Newjack (51 page)

“I don’t even take my hands off the steering wheel till I can talk to them,” he said. “I look straight ahead and say, ‘Officer, I am a New York State peace officer, and you’ll find my identification
next to me on the seat.’ I wait for them to tell
me
to move my hands, and then I do it
very
slowly.”

I, meanwhile, hadn’t been pulled over for years. I was even kind of looking forward to it so that I could beat a ticket by showing my badge. But it didn’t happen.

Then there was the complicated matter of minority officers recognizing new inmates. More than once, I’d heard a colleague tell a sergeant that a new inmate was somebody he had known in high school or in the old neighborhood and the sergeant then asking if that was going to be a problem. (“No, I just wanted you to know” was the typical answer.) In some cases, maybe this led to officer and inmate being too close. But just as often—or even more often, it seemed to me—it led to them keeping a greater than normal distance.

My most impressive lesson on the lives of minority officers came on the mess-hall bridge with Smitty and Brown. In between pat-frisking inmates as they entered or exited the mess hall, there was time to just stand around and gab. The subject turned to the Internet. I asked whether either of them had heard about the website that listed all New York State prison inmates, along with their crimes, their dates of birth, the date of their first eligibility for parole, and so forth. All of it was information we weren’t supposed to have, and I thought they’d be intrigued by this new situation, particularly Smith, who had learned so much about the individuals he was in charge of during his days on V-gallery.

“But what about privacy?” he asked. He had learned whatever he knew by just asking the inmates.

“Well, think of it as a way to check what you’ve been told,” I said.

Smith shook his head. Brown, too, looked deeply skeptical. I didn’t see why, and she tried to explain. “Look, I’m from the Bronx,” she said. “There are six of us kids and I’m the youngest. My older brother was riding the subway one day. Guy across from him drops his gym bag by mistake, and there’s an automatic in there and it goes off. It hits my brother in the leg. The leg had to be amputated. Now, can you imagine what I would have done if I caught that guy?”

“I don’t know you well enough to know.”

“Well, I would have hurt him, or even maybe killed him if I
could. I’m a person who respects the law, but … sometimes there’s things you can’t help, right?”

Smith agreed: There were things you just couldn’t help. Anyone could get caught up in the heat of the moment.

Their point was that anyone could end up inside. The black officers I knew, especially, seemed to feel this—that the line between straight life and prison life was a very thin one and that sometimes the decision about which side you were on was not yours to make.

Prisons reconvene old neighbors as well as people with even deeper connections. Shortly after I left Sing Sing, there was a story in
The New York Times
about a man named Baba Eng, who had been at Sing Sing for twenty-two years. He was “serving a life sentence for murder, when a new inmate walked into the shower room one day and stared at his face.

“‘Dad!’ the stranger finally exclaimed.

“The man was his son, whom Mr. Eng had not seen since his arrest, and who now was in prison himself for armed robbery. ‘It was the worst moment of my life,’ Mr. Eng recalled. ‘Here was my son; he had tried to imitate my life.’”

Prison life creates its own pathologies. Experts are increasingly worried about the effect of a parent’s imprisonment on children—both the increased likelihood that a child of a criminal will become a criminal himself and the idea that prison itself may become a twisted rite of passage for young men. But can
rite of passage
possibly be the correct term for a kind of suspended animation that leaves you older, weaker, less sexually attractive, and less connected to community than before you went in?

Stone told me that when he had worked at Green Haven, among the inmates had been a father, his grandfather, and his son. On W-gallery, we had an uncle and his nephew. On R-gallery, we had Twin, a murderer, whose twin brother was imprisoned upstate. My wife and I were mugged in the eighties in Brooklyn Heights; the criminal was a crack addict who was finally apprehended after robbing several other people. His three brothers, detectives told us, were already imprisoned upstate.

I knew no story stranger than that of Foster. The tall, troubled black woman from my training section, a single mother and former Rikers guard, had wept openly from the pain of Defensive Tactics, had made us late and gotten us in trouble with her chronic
tardiness, and had, according to rumor, been chastised at Sing Sing for falling asleep on the job and, of all things, for speaking in tongues during chapel services for inmates. She had transferred up to Bedford Hills, the maximum-security prison for women in Westchester County. There, according to my classmate Buckner, who preceded her to the women’s prison, an older woman inmate was in the habit of bragging to officers about her daughter, the correction officer. He and other transfers from my class recognized from snapshots the daughter of whom the older woman was so proud: Foster.

To have a mother in prison and become a guard there yourself—that was the strangest bond I heard all year.

Early in my V-gallery days, one of my double-bunked new-arrival inmates got keeplocked. This was a big bother for me and his cellmate, because it meant I had to keep the bolt on the cell deadlocked all the time. His roommate had to get my attention every time he wanted in or out.

“How’d you manage to get keeplocked so soon?” I asked him. “Most guys, it takes at least a few weeks.”

The inmate smiled somewhat sheepishly. Unlike many keeplocks, he had no problem with authority—or no problem with me, at any rate.

“Just a hassle with another inmate, CO,” he said. “Something I had to do.”

He was unremarkable enough to me at that point that I never even bothered to check further about what he was keeplocked for. He remained a face in the crowd until one sweltering day in July when he was no longer keeplocked. B-block could get hot and sticky if there was no breeze outside, and on this day, many of the inmates who went to the yard after midday chow peeled off their shirts before heading outside. Delacruz, as I’d learned this inmate was called, was one of these. As he did, I noticed the large tattoo spread across his chest like a banner:
ASSASSIN!
it read. That was fairly interesting, but then I noticed his back, which was almost entirely covered by a long poem in Spanish, tattooed in a flowing script. That was fascinating, and in my surprise I said something like, “Whoa, what
is
that?”

Delacruz gave a little smile and said, “It’s a poem,” and continued on his way out to the yard.

When he returned I tried to find out more. He brushed off my question about what poem it was, but he did explain how he’d gotten it. A white guy at Rikers Island was the artist, he said. The “ink” was made by burning plastic—a pen or a toothbrush—under a metal surface, like the bottom of a bunk. You wiped off the thick soot, mixed it with toothpaste and soap, and there was your ink. Your pen was a pencil with two needles tied to the point with string. The string soaked up the ink. The artist’s many jabs left its residue under the surface of the skin.

Five days later, Delacruz finally told me about the poem. It was from a book in the Rikers library that “really meant a lot to me,” he said, though he didn’t like to talk about it.

“But who wrote it?” I asked.

“Oh, it was a Jewish girl during the Second World War. I translated it into Spanish.”

“You mean Anne Frank? The one who wrote a diary?”

He looked surprised. “Yeah, I think that’s it,” he said. “Anne Frank.”

On my next day off, I took Anne Frank’s
The Diary of a Young Girl
off my shelf and reread it. The parallel between a prison cell and the tiny space where Anne and her family had hidden from the Nazis in 1942 was immediately clear, as was the way that Anne, at thirteen, was imprisoned by her Jewish identity, by the very fact of who she was. There was no poem in my version of the diary, however, and I assumed it must have been included in a different edition.

The next time I saw Delacruz, I told him about my rereading the book. I even let him know that I had visited the Anne Frank house on a trip to Holland and had seen the rooms where she had hidden. Delacruz didn’t really react with the interest I had expected, and I worried I’d gone too far, maybe sounding like a braggart or claiming a personal interest in this story that was greater than his or seeming to pry. Or maybe the thought of a CO who had been to Europe and was into Anne Frank was just too fucking strange. So I laid off for a while.

Delacruz, in the meantime, graduated to his own cell, but it was way upstairs on U-and-Z, not on V. So we’d acknowledge each other in the mess hall or wherever else our paths would cross. Then, months later—December—I was back on V preparing to let my keeplocks out for their daily rec when I discovered that among them was none other than Delacruz. He’d been locked up two days before, he explained, and then moved downstairs.

“Hey, you want to read that book again?” I asked him.

“Yeah!” he answered enthusiastically. “I
loved
that book.”

Thus our acquaintance was reestablished. I brought the book in—smuggled it, technically—and peeked in on Delacruz as he savored it. He skipped rec and read it cover to cover. Then over the next few days he read it again, slowly. I saw him discussing it with the inmate next door (another robber, named Perez) and I worried he’d tell the man I’d brought it in—I didn’t want inmates to have anything on me, no matter how minor. That’s why I let Delacruz return the book, accepting it back with a measure of relief. He parted with it like an object of love.

“It’s the best book I ever read,” he said this time. “I cried all the way through.”

I asked him if he’d seen the poem in there. No, he said. But the book he’d read the first time hadn’t looked exactly like this one. Another edition, I again figured.

After that we talked often and easily. I liked Delacruz initially because of the poem, and then later because I didn’t think he bullshitted me or tried to get anything from me. He was keeplocked this time, he said, for extorting from another inmate in the commissary.

“Hmm, sounds bad,” I said.

Delacruz didn’t pretend to be ashamed. “What can I tell you, Conover? It’s what you do to survive.”

Delacruz was short, fit, handsome, and dark-complected, with brown eyes and thick eyebrows. He was in for robbery—his fourth prison term, he said, after three in Virginia (two for a period of months, and a third for four years). He had entered Virginia’s most famous prison, nicknamed the Wall, at age sixteen, he said, because the state believed he was eighteen: His mother had brought him into the United States from Puerto Rico using the birth certificate of his older brother, who had died at age two.

“That was the worst time, man, being sixteen, sitting in that bus, looking out the window at the Wall.”