Newjack (25 page)

“So you’re refusing?”

“I want to speak to a sergeant.”

This was every inmate’s right. I summoned the male sergeant, who, given the din and the insults, was in no mood for a negotiation. “I’m giving you a direct order to comply with the frisk,” he said simply. I couldn’t hear the inmate’s reply.

“So you’re refusing to comply?” the sergeant said. Lincoln George nodded. The sergeant left the gallery and spoke to the extraction team.

They were swift and tough. George made little attempt to brace himself or otherwise prepare for their entrance, so it didn’t take long. He was knocked down, flattened, then hauled upstairs to be forcibly searched. We frisked his cell and found nothing.

Meanwhile, the extraction team had brought Duncan back down. They placed him in his cell, unchained him, and were on their way out when he snatched the leg chain from one officer’s hand and swung it at him, hitting him hard on the visor. The surprised team completed its exit from the cell and closed the door. Then they turned around, regrouped, and went back in again to get the leg chain. Duncan appeared shortly afterward at the door to his cell, a big scrape on one cheek. No doubt, he had untold other wounds less easy to see. Rather than defeated and injured, he looked thrilled, and once again shouted out his defiance.

The extractors took a break and then bulldozed their way into a third cell. This one I couldn’t see, but it took longer than the others and had the officers shouting, “Stop resisting! Stop resisting!” partway through. At the Academy, we’d found out that this phrase was basically a legal requirement that you shouted out to indemnify yourself when you were, for whatever reason, applying a bit of extra force. Konoval was following the team with the camera, but as the officers knew, all he could see was their backs. The inmate continued to struggle as he was carried up the stairs. I picked up half of a shattered face shield after they went by.

And then it was all done but the paperwork. The cell-extraction team came back downstairs, extracted themselves from their armor, and then gave one another hearty hugs and slaps on the back. They were sweaty and charged-up, like victorious football players. I felt the catharsis, too: Prison work filled you with pent-up aggression, and here was a thrilling release, our team coming out on top.

But as the moment faded and I picked up my gear, I paused and looked back down the gallery. It was quiet now—the sound of defeat. No weapon had been found in any cell. Perhaps, I began to suspect, none had actually been expected. It seemed reasonable to conclude that we had been sent in to make a statement about who was in charge. And I had to wonder: With the outcome never in doubt, what had we won? What did it do to a man when his work consisted of breaking the spirit of other men? And who had invented this lose-lose game, anyway?

Vivid to me, and a seeming conundrum, was the refusal of my inmate to submit to a strip-frisk. By refusing this small violation of his privacy, he’d earned himself a big violation. What could account for an action so apparently contrary to his best interests? My idea of his best interests, I later concluded, was colored by the team I was on. Eventually, it occurred to me that self-respect had required him to refuse. His stupidity began to look principled. He was renouncing his imprisonment, our authority, the entire system that had placed him there. If enough people did that together, the corrections system would come tumbling down.

Nearly ninety years ago, Thomas Mott Osborne, a politically connected prison reformer, spent a week in voluntary confinement at New York’s other famous historic prison, Auburn. The book he wrote afterward,
Within Prison Walls
, was an exposé of the conditions inside Auburn, and particularly inside its version of the Box, a unit of the prison that was known simply as the jail. By refusing to work in the prison’s basket-weaving shop, Osborne got himself sentenced to a night in the “jail”—a barely lit room between Auburn’s Death Row and its generator that contained eight metal cells. Prisoners there were allowed only three “gills” of water—three quarters of a pint—per day; they were not allowed any exercise, bathing, mattress, or change of clothes. Osborne conversed with his fellow inmates and soon felt sympathetic and righteous. When the warden, thinking he might have had enough after a few hours, sends the “principal keeper,” or head of the guards, to release Osborne, this is how he reacts:

Sing Sing’s SHU has no sweat box of the kind found in
The Bridge on the River Kwai
or
Cool Hand Luke
, none of the dark cells that inmates in “solitary” were subjected to prior to the middle of the twentieth century. Since then, the courts have found the extremity of that kind of treatment to constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Now the cells are slightly larger and slightly brighter, and regular access to showers and recreation, food and water, is guaranteed. But perhaps in part because inmates cannot be “broken” as quickly as they used to be, their sentences in these segregation units now drag on and on, sometimes for years. The process of breaking a man simply takes longer and costs more. Does it represent “injustice or tyranny”? That depends on your point of view: If they are not going to be put to death, the monstrous—the Lemuel Smiths—must be warehoused. Trying to extinguish the spark of the rest—the merely incorrigible, those holding on to civilization by a thread—itself feels like a monstrosity.

For officers, the lineup room represents the transition between the outside and the inside. There, you can rest a minute with a cup of coffee, talk with your fellow officers about work before actually going in to do it, and prepare yourself mentally. The day after the SHU extractions, CO Konoval showed his videotape in the minutes before lineup. Everyone was eager to see what had happened down in the dungeon. Nervously expecting to be transported back, I instead found the footage sort of dull: Konoval’s video, with its poor lighting and bad sound, captured none of the atmosphere of madness, the endless chanting and shouting, the high anxiety. It just looked like tough guys doing a cartoonish job, the kind of thing you might see on a crummy TV show.

In general, the pattern in lineup follows a routine. After 6:45
A.M.
, when we’re called to attention, come the announcements—everything from new parking rules to the schedule for upcoming sergeant tests to reminders about blood drives and retirement parties.
Then, sometimes, the day’s watch commander, a lieutenant, will step up and say a few words, often a rundown of notable happenings from the shifts before.

There is a strong speechifying tendency in corrections. Another tendency, in the wake of anything gone wrong, is Monday-morning quarterbacking. Someone can always be counted on to tell the victim of some unfortunate incident how he could have handled the situation better.

My favorite watch commander was Lieutenant Goewey. A heavyset man who was somehow more blue-collar than a lot of COs—he could have been the boss of a trucking firm, to judge solely by appearance—Goewey almost always took advantage of his prerogative to speak, and his words were always wonderfully coded. He wouldn’t tell you the state police had been at Sing Sing the day before to arrest the longtime CO suspected of supplying drugs to inmates via the package room; he would simply say, “In case you haven’t heard, there’s a job opening in the package room.” He wouldn’t say he thought the previous superintendent was an idiot who neglected the security personnel in favor of programs and housekeeping; he’d just say, a couple of times a week, “Security is once again the top priority of this administration.” I found it enjoyable to read between his lines.

There was a chalkboard on the wall right behind the front gate, and one morning it read, “CO Diaz had arm broken by a con 8/19/97 and is awaiting surgery.” Following up on this, Goewey explained to us that Diaz, a well-liked officer posted to the Adjustment Committee (which conducted disciplinary hearings), had retrieved an inmate from the blocks and was placing him in the disciplinary bullpen to await a hearing when an inmate already in there went after the guy. In the struggle, the gate slammed on Diaz’s arm.

Lieutenant Goewey, in his predictably coded way, said, “The incident occurred at about two, and I didn’t hear about it until twenty minutes later. When I got there, the guy was just sitting there, happy as a clam.” There was a long pause. “Now, these days you can have a use-of-force. Whatever it takes at the time, you can do it. But twenty minutes later … I’m not saying it didn’t used to happen, but these days you can’t just knock all a guy’s teeth out and shove ’em down his throat. Twenty minutes after an incident.”

He continued: “Now, I know there’s gonna be a lot of armchair quarterbacking about this—he should have had another officer there, should have looked, that kind of thing—but it’s dead.”

In other words, Goewey had just told us: I hope you’ll forgive me for not beating the shit out of the perp who did this, and Diaz probably could have prevented it.

You didn’t have to work the galleries long to realize that a large proportion of inmates were mentally ill. The symptoms ranged from the fairly mild—talking to oneself, neglecting to bathe—to the severe: men who didn’t know where they were, men who set fire to their own cells, men so depressed they slashed their wrists or tried to hang themselves.

Prison, said the department’s assistant director of mental health services at the Academy, was “a hard place to be crazy.” He told us that the “last good study,” now more than ten years old, had indicated that of the state’s 70,000 inmates, 5 percent, or 3,500, were “seriously and persistently” mentally ill—people who would be in a psychiatric hospital if they weren’t in prison. But corrections had beds for only 1,000 of them. Another 10 percent, or 7,000, were under the supervision of a psychiatrist, “taking some drugs.”

Stress, he said, worsened almost any condition, and prison—obviously—is stressful. “Many people break down for the first time in prison,” the official said. In other words, prison not only made crazy people worse; it drove people crazy.

Working as COs, he said, would make us “students of human nature.” He gave us thumbnail sketches of people with schizophrenia (and symptoms like psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia) and those with personality or mood disorders, like manic depression. Once we got to Sing Sing, however, these distinctions were never made again, at least by officers. A crazy person was a bug—slang used by both guards and inmates. Working a gallery was like sharing a crowded urban street with a higher-than-usual number of disturbed street people. Mostly, you just learned to live with the bugs. Occasionally, however, a bug went off the deep end, and—particularly if he got suicidal—would be sent to the psych unit.

Sing Sing’s PSU, or Psychiatric Satellite Unit, occupied the second floor of the Hospital Building. It was run by employees of the
state Office of Mental Health (OMH) and by a handful of officers, who were there to provide security.

The door from the building’s staircase to the PSU floor was always kept locked. Half of the floor comprised offices for the various mental-health-staff members—psychiatrists, nurses, and social workers. The other half, separated by an iron gate, held the sick inmates.

The worst-off and most dangerous of these men were kept in six special high-security cells. These cells, with bars front and rear, had dense screens installed from ceiling to knee level to keep the occupants from throwing things out. Inmates assigned to them had their clothing taken away and replaced with—in severe cases—paper gowns and hospital slippers. The toilets and sinks were a single stainless-steel unit, such as were found in most newer jails and prisons but not generally in Sing Sing. The remainder of the floor’s residents—up to sixteen, who were considered less dangerous—were held in a dormitory room down the hall. They had a TV lounge across the hall, with games and newspapers, and a small room next to that where they received meals.

A very few inmates were transferred from the PSU to the state mental hospital at Marcy. This was a hard transition to make, however, since space at Marcy was limited: they had to come really
close
to killing themselves—slashing their wrists deeper than merely the skin, or “hanging up” in such a way that they came close to death. The only other way I ever saw an inmate get to Marcy was by making a credible threat. “I’m gonna be in here a lot of years, but I’m gonna remember you and when I get out I’m gonna find you,” he had said to a female psychiatrist. She must have believed him, because he was shipped out the next morning.

The general understanding among officers was that many inmates played a bug game—worked the system—in order to get themselves into the PSU or Marcy. They did this because life in those places, even though they were surrounded by bugs, was more tolerable than among the general population of a max. In the psych ward, you didn’t have to worry about gangs or weapons. You had more room to yourself, and there were more staff looking after you.

For the same reasons, I was always glad when Sergeant Holmes sent me to the PSU after a period on the galleries. It was quiet there, and clean; the inmates were carefully controlled, and there
wasn’t much for a CO to do. Most of the time, the PSU was a relief. The most obvious evidence that things were better here was the presence of longtime officers. Because of seniority, they had their pick of easy jobs, and there always seemed to be an old-timer on duty in the PSU.

The one who was there my first day—and many times after that—was a tall, grizzled guy named Birch. He spent his days minding the staircase door and the center gate, making sure things on the floor ran the way they were supposed to, reading religious tracts, or doing crossword puzzles to pass the time. When I arrived, he was speaking through the screen of a high-security cell to a tiny Dominican named Colon, who had decorated the cell with a carpet of shredded pieces of magazine. Tassels of toilet paper festooned every bar, and some thirty wads of toilet paper had been stuck to the walls with toothpaste. I knew Colon from B-block—he had set fire to his cell and destroyed its fixtures once when I was there. As Birch walked away, Colon angrily scooped water from his toilet bowl with his hands and threw it out into the hallway.