Newjack (8 page)

But the lecture and this small sampling paled in comparison to the main event of our chemical-agents education—the practical class. Again we boarded a bus, this time to a National Guard “military training range.” We were somewhat nervous as we walked a path alongside a stream, gas masks bouncing on our hips. We knew we were going to “get it” up there, but didn’t know exactly how or when; other sessions had been taken to a different spot. The streambed opened onto an expansive grassy firing range, with an observation tower and berms at the near end and hillocks at the far end. Some civilian observers, maybe bureaucrats from the Department, stood by as several of us fired grenades onto the range using the gas gun. As each one landed, it emitted a thick cloud of white smoke, which hung malevolently in the air. Part of our job was to memorize the different types of “delivery devices.” One of the most impressive was the Federal 515 Triple Chaser grenade, which exploded into three parts upon landing, each piece spewing smoke. Then there was the Defensive Technologies (“Def-Tec”)
No. 2 Continuous Discharge grenade—“the Department’s workhorse,” an instructor called it. He explained that this one, like many others, gets hot as it combusts, which gave me new respect for the 1960s student activists I remembered from TV, who would run up and hurl smoking gas grenades back at the cops.

The instructors ushered us down to a small shack off to the side of the range, near the woods. We all went inside, whereupon the lead instructor asked for four volunteers. He got only two, Dimmie and Falcone. He “volunteered” Bella and Dobbins to stand with them in a row, facing us. Peering in from a window behind them were some of the civilians. This was it. The instructor produced a handheld aerosol. “Do you want me to tell you when I’m going to do it?” he asked. While they thought about that, he sprayed them, one at a time, in the face. Each in turn screwed shut his eyes, turned red, and started to tear and sputter and bend over. “Do you want to fight?” the instructor demanded. All of them tried to say no. “Will you come out of your cells?” A couple succeeded in nodding. The instructor assigned others to lead them outside, where they could recover. (Dimmie would later liken the burning sensation to “bobbing for french fries.”)

Next we were all told to don our gas masks. Half the class was ushered outside. The instructor shut the door and told the drill to those of us remaining: We were to lock elbows and move in two concentric circles around him, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise. When he dropped the grenade, our movement would churn the gas up into the air, and we would see how effective the masks were. And then we would remove them. We would attempt to say, “Correction-officer recruit,” and our name and Social Security number, during which time we would presumably learn how effective the gas was. After that we could leave the room. “But if one person leaves early,” he warned, “you’re all going to have to do it again.”

It was dim in the shack with the door closed and a gas mask on. I remember looking down toward the instructor’s feet as we circled him, seeing the white smoke as it began to swirl over the wooden floorboards. And then it rose. It seemed a miracle that it could obscure my vision but not cause me to choke: The gas mask worked. I remember glimpsing a big bureaucrat whose face filled one of the windowpanes and thinking, Maybe he ought to come in here and try it himself. We walked in our circles. And then, on the instructor’s order, I remember overcoming my every instinct for self-preservation
and pulling off the mask. There were a couple of dreamlike seconds before anything happened, and in this space a cacophony of names was shouted, and I got to “Correction offic—” before my throat clamped shut and a wall of fire crossed my face. Tears burst from my eyes and, squinting, I saw that the door had opened and others were filing out. I staggered that way and was quickly grabbed by my classmate Anthony “Big Buck” Buckner, a 275-pound man from the Bronx, who walked me out into the open. There I joined some twenty others, all of whom were gasping, with red, wet faces, as the pain sharpened. Streams of mucus issued from our mouths and noses and dripped to the ground in long strands. My eyes didn’t hurt too badly until someone said to open them. And then some more stabbing irritant flowed in, sharp and prickly. They said that holding your eyes open made it pass sooner, and everyone tried to. Water was splashed in our eyes by a strange piece of equipment designed to do just that, but it didn’t seem to help. Finally, I just stood there shaking, and Officer Popish, whom others considered an asshole, held my arm and I felt deep gratitude.

Fifteen minutes later the roles were reversed, and I was holding the massive arm of one of the Antonelli twins as he sputtered and teared. Nearby, as Arno recovered, someone pointed out that the cap hanging from his belt was covered with puke. Brown sheepishly confessed that he was responsible. For a while, Bella was spitting up blood. We took off our shirts and shook our hair, since the chemical agent lingered in both. The instructor handed out garbage bags for us to place our uniforms in and offered us the rationale for this ritual of suffering. It was necessary, he said, so that we didn’t panic if it occurred inside a prison. He painted a scenario: Chemical agents were released into a mess hall containing unruly inmates, and officers too. The inmates would soon be rushing outside to the yard, hopping mad and “looking for the first uniform they can find” to beat up. If we officers could calmly remain inside the mess hall, we would be more likely to remain safe.

This was just barely plausible. Who said the mess hall would have an exit to the yard? And that it would be open? Our afternoon on the range made more sense to me as a rite of passage that might bring us closer by making us feel we’d endured something awful together. In conclusion, the officer assured us that the chemical agent, “once you’re out of it, will be nothing more than a painful memory.”

At chow that evening, somebody commented that the exposure had caused “the worst pain I ever had.” I thought about that, and about the instructor’s remark—kinds of pain, kinds of bad memories. For a pain of fifteen-minute duration, this was probably the worst. But I’d had worse pain, duller and more long-lasting, from various injuries. And how did you compare these nerve-related pains with heartache, or with the pain—call it soulache—of imprisonment, the kind of pain, no one seemed interested to observe, that we were going to administer in our chosen profession? It hardly seemed right to use the same word for all of them.

Concomitant with the rise of imprisonment, there were 239,229 correction officers nationwide at the beginning of 1998, up from 60,026 just sixteen years before. In large areas of New York and other states, corrections is the only growth industry, the most likely profession for thousands of young people. But how odd to devote yourself professionally to confining others in a small space.

“You’re just a forty-thousand-dollar baby-sitter,” one instructor told us in summary, after describing the misbehavior of inmates. Only, most baby-sitters can’t get away with the use of force, and most are not seriously endangered by their charges.

“You leave here and become a boss,” another instructor asserted. “You’re automatically a supervisor, because supervising inmates is your job.” This instructor, Turner, who was not very good at telling a joke but clearly intended one, proceeded to read us a passage from
The One Minute Manager:
“‘Take a minute out of your day and look at the people around you—they’re the most valuable resource that you have!’” He put the book down and cleared his throat. “Of course, that doesn’t really apply in a correctional setting,” he said. “Get rid of these, and there’s ten thousand more out there waiting.”

In one sense, Turner said, prisons were like little towns—with infirmaries their hospitals, commissaries their department stores, chapels their churches, exercise yards their parks, gyms their health club, mess halls their restaurants, and we a special sort of police department. If our job title, “correction officer,” suggested a role in setting people straight, though, Turner suggested we think again. Because in reality, he said, “rehabilitation is not our job. The truth of it is that we are warehousers of human beings.” And the prison was, above all, a storage unit.

Turner offered this opinion after the warning that was issued in two thirds of classes at the Academy: “What’s said here doesn’t leave this room.” That was always a signal to pay close attention, because we were about to learn something of actual value. Police work must be like this across the board: There’s the official line and then there’s what you really need to know, and the invaluable instructors are the ones who can cut through the crap and, perhaps at their peril, tell you the truth.

We learned many things this way. To be attentive to the location of surveillance cameras, as in our Coxsackie tour, was one of them. One instructor said that in past years it was true that a team of COs would patrol the blocks and “adjust” individual inmates who had been causing trouble, but that it really didn’t happen anymore; on the other hand, the Antonellis had heard there was a room in Attica where troublesome inmates would still “get a tooth through the lip” as encouragement to change their attitude. We learned that you probably wouldn’t get in big trouble for showing up at work slightly drunk or unshaven, or even for falling asleep once in a while, but call in sick or punch in late one too many times and you were history.

At the same time, the Academy seemed to embrace an institutional denial that what we were being taught to do had a moral aspect. The moral
weirdness
of prison was never discussed—the racial inequality and the power inequality; the them and us; the constant saying no.

I thought about this during “range week,” one of the most enjoyable periods of training because of the time we got to spend away from the Academy, at a shooting club. We learned all about the Department’s three standard firearms—the Smith & Wesson Model-10 .38 Special revolver; the Colt AR-15 semiautomatic rifle; and the Remington 870P 12-gauge pump-action shotgun—and their ammunition, and we practiced loading, unloading, cleaning, storing, and, by far the most fun, firing them. The concentric circles of the targets were set inside the shape of a dark human torso, but I was so busy working to get my qualification card and trying to outscore gun-nut Dieter (owner of seventeen pistols) that I hardly noticed. What finally got my attention was the shotgun instruction. In the event of a riot in the yard, one instructor said, simply stepping outside the wall tower with a shotgun held high or pumping it near the microphone of your public address system could be enough to get inmates to stop. Similarly,
he added, shooting at the ground in front of rioting inmates, rather than directly at them, could be highly effective, as it sprayed buckshot at several individuals instead of giving only one man the full force of a blast. We were firing our shotguns into the ground in front of a high bank of dirt to see how this worked when I faced the fact that this class was essentially about killing and wounding inmates.

Sergeant Bloom called us into the chapel at the end of our last day on the range to read us some announcement. I don’t remember what it was; I only remember thinking it was strange to have spent so much time learning details about firearms (on our weekly test we were asked about the range of the different kinds of buckshot the Remington could fire, the direction in which the crossbolt safety button had to be pushed to enable the gun to fire, and a zillion questions of nomenclature) while never once being asked whether we thought we could shoot somebody. Or never discussing what shooting someone meant, in an ethical sense—how officers might be not only legally but morally justified in doing it. Probably, it was true in all of the police agencies, as well as the armed forces, that training had its own physical and intellectual momentum and the spiritual side was left to the student. A Black Muslim inmate would later opine to me that this kind of denial was the very reason for military discipline; it was necessary, he said, in order to make men do something unnatural, something they ordinarily wouldn’t do. Maybe that was true; or maybe it was more a matter of needing to have strict control over the behavior of those who held life-and-death power over other men.

In any event, here we were in the chapel, illuminated by stained glass of men who had aimed to do right by God, and our job as correction officers, it seemed to me, was to think about those godly things as little as possible.