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Summary: I work at Sing Sing
Review: As a C.O at Sing Sing i think this book gives a pretty good view of what working there is like. If you are interested in prisons or becoming a C.O I recommend this book. To the reviewer above we are correction officers not guards. guards stand around guarding property that is not what we do!
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Summary: The World as Seen by Ted
Review: Over the years Ted Conover has written about real life experiences that he himself has actually lived. I know this very well since I was with him on assignment for "Travel and Leisure" to write a story about mountain biking in Canyonlands National Park. He did indeed live and ride with us (and fall too) and even survive to write about it. So from first hand experience I can vouch for the faithful reporting in "Newjack". It is an unbiased view of life as most of us will never experience. Thank you Ted for opening up our eyes to experiences that most of us will be unable to see for ourselves.Leon Wilde
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Summary: Why American Prisons Need to be Reformed
Review: Conover's book is honest and disturbing. I'm convinced that his portrayal is accurate, that being a prison guard is a hard job, and that being an inmate is an absolute nightmare. I'm also convinced that it doesn't have to be that way and that today's prisons hurt society more than help it. Meatheads who like brutality in prisons will enjoy the book, while people dedicated to improving society and reforming prisons will find fuel for their fires in it. Conover's most disturbing revelation is that prisons of the past were more humane. If the book lacks anything, it is what a more-humane, effective penal system would look like.
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Summary: MUST READ FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE MAJORS
Review: This is my first Conover novel. A realistic account of the trials and tribulations of working in the prison system as a guard (guard not correction officer, they don't correct anything). Conover describes his experience through the process of living with prison rules. To be effective as a guard you must master the art of knowing when to follow procedures and when to look the other way. This internal struggle spills over into his family life.This is the most realistic book written on the process of working in the American Justice System I have read. As a political science professor it will be required reading for criminal justice majors.
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Summary: Working in Sing Sing
Review: After reading this book I find it to be an accurate, interesting and at times humorous accounting of what is like to work in Sing Sing prison. I know because I spent a year there myself in the same capacity. If you wondered what is is like to hold this type of job, this is the book to read.
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Summary: An unprecedented inside look at our most famous prison
Review: Ted Conover is a journalist who not only talks the talk (he writes with enormous intelligence and insight and style) but walks the walk. Hoboes and Mexican immigrantsand African truck drivers on the AIDS route--Ted has lived their lives and brought them to life for his admiring readers. Now he has gone an extra mile and done a year of very hard and frightening work as a prison guard at Sing Sing, and that year is what this book is about. Tom Brokaw calls it "an astonishing work by a gifted--and dedicated--jousnalist." I think you'll agree. Ted has evoked the world behind Sing Sing's walls with great specificity and compassion and immediacy. The wide range of guards and prisoners are here in all their diversity and duress--fascistic and sympathetic guards, transvestite, charismatic, and demented inmates. The insight Ted brings to this kind of job and this kind of life redeems its tough content and gives us hope that wise people will read it and learn its lessons. This is a milestone in American literary journalism.
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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."
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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.
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Summary: Insight Of A Prison "Hack"
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed "New Jack" and recommend it to anyone. The unique detail of this book is that it gives insight to not only a prison guard but a new one. The lack of training that he got really startled me but it should not of. Although being an inmate would be hell, being a guard is almost just is bad, in that you are incarcerated mentally even though one can leave at the end of the day.
The book is not a critique of the penal system but more a guide to what happens on a day to day basis. Conover the writer explores the madness and monontiny (sp?) that goes on, yet while he still had to be Conover the guard. He spares no grimy detail like extracting a prisoner yet does not dramatize or liberty with the facts.
I can't imagine being a guard myself, and the writer asks that same question. Pick up this title.
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Summary: truth and poetry from inside a prison
Review: I have worked in the mental health system for 18 years and the similarities in structure and control that I saw in reading this book give me a new perspective on incarceration. Taking the gleam off my sunny approach to work inside a locked facility I see so much more clearly how the keys define my realtionship to the patients, no matter how natural those relationships seem to be.
Another review made me wonder if this book was going to leave me hanging with no insight into how this experience affected Conover. The way that Conover gently leads the reader away from the violence, starting with a tattoo in Spanish and ending with New Year's eve is magnificent, bittersweet and anything but artless.
I read the book in two days. Buy it. Support this author's hard won work, and learn about the darker side of human behavior.
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