Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing Unable to get official permission to interview and write about correctional officers, Ted Conover, author of the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, “got in’ by applying for a correctional officer position. After training, he and his fellow rookies, known as ‘new jacks,’ were randomly assigned to Sing Sing, one of the country’s most famous — and infamous — prisons. Sing Sing, a maximum-security male prison, was built in 1828 by prisoners themselves, kept at their task by frequent use of the whip. Today, the chaos, the backbiting, the rundown building and equipment, the disrespect and the relentless stress that Conover experienced in his year at Sing Sing show, quite well, how the increase of prisons in the U. S. brutalizes more than just the prisoners.
Some of the individuals in Conover’s entering ‘class’ of corrections trainees had always wanted to work in law enforcement. Others were ex-military, looking for a civilian job that they thought would reward structure and discipline. But most came looking for a steady job with good benefits. To get it, they were desperate enough to commute hours each way, or even to live apart from their families during the work week. Their job consists of long days locking and unlocking cells, moving prisoners to and from various locations while the prisoners beg, hassle and abuse them. Sometimes, the prisoners’ requests are simple, but against the rules: an extra shower, some contraband cigarettes.
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Other times, they are appropriate, but unbelievably complicated: it can take months to get information about property lost in the transfer from one prison to another. Meanwhile, the orders officers give are ignored. Discipline — even among the officers themselves — is non-existent. And with the money and benefits of this ‘good’ job come nightmares and family stress, daily uncertainty about one’s job and duties, and pent-up frustration that, every so often, explodes in violence — instigated by staff as well as by prisoners. The picture this book paints would no doubt bother corrections professionals in prisons where prisoner-staff relationships and officer solidarity are more developed. In training, Conover is told that ‘the most important thing you can learn here is to communicate with inmates.’ And the Sing Sing staff who enjoy the most success and fulfillment in their jobs are those who communicate: who make clear what privileges they will bestow and what orders the prisoners must follow, and who will respect the prisoners’ ability to behave accordingly.
But the few officers who manage to build this cooperation with inmates are swamped by those who distribute favors and punishments inconsistently and who isolate themselves, as much as possible, from the prisoners. Experienced corrections professionals would have no trouble seeing this as a huge mistake. Conover sees correctional workers as multidimensional characters, neither good nor bad, but as people struggling as we all do to behave well in difficult circumstances. He feels that most officers’s uc cess is more a matter of controlling the challenges of empathy and anger, than over coming the hostility that comes along with the job.
I feel Conover did a good job at exploring the tensions that correctional officers face on a daily basis Conover describes a gap between the training and the reality of the job, official policies and procedures that require routine circumvention, poor relations between line officers and administrators, and the influence of stress on professional conduct and personal life. Conover covers all of this, describing the overwhelming confusion of a new officer’s first days in a crowded housing unit, illustrating the “new jack’s” dependence on the goodwill of inmates, depicting the apparent hostility and indifference of senior colleagues, and demonstrating the predictability of making serious and even life-threatening mistakes in the chaotic world of the prison. Conover gets beyond the stereotype of the brutal guard to see correctional officers as individuals, offering us a chance to understand how the prison experience shapes their professional lives and actually influences their personal relationships. Similarly, solidarity among officers — essential when staff are drastically outnumbered by inmates — is nearly non-existent in Sing Sing. Supervisors do not mentor new officers; officers on one shift push problems off onto the next; and most staff are too busy trying to handle their families, their commuting and their daily eight hours to get to know their co-workers. The result is inconsistency in the treatment of prisoners and a job with almost no rewards for staff.
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No wonder the turnover rate is so high: one out of three correctional officers departs within the first year. Many of these problems apply less to prisons in general than to Sing Sing in particular. As Conover points out, the physical plant at Sing Sing works against the possibility of staff getting to know prisoners; the complications of staffing such a large facility means that neither officers nor prisoners know who will be at any post from day to day; and the high turnover likely discourages staff from investing in relationships with each other. Further, since Sing Sing itself is located in an area too pricey for officers to live in, they have no chance to create community outside of work. But there are also problems that prison administrators clearly could solve, but do not. In particular, incentives for better supervision and more support for effective staff are clearly needed.
I feel that Conover’s time spent in the world of Sing Sing sometimes leads him to miss the larger context. He gives little sense of how typical a prison Sing Sing might be, or where Sing Sing’s problems might have originated. He also omits details about the officers that could create a fuller picture of their humanity and the struggles they face. Conover tells us there was almost no personal talk among officers. Plainly, he would have stood out had he tried to get information on his colleagues’ feelings about their work during his own time as an officer. But he does not seem to have gone back to his former colleagues, after he left, to seek their understanding of their feeling about Sing Sing.
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Ted Conover’s foray into the world of corrections started as undercover expose of the Sing Sing prison system. He soon discovered a world rarely seen by those outside of corrections. More than once, Conover was advised that he was not a “prison guard” but a correctional officer and he quickly learned exactly what that meant. Richard Lessington, a correctional officer in the ...
After reading Newjack, I clearly appreciate the difficulty, the chaos and the stress of an officers’ job. I am less sure how they manage to do it, and I wonder at what cost to their sense of self it has on them. By contrast, with a few well-chosen stories, Conover humanizes individual prisoners: one who has lines from Anne Frank’s diary tattooed on his back; a prisoner on the serving line who tries to sneak extra food to his friends; a young, emotionally needy prisoner grasping for attention from anyone, even an officer. As a result, the prisoners are often drawn “with more humanity” than the staff. I feel that this book gives a rough, inspiring and passionate warning that the rush to imprison offenders hurts the guards as well as the guarded. Conover reminds us that when we treat prisoners like the garbage of society, we are bound to treat prison staff as garbage men — best out of sight, their own dirt surpassed only by the dirt they handle.
Conover says in one part of his book, “Eventually admitting that being in a position of power and danger brings out a side of myself I don’t like.” I feel both prisoners and officers deserve better.
