shift OIC (officer in charge), is a fifty-something woman with horn-rimmed specs who tells officers where they are posted. Conover is assigned to 254 R-and-W as the first officer on the second-floor galleries. He has worked there before, including on his first day of training, and his heart sinks. Before he leaves to relieve the night officer in charge, he notes the keeplocks, who are inmates that are on disciplinary restriction and must remain in their cells. Remembering which prisoners are keeplocks is a challenging task given the fast pace of work and the number of cells to monitor. Conover tries to make conversation with the night officer, who says of the inmates, “I don’t know, I don’t care, they’re not my friends, and I don’t like them” (10). The cells are currently deadlocked, and Conover’s first job of the day is to let the inmates out for breakfast.
Chapter 2 Summary: “School for Jailers”
Conover opens the chapter with a quote from Peter G. Bourne: “when the recruit arrives he is plunged into an alien environment, and is enveloped in the situation 24 hours a day without relief. He is stunned, dazed, and frightened” with a severity of shock reflected in heightened corticosteroid levels comparable to schizophrenic patients in psychosis.
Conover briefly lists the locations and occupations of various classmates when they received their appointment letters from the Department of Corrections: Arno had been managing a Burger King, Brown was a plumber, Charlebois worked distribution for a Wal-Mart. Most worked blue-collar jobs, and others had been unemployed. Conover had been working for The New York TimesMagazine. The letter gave two weeks for the correction-officer recruits to drop their jobs and report to the Albany Training Academy, to begin a seven-week training course in March 1997.
The Academy is a three-story brick structure. It was once a seminary and now a site for corrections training. Conover arrives and falls into a line of male and female recruits that snakes all the way down the hallway. Resembling boot camp, officers constantly “dog” recruits, looking for weakness. The lesson is not to stand out. Conover is awestruck by an enclosed display of inmate weapons and another display of the compartments where inmates hid these devices.
Conover had recently been in the north country of Alaska with his father; although he was scheduled to give a lecture about Alaska at a club in his neighborhood, Conover had asked the organizers if he could postpone or reschedule due to his training. which he does not explicitly mention to lecture organizers. Conover envisions himself away from the recruit training: giving the presentation, drinking a glass of wine, sitting at a table with a white tablecloth. For the next thirty or so months his life, he will be compartmentalized between work and his personal life.
One of the officers running the Academy is Sergeant Rusty Bloom. Sergeant Bloom stresses that the recruits are professional correction officers, rather than prison guards. The recruits are joining 26,000 state correction officers to work within a $1.6-billion-dollar department. Conover begins with one hundred and twenty-seven classmates, each paid a yearly salary of about $23,000.
Conover becomes acquainted with his roommates, many of whom are training to be officers out of financial need. Unlike his classmates, Conover is here as a journalist seeking transparency around the inner workings of prison. Conover has been repeatedly rebuffed by other officers in his attempts to discuss life within prison, and he sees his only way to enter—aside from becoming an inmate—is as a recruit. One of Conover’s roommates is Russell Dieter, an ex-Marine. The two have a mutual dislike for one another. Dieter has come highly prepared for training, even arriving with an ironing board and starch; on the other hand, Dieter also has perverse fantasies of torturing women, and threateningly jokes about shooting Conover. Eventually, Conover is assigned to another roommate in different housing.
Officer Vincent Nigro, nicknamed Abbott by the inmates, is one of the officers in charge of training Conover. Nigro’s training specialty is in chemical agents. Training consists of numerous examinations, demanding guidelines, and punitive consequences for failure to comply. There is an assortment of rules and restrictions, regulations, and tests every Friday, which include maintenance of outfit, a physical performance test, defensive tactics, the shooting range, and exposure to chemical agents. The academy motto is “care, custody, and control” (16). It is repeatedly reinforced to the trainees that grey, the color of the guards’ suits, is good; conversely, green, the color of the inmates’ outfits, is bad.
The recruits take a “field trip” to Coxsackie prison. Officer Popish, who is also the bus driver, explains that Coxsackie is for youthful offenders. Popish warns that lately there has been trouble with attacks on guards: two officers have been slashed in the head, and the Box—the special-housing unit—was attacked two years ago. A large slice was cut out of an officer’s baton when that officer had come face to face with a shank. When the prisoners come into Conover’s view, he sees that they are all wearing dark green pants, but express individuality in their shirts. In the Box, Conover sees a cot bolted to the wall, along with bedding, a sink and a toilet. The inmates have no privileges beyond an hour of exercise. There is no reading and writing, no private property, and the most recalcitrant inmates are fed “the loaf […] a nutritious but awful tasting bread” (28) invented solely for feeding the worst inmates. In the courtyard the inmates shout obscenities at the officer recruits; the noise is amplified, loud, and intimidating.
Conover writes that the U.S. is neck-in-neck with Russia in terms of rates of imprisonment, and that the number of inmates in the U.S. has tripled in the past twenty-five years. The response to crime has been costly and blunt. New York state alone has seventy-one prisons. State prisons hold felons with sentences of a year or more, while federal prisons hold criminals convicted of federal crimes. The majority of inmates are young men of color, and nearly all prison construction is outside of New York City.
The salary for a correction officer is around $40,000 after seven years. Officers are overwhelmingly white, and Conover compares the demographics to those of South Africa under apartheid. Sing Sing is always in need of staff because of its chaotic reputation and location in a pricey area, and its regular staff is predominantly nonwhite, which is an exception to the rule. Standard officer commutes are between sixtosevenhours. College education is not a requirement for becoming a corrections officer. In large sections of New York state, corrections is the only growth industry.
During the final two weeks of training, both the pace and physicality of the lessons increase. The recruits are taught “pain management” and defense tactics, are trained in the course of action in response to hostage situations, and are shown footage of prison guards who have been injured by inmates. At the end of training, Conover is sent to Sing Sing, the prison at “the bottom of the barrel” (56).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
Conover uses the first chapter to set the scene for the novel. The reader accompanies Conover on a typical morning arriving at work in Sing Sing, and the audience is given a glimpse of the prison landscape before entering.
There are already signs in the first chapter of an atmosphere devoid of empathy. Officer Sims, the OIC (officer in charge) for the night shift, makes this clear when Conover tries to inquire about any updates regarding the inmates. Sims states coldly: “I don’t know, I don’t care, they’re not my friends, and I don’t like them” (10). Conover points out the irony that exists in the rhetoric of the prison institution: prison guards must be referred to as correction officers and yet “Rehabilitation is not our job. The truth of it is that we are warehousers of human beings. And the prison was, above all, a storage unit” (41). The motto of the academy is “care, custody, and control” (16), and yet inmates are referred to as the lowest of the low and the scum of the earth. Recruits are explicitly conditioned to deny inmates of empathy; although the modern-day training academy exists at the site of a former chapel, Conover writes that “our job as correction officers, it seemed to me, was to think about those godly things as little as possible” (43). The COs are classified as “peace officers”; however, the department deters them from enforcing the law (33). Conover describes one incident in which a training officer jokes about performing CPR on an inmate: “The instructor placed his boot on the chest of an imaginary prone inmate, pumped five times [...]and blew five times loudly toward the floor” (37).
In the second chapter, Conover provides a comprehensive report on his time at the officer training academy. Militarization and machismo are significant elements of recruit training. In fact, the recruits who appear to be the most comfortable and prepared are ex-military. An example would be Russell Dieter, whose threats towards Conover escalate to the point that Conover is glad to be assigned a different roommate. It is interesting to note the legacies of trauma, abuse, and neglect that exist at each level within the hierarchy: the training officers are verbally abusive towards the new recruits, who enact violence on each other and consequently extend this treatment towards the inmates. Sergeant Bloom, a training officer for Conover’s cohort, is antagonistic towards the recruits and himself has survived a hostage situation while in prison. During a self-defense training drill, Conover notes that upon trading roles “those who had been abused now got to wreck vengeance, and some did it with gusto” (50). During the field trip to Coxsackie prison, the recruits are brought briefly to the Coxsackie prison yard, where they are subjected to an onslaught of insults by inmates. It becomes apparent to Conover that the visit to the Coxsackie yard was unnecessary, and he writes that it is “clear that our taking the abuse out there was part of the initiation” (30).
The ripples of abuse are not contained within the prison walls. Indeed, Joe Puma, an executive director for the New York State guards’ union, tells Conover that prison guards have the highest rates of divorce, heart disease, and substance addiction, and the shortest life spans of any state civil servants (20). There is a corrections joke about the first three things you get when you become a CO: a car, a gun, and a divorce. Conover comes to learn firsthand that he cannot perceive his experience at work as mutually exclusive from other aspects of his life.
