Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

Rating:
Summary: Doing Time at Sing Sing...
Review: A person needs to have a certain determination to do what author Ted Conover did: take a year out from one's life to go undercover and put one's neck on the line, literally.

Investigative journalist Conover took a big risk - his career, his family life, and even his life - to get the scoop on what life is like inside New York State's infamous Sing-Sing Prison... from a Correctional Officer's point of view. It makes for a most fascinating read.

Ted had tried the traditional route to get inside and have a look at life from behind bars, his target being the notorious Sing-Sing Penetentiary. However, he soon discovered that the media is not a welcome bunch and the stalwart institution (like all other max-security prisons throughout the country) makes sure that the press never get inside to have a peek. Not one to give up easily (and smelling a real story), Conover came up with the plan to go in undercover, as it were, as a legitimate, bona-fide, State-trained Correctional Officer.

And that is just what he did.

He went the route of CO training - a boot camp of sorts, a rough ride indeed - finding it very demanding and obtuse. Still, he persevered to the end, graduated, and waited for his call-up. He didn't have to wait long. The turnover rate of COs is high, and the inaugural training ground for almost all COs in the State of New York is the infamous prison he was targeting.

The book, NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing is the chronicle of Conover's year (he dedicated an entire year to experience the fulness of the prison experience) as a CO at the institution. The contents of the book are, in many ways, not surprising. Life is hard behind bars, for inmates and COs alike. There is a palpable aggression, a frustration at the procedures, and the interaction between inmate and prison guard (errrr, sorry, correctional officer), inmate and inmate, and CO and CO is perpetually tense and suspicious.

Those who are crime or psychology buffs will dig their teeth into this read and come away satisfied. Conover has done an outstanding job of revealing what everyday life - on the job and in the cell - is all about at Sing Sing. He gives wonderful description of the compound itself and what living conditions are really like inside. His historical account of the raising and implementing of the prision is, in itself, worth buying the book.

As well, he's done a great job on revealing the personality of Sing Sing - from the inception of the place right up to present day. It's an institution that has a rich and varied history, if not pristine and stellar. Sing Sing is a bastion of punishment, not all of it good or right or noble, and Conover has documented and presented such with a pretty fair stroke of the pen.

Though I found his commentary on the prison population a little heavy-handed and hyperbolic on occasion, I'm sure that couldn't be helped when the man was laying his life on the line everyday, going in to control the masses. He did, however, paint a fair picture of the life of a CO on the inside and outside. It's a hard job, and it has hard men and women occupying it.

And Conover made it to the end of the year. He survived the job, in all its quirks, and has given the rest of us on the outside a very rare glimpse at what life is like on the inside. And what a unique perspective it is, too.

I recommend this book to one and all who want to explore penology from a more relaxed, less academic, view and accounting. Great read, start to finish.

Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I can't believe these guys (corrections officers) put up with the stuff they do. It takes nerves of steel to work in a place like that. The book was very entertaining. At times I could not put it down. Also recommended : Nine-o Adam, Another Day in Paradise, Junky, Slaughter House Five.

Rating:
Summary: This "Sing Sing" ex-resident approves
Review: I lived in Ossining, New York from 1970 to 1994 and can say that most of the village's residents have little or nothing to do with Sing Sing Prison, which lies at the southern edge of town. Tucked away off the main drags of Route 9 and Spring Street with no sign pointing the way, and only entirely visible from a boat on the Hudson, it is even hard to find. The only times most residents are reminded of its presence are during hot summer nights when corrections officers' PA announcements can be heard clearly as far as 2 miles away.

And after reading this book I don't think the prison or the community will be "reaching out to each other" any time soon. Sing Sing's administration has more than enough to worry about within its own walls.

There are a lot of great lines in this book, my favorite being something like "The longer I worked there the easier it was for me to believe that anyone, anywhere, could be guilty of any conceivable crime." Conover also punctures one of society's most cherished myths about maximum security prison life--I won't reveal it, but you can probably guess which one it is.

Rating:
Summary: Writer in a cage, with a club and a gun
Review: Ted Conover is a traveler, an explorer, a "participant anthropologist." His chosen profession is to take extended journeys to strange lands, and then write about his experiences for the rest of us. What a great job. For his first book he road the rails with men once quaintly known as hoboes. He traveled on another kind of railroad, this one underground, to tell the stories of illegal immigrants. Then he drove a taxi in Aspen, Colo., to write about the working-class reality behind the glitz. This time he spent a year at the New York prison called Sing Sing, a rock-hard warehouse of human beings held against their will. Most prison stories are told from the point of view of the inmates, but Conover (wisely, for his sake) decided to tell the story from the point of view of the guards. After his request to visit the prison as a writer was rejected, he was accepted into the Albany Training Academy and graduated as a "newjack," a rookie officer of the Department of Correctional Services, assigned to Sing Sing. "The main feeling was that inmates were like a contagion - and the more you kept a professional distance, the better off you'd be," Conover writes in "Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing." For their part, the inmates regarded the correctional officers "like their TV." "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," Conover writes. "When grown men are infantilized, most don't take to it nicely." Thankfully there are some lighter moments inside, for example on "waffle day." "The inmates loved waffles and sometimes went to great lengths to acquire more than their share. It was not as bad as the situation on fried chicken day, but it still was bad - a little worse than, say, fish-stick day." Conover is not without compassion for these men, even if he thinks many of them belong behind bars. About one sad case he thinks, "God, you poor knucklehead, why didn't anybody take care of you? Where were your parents?" Thankfully, he resists philosophizing in favor of reporting, except for a rare passage such as this one, which sums up his time: "It was all about absence, wasn't it - the absence of imprisoned men from the lives of the people who loved them; the absence of love in prison. And also - what you could never forget - the absence in the hearts of decent people, the holes that criminals punched in their lives, the absence of the things they took: money, peace of mind, health, and entire lives, because they were selfish or sick or scared or just couldn't wait."

Rating:
Summary: This guy should get a lot of credit ...
Review: The oficer who said that only the liberal media, whatever that is, will appreciate this book, is wrong. I think any professional who agrees that only the light of day will lift us out of the swamp of stereotype will praise this book. Anyone who has worked in a real prison will know that this book is dead on. It's not the truth exactly as some of us would paint it, but let's face it, the what goes on in corrections should stay in corrections attitude is a lot of what our problem is today. Where's the pride in that? To say he's a rat is to say we have dirty secrets that nobody else should know. I say baloney. Do you realize that most people out there think that "guards" are brutal?That's the starting point. Conover uses the word guard, sure, but so does thre rest of the world, and he says officer more. And the point is, he was one and he respects what we go through and the pressure we face. COs are LUCKY to have this book--there won't soon be another that outsiders will BUY that attests to the humanity of those of us who wear the uniform.!!!