Newjack (10 page)

The pace of training seemed to accelerate in our last two weeks. There was more physicality, for one thing, and that always helped: We received instruction in the use of the baton and in a variety of martial arts and other tough-guy methods, cumulatively labeled Defensive Tactics. Because the gym was in use, we cleared the chairs off the marble floor of the chapel and had baton training there. Our instructors were two somewhat scary blond guys, one who had patrolled our afternoon Physical Training sessions with a baton hanging from a belt around his gym shorts (was he going to strike the slackers?), the other a huge, primitive-looking bodybuilder, named Malaver, with short, spiky hair. Malaver taught while chewing tobacco. (Nigro, who ran a part-time business as a party disk jockey, was putting together Malaver’s bodybuilding competition tape for him.) Never hit an inmate on the head with a baton, Malaver cautioned matter-of-factly—“that’s a big no-no.”
It was not going to fly, on your use-of-force report, to say that you had been aiming for his ribs when the inmate suddenly ducked. Best was to aim low—for the shins or for various vulnerable points in the torso, such as the lowermost (“floating”) rib. “I’ve heard those ribs crack,” said Malaver with satisfaction, and nobody wondered who had done the cracking. Malaver and his partner drilled us in various jabs and parries. And they showed us how two partners could hold opposite ends of a baton to create an impromptu chair for an injured CO or inmate. “Or if the inmate’s real skinny,” Malaver said, joking, “you can just stick the baton up his ass and carry him that way.”

The penalty for dropping your baton during these exercises was doing push-ups on your knuckles on the marble floor, hands wrapped around the baton. Eno, the dufus, dropped his soon after the warning, so we all had to get down on the chapel floor on our knees and knuckles, like penitents.

The batons were made of hardwood, Malaver explained—usually, oak or ash. Members of local CERT teams—the acronym stood for Corrections Emergency Response Team, and every max facility had one—were sometimes issued special black plastic batons because, Malaver told us, “the wood ones can break. You heard about what’s been going on at Coxsackie?” he went on. “One of those officers was hit three times on his head and shoulders with a baton. The third time, it broke. You know how hard you have to hit these to break them?” Malaver struck a table with a baton, hard. Again. And again. It didn’t break.

The rest of the Defensive Tactics course was a bit more involved. Drawing from sources as diverse as aikido and barroom brawls, the instructors taught us ways to tangle with an attacking or resisting inmate that you weren’t likely to see in, say, a John Wayne movie. This wasn’t about fistfights; it was about saving your ass in whatever way possible, or about coercing a misbehaving inmate in ways that wouldn’t cause death or other lasting damage.

The first exercise, learning how to fall, was conducted in the gym on a big expanse of mats. Essentially, it was a hazing ritual: Despite the instructors’ claims, I could see no real connection between repeatedly falling flat on your face and self-preservation inside a prison. The idea was that if you learned to land on tensed forearms and elbows, you wouldn’t hurt yourself—wouldn’t break a wrist, wouldn’t bang your nose on the floor, etc. So, endlessly, we
repeated what we had learned not to do around age two: tipped ourselves forward, bodies straight, feet still, until we landed with a
bam
.

It was perhaps the only time during my work in corrections when being small and light was an advantage; aside from a little pain in my neck, I didn’t get hurt. But those who were heavy and tall had it rough. The muscular Antonellis rubbed off all the skin at their elbows. Our stout classmate “Big Buck” Buckner, a big man with a big appetite, kept landing stomach first—it was physically impossible for him to land any other way—his limbs and head crashing down a split second later and the whole mass pitching forward till it seemed that most of the fall was taken by his head. Finally, and worst, tall and thin Aisha Foster was hurting so badly that after the fifth or sixth time she just curled up on the floor and cried. Sergeant Bloom walked in by chance, stared at her for a while, asked the instructors something, and left.

Next came lengthy instruction in “pain compliance.” We learned that if you could get hold of an inmate’s hand or wrist, several inventive ways of twisting it would drop him to the floor with you on top. We practiced with partners. The worst for me was the painful aikido grip where you placed your thumb between victim’s pointer finger and middle finger, grabbed his thumb, and twisted his hand up under his armpit. I gravitated toward gentle Cleve Dobbins, a forty-something former military policeman, who was as disinclined toward suffering as I was. That worked fine until the instructor ordered us to rotate to the next partner in the circle. “Now, switch positions,” he said. “Those who were the inmates are now officers. It’s payback time!” Those who had been abused now got to wreak vengeance, and some did it with gusto. A tubby, mild-mannered recruit named Emminger, harshly flipped onto the mat, suffered torn ligaments in his shoulder and was sent off to the emergency room of a local hospital.

It reminded me of Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment at Stanford—now recounted at every police academy and introductory psychology course—where the students who were assigned to “guard” fellow students who were playing inmates often acted with excessive zeal, even with brutality. The experiment seemed to demonstrate the way even seemingly decent people could be corrupted by undue authority. Zimbardo has since accepted some criticism of his methods and admitted that the experiment was
“clearly unethical.” But given the scene around me and my own tender wrist, I wondered whether his study wasn’t valid after all.

Of course, grabbing a hand or arm isn’t always possible. And some inmates in a brawling frame of mind need additional persuading. For these situations, we were taught how to cause pain through “pressure points”—places where clusters of nerves lie just under the skin. Most of these are around the head: under the nose, in the mastoid process (near the jaw joint), under either side of your jaw near the windpipe. (“Do any of you fish for bass?” the instructor asked.) We also practiced karate-chopping each other on the sides of the neck and four inches above the knee. And through it all we were urged to be creative. “Pain’s a wonderful thing,” an instructor told us. “The floors and walls can be your friend.”

But the most dramatic moves—which we did not practice on each other—were saved till the end. Jabbing an inmate with straightened fingers in the windpipe (the “trachea poke”) or the eyeballs (the “eye poke”) was said to be extremely effective. And in the case of the latter move, there was a good chance it would not even cause blindness. According to the instructor, “You can poke into the eye sockets about two to three inches and a few seconds later, they’ll be looking at you and saying, ‘What happened?’”

The schedule showed something unusual on our last day of regular course work: a class called Stress II, to be taught by Sergeant Bloom. As he was the master of causing stress, I assumed he was well prepared to address the subject, but it was strange, because there had been no Stress I. And the sergeant’s expertise turned out to be completely different from what I expected.

Bloom, who seemed somehow more approachable and human than before, began by talking about the most stressful scenario a CO could ever possibly face: being held hostage. This situation was a complete turning of the tables between officer and inmate—payback time to the highest degree. Bloom didn’t say so, but I knew from talking to the recruits and others that if a hostage situation did not end quickly in death, it usually involved torture of some kind, including rape. As a result of an inmate takeover of the Coxsackie Special Housing Unit (SHU) in 1988, Council 82 had
initiated hostage insurance—a payment of half a year’s salary to any member held hostage for more than eight hours. (“If they’re gonna release you after seven and a half,” a Council 82 rep had quipped to us, “tell ’em to go make a pot of coffee.”) Bloom now wrote on the chalkboard a list of all state-prison hostage incidents since 1970, when records started to be kept. There were eleven, including the big one at Attica (seven guards and thirty-six inmates killed) and an extended one at Sing Sing in which seventeen officers were held hostage in B-block. Not included in this list were incidents in which civilian staff members—a psychologist, for example—were held hostage.

Bloom told us the warning signs of prison disturbance: inmates stockpiling food in their cells, unnaturally quiet cell blocks, inmates wearing heavy clothes (often with magazines or newspapers tucked underneath, to deflect knife thrusts) in warm weather, inmates who were normally well behaved trying to get keeplocked so they wouldn’t have to mix with the general population.

An officer on the verge of being held hostage should, if he could see it coming, get rid of his keys and radio, break the television sets (so inmates couldn’t watch the local news), and “destroy cutting torches if possible.” That last suggestion seemed odd, but Bloom explained that during a bloody riot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary at Santa Fe in 1980, inmates in possession of a torch had not only cut their way into other cell blocks, spreading the riot, but had tortured living inmates and mutilated the dead. “They had a barbecue,” he said.

The Academy had a video on this subject, but it would be more useful for us to ask someone who had been there and could talk about it. “So go ahead,” Bloom said.

The stunned silence lasted several seconds. Bloom could only mean one thing.

“You?” somebody asked.

Bloom nodded. He had been working the Coxsackie SHU in 1988. As inmates came in from exercising outdoors, one slugged him in the jaw—he didn’t even see it coming. Four other officers were overpowered as well, and thirty-two SHU inmates, the worst men in the prison, were soon out of their cells, terrifying their captives and destroying the Box’s control center.

To me, it seemed that an officer held hostage might not tell his
fellows everything that had happened to him, because it was either too painful or too humiliating. Bloom, though brave enough to stand up there in front of us, offered information only in response to our questions, and even then not a lot. One inmate had wanted to cut off his ring finger, he said, because it was too swollen for the inmate to remove his wedding band, but another inmate had talked him out of it. The inmate who started it all had a fifteen-years-to-life sentence and apparently felt he had nothing to lose. His name was Rafael Torres, and he was now in Sing Sing’s SHU. The incident had lasted fourteen and a half hours. Bloom went back to work three and a half weeks later, “after the stitches came out.” What stitches? someone asked. Bloom explained that he also had been struck on the head with a baton. What else happened to you? I wanted to ask. But you couldn’t ask—that much, I had learned. Couldn’t he have retired on some sort of disability? someone asked. “If the horse throws you, you gotta get back on,” Bloom replied.

He had, however, become a training instructor soon after, “in order to get a different kind of work.” Then two years ago he became a sergeant and head of the Academy. He no longer had nightmares, Bloom said, but he did still dream about it.

A short while into the crisis, the prison chaplain had called Bloom’s home to inform his family. His wife wasn’t there, so the chaplain had given the news to Bloom’s twelve-year-old daughter. Bloom wanted us to know that he thought talking to our families, and soon, about the possibility of being taken hostage was a good idea. He asked how many of us would do that and, slowly, about half the class raised their hands. Mine was not among them. Families would know this at some level anyway, I thought. In my journal, trying to further justify my stance, I wrote, “Clearly, the odds are against it.”

The staff saved another frightening thing for the last week of our Academy session: prison video. Nigro showed footage of yard disturbances taken from a wall tower at Eastern Correctional Facility. In one film, two inmates tried slashing each other while the surprised and nervous tower guards tried to zoom in with the video camera; in another, a large mass of inmates tried to catch and punish an inmate who had been a snitch. The pictures of the mob reminded me of news footage from some besieged African capital. You could hear the report as the tower guards fired the gas
gun, and then watch inmates disperse as the clouds of tear gas drifted toward the prison. Though officers were nearby in both cases, none of them, surprisingly, appeared to be in much danger. What the films did reveal was the frightening power of crowds.

Another batch of film, shown to us by an assistant district attorney from an upstate county, hit even closer to home. He pointed out, entirely correctly as far as I knew, that movies featuring prison guards portrayed them as cold and brutal, without exception. “Anybody seen
Cool Hand Luke?”
he asked. “Well, these movies are going to show you something different.”

We watched still-mounted camera footage of urine flying out of a cell and drenching an officer as he walked, unsuspecting, down a hallway. This was a special crime: As we had learned, the number of incidents of this sort had skyrocketed in recent years, to the point where the union had recently pushed for—and gotten—“antithrower” legislation which added a mandatory three to five years to such inmates’ sentences. But we had also learned that many D.A.’s saw attacks on correction officers as low-priority prosecutions, since the criminals were already in jail. It went without saying that this was a strong argument for taking retribution into your own hands, but the prosecutor pleaded that we not do so. “And don’t wash your uniform if you get shitted down,” he advised. “We’ll need it for evidence.”